BY GLORIA STRAVELLI
Staff Writer
FARRAH MAFFAI staff Paul Crescente says the secret to great pizza is in the dough — and the toppings. The owner of Ninette’s Italian Restaurant in Tinton Falls is celebrating 25 years of serving pizza to local customers. It’s not that Paul Crescente didn’t appreciate the fact that TV’s Tony Soprano had come to dine at his restaurant.
But for the proprietor of Ninette’s Italian Restaurant in Tinton Falls, having James Gandolfini sitting at a table in the dining room created a problem. As soon as customers realized it was him, bada bing!, they stayed put in their seats.
“He walked in the door on a Friday night; it was very busy. You should have seen the chaos,” Crescente recalled. “People wanted to take pictures. I had to direct all the customers, ‘Just stay in your seats.’ So nobody left and people were coming for dinner and there were no seats; there was no turnover.”
To deal with the would-be paparazzi, Crescente approached Gandolfini, who, it turned out, was having dinner with his cousin, a regular customer.
“I asked him to do me a favor. I said, ‘Would you step outside so people could take pictures?’ ”
In the process of disassembling a platter of Ninette’s Italian antipasto salad, Gandolfini obliged, grudgingly.
With the logjam over, Crescente returned to what has been the real focus of Ninette’s for more than two decades — serving lovingly prepared Italian food to a loyal cadre of customers who have become more like an extended family.
Good food and friendly service are a formula that has worked well at the restaurant, located in Tinton Falls Plaza on Shrewsbury Avenue. Ninette’s will celebrate its 25th anniversary Friday and Saturday, 5-11 p.m., and, as a thank you to customers, will offer complimentary appetizers and a strolling accordion player to serenade diners with Italian songs from 6:30-9 p.m.
“We built up a clientele over the past 25 years that’s like a family. We know them all by name,” said Crescente. “They have family celebrations here, christenings, rehearsal dinners. We get to be a part of the life of that family.”
“Everyone says that when they come here, they feel they’re at home,” added daughter Judith Crescente, who grew up around the business. After taking a hiatus to work in the fashion industry, she began working at Ninette’s full time as restaurant manager four years ago.
Paul Crescente credits “good food, consistent quality and a friendly atmosphere” for the restaurant’s 25-year run.
“I’ve maintained the same standards through the years,” said Crescente, who still prepares most of the dishes on the restaurant’s menu. “Even though prices increase, you have to maintain your quality.”
Crescente, Lincroft, came to the U.S. with his family in 1964 when he was 15. He still can recall tip-toeing into the kitchen in the predawn hours in his family’s native Bari to watch as his mother, Loreta, made bread for the town’s bakery.
“I was 6 or 7 years old and I watched her all the time. She used to make bread at 4 a.m., and at 6 a.m. the baker would come and pick it up,” said Crescente, who credits his mother as his cooking teacher.
Crescente held down a day job while he worked part-time as a pizza maker in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y., for 10 years before moving to Monmouth County, where he and his wife Theresa opened Ninette’s on Oct. 12, 1979.
The first few years of building the business were a struggle, he acknowledged, complicated by the fact that its strip mall location needed an update and the Monmouth Mall opened, drawing business away.
“It was a tough time,” he said, “but in a few years we started to grow.”
Crescente began with just a pizza counter and dining room, and by 1986 business had picked up enough to expand into adjacent space and add a second dining room.
A mainstay of the menu is the original fast food — pizza — which reaches perfection at Ninette’s in regular or gourmet versions.
“The secret is in making the dough,” explained Crescente, who makes about 500 pounds of pizza dough a week. “It’s the way you work the dough and how long you work it. Sometimes you see a pizza guy making a pie and he keeps stretching the dough. It gets like chewing gum. The crust should be thin and crispy, it’s the foundation of a good pie.”
He has also developed his own recipe for a rustic homemade focaccia that is stuffed with fillings like prosciutto and fresh mozzarella or pesto chicken salad for the lunch menu.
Crescente turns out well-loved standards like eggplant parmigiana and fried calamari plus an array of signature home-style dishes like Rigatoni ala Ninette’s, which melds pasta, broccoli rabe, roasted peppers and chicken in a light marinara sauce.
“All the dishes, including the sauces, are homemade and made to order,” noted Judith Crescente, West End.
Ninette’s is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., for lunch and dinner. There’s a bustling lunch business with daily specials beginning at $3.50 as well as nightly specials, and a dinner menu ranging from $10.95 to $16.95. The restaurant, which is BYOB, seats 130 diners, 50-60 for private parties, and offers off-premises catering.
The restaurant’s customer base has expanded over the years, and the Crescentes find they are now feeding three generations of Ninette’s devotees.
“A lot of customers my age remember coming to the restaurant when they were growing up and now they bring their children here to eat,” Judith Crescente said. “Plus, we have customers who moved away and came back to be close to family, and they’ve found that we’re still here.”