Aged to Perfection: Gene & Georgetti’s Tony Durpetti Sticks With Tradition
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In 1967, an adult Tony moved in with his brother, who happened to live directly across the street from Gene Michelotti and his wife, Ida, in Elmwood Park. “I met Marion [Gene’s daughter], and we started dating. One night when I went to pick her up, Gene says to me, ‘You’re the guy who used to hang out in front of my restaurant, aren’t you?’ I couldn’t believe it.” Tony and Marion married in 1969.
Durpetti was an advertising executive then, representing more than 500 radio stations all over the country. In 1989 Gene fell ill; he passed away later that year, at the age of 73. Durpetti and his wife bought the family business from Ida Michelotti in 1991, and Durpetti ran it simultaneously with the ad business for four years. Eventually, he says, “I got sick of all the traveling, and I started to like the camaraderie around here.” So in 1995 he gave up advertising and began to focus full-time on the steak house.
Steaks cook inside one of the kitchen’s three Vulcan gas broilers, which have been modified to heat up to 1,100 degrees instead of the factory-installed maximum of 800 degrees. No salt or pepper touches the meat. “The marbling takes care of the flavor,” says Navarro, with absolute confidence. At full capacity, the broilers can handle up to 50 steaks at a time. After ten minutes, a 21-ounce strip is cooked to a perfect medium rare; the exterior is charred black, smelling of earth and coal. The interior is a warm, deep red, and the meat is only slightly chewy, more tender at the center of the steak. Durpetti hands me a sharpened butter knife. “You know what we say here?” he asks, smiling. “If you can’t cut it with that, it’s free.”
