Messing around at the Coney Island Bar

The middle-aged man sitting by himself at the corner table by the window, face bathed in yellowish light from the snowfall outside that coats the Chevron station across the parking lot, is playing solitaire. He flips cards with half-interest, as if waiting for old friends to show. He fits into this place like the decor: a bald man in plaid shirt and blue jeans, wearing a green jacket, toothpick tucked behind an ear.

Where are we? The Coney Island Bar.

No homier place to be at lunchtime in Sparks. Or Reno.

The trappings of this locals’ landmark—set just inside The Rail City, where it meets The Biggest Little City at the end of East Fourth Street—are as reassuring as its brown-brick exterior. Nothing seems to have changed much since, say, the 1950s, including the pine cuttings and white Christmas lights that border the ceiling, or the antelope, buffalo and mule deer heads mounted on the walls in the front room.

A ceiling fan rotates on medium speed. The diners at the other brown Formica tables speak in low tones—they’re working men; that’s their way—and the light in the restaurant is dim, but the ambiance is one of busy-ness. A pot on a burner by the coffee machine in the corner (set atop an old safe) is nearly empty. The “In” door to the kitchen is propped open, and the bearded dishwasher in his tie-dyed shirt is in plain sight of diners at tables one and two, clanking silverware onto the steel counter.

Sally, the genial blond waitress, hurries about, able to handle this room and the front room, where the bar is and more diners at more Formica tables, because it’s Monday and the really big lunchtime crowds show up on Tuesday when you can order Galletti’s Spaghetti. Or Thursday, when you can get the corned beef and cabbage with potato for $7 or the Italian sausage and cabbage with potatoes for $8.

You have to be a bona-fide Reno or Sparks person with a sense of history and tradition to know about the Coney Island and to be drawn here to split your day in two. Otherwise, why would you pay it notice as you zoomed along East Fourth Street past the green-and-white “Welcome to Sparks, drive friendly” sign?

The brick building (built in 1935; the new kitchen area was added in 1958 and new bathrooms in 1994) is right there on your left, before you get to the Interstate 80 onramp after Fourth Street turns into Prater Way.

If you know about the Coney Island—its inexpensive and time-proven lunch fare; its status as a generations-old eatery at which some of the powerful (state Sen. Bill Raggio, casino owner John Ascuaga, governors, judges) and many of the old-timers of the community frequent; and its note as a great place to get an authentic Italian dinner on Wednesday nights—then you may be tempted to pull an illegal (though, reputedly, unmonitored) left turn into the parking lot, instead of driving several blocks into Sparks to find a way to lawfully swing around and head west.

Especially if it’s lunchtime, which runs 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

At 1 p.m. on a snow-blowing January Monday—the first drive-30-mph-slower-than-normal day of 2002—a decent-sized crowd has ignored the cascading flakes and is congregated in the two long rooms of the Coney Island.

A few people sit at the front room’s bar, served by bartender Dan Dodge and listening to the country music station from an elevated television. But most are at the tables in the front and back rooms, slurping coffee and lunching on sandwiches, grill items or soup, sitting on steel-frame-and-black-foam-backed chairs that look as old as Eisenhower.

These are middle-aged people, mostly men, who may be regulars for most of their lives, given that the Coney Island Bar dates to 1945 and its direct predecessor, the Coney Island Tamale Factory, to 1927. Both establishments claim Gallettis as owners, and 39-year-old Greg, the present proprietor, who frequently is found toiling about it in a white apron, is the grandson of the Tamale Factory’s founder, the late Ralph.

Greg’s father, John Galletti, added the existing bar in 1946, after returning from World War II. He carried on the business after Ralph and Mary passed on, and even though the Coney Island stopped making tamales ("They’re a lot of trouble,” Greg’s uncle Gerald says), old-timers still called the place the “Tamale Factory” and John “Tamale John.”

The contemporary lunch menu features sandwiches (fresh roast beef, turkey, ham, salami, corned beef or pastrami, $5 or $2.50 for a half, and 25 cents extra for Swiss or American cheese), grill fare (hamburgers, cheeseburgers, grilled cheese, hot dogs, hot dogs with homemade beans and hot pastrami topping the price list at $5.50), “Coney Originals” (enchilada with beans, $5, plain enchilada with sauce, $4, “Cold Plate” of ham, roast beef, salami and corned beef topped with Swiss cheese for $6.50 and “The Mess,” which is a homemade enchilada with beans, topped with salad, for $6). But Tuesdays and Thursdays—as I said before—are the best lunch days.

But even Tuesday or Thursday lunch isn’t the premier event of the week. That would be the famous Wednesday Night Dinner, a prix fixe prepared by Greg’s sister, Lorri Van Woert, and for which those brown Formica tables are adorned with white tablecloths, flowers and candles. You need to make a reservation (call 358-6485, or visit the Web site at www.coneyislandbar.com).

For Feb. 27, the menu is Mama Marie’s Soup, chicken cacciatore and polenta, with a dessert choice of caramel pecan cheesecake, country pear cake and gianduia puffs. Price: $16, plus $3 for dessert. Each meal comes (of course) with soup, salad, vegetable in season, bread and “pasta freshly made.” Seatings are at 6 and 7:45 p.m.

When I visit during the January snow-shower, Sally the waitress recommends a bowl of the vegetable soup “for a day like this.” I also order “The Mess” and “a Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi, whichever you have,” which happens to be both. That makes sense, because the menu offerings are, after all, timeworn and customer-driven, and some customers like Diet Pepsi and some like Diet Coke, so the Coney Island carries both brands. The table settings also have obviously evolved from customer mandates over the decades, and here is what they are:

Two Half & Half containers in a small bowl, salt and pepper shakers, a small bottle of red Gadzooks pepper sauce, a small bottle of McIlhenny Tabasco green pepper sauce, a small bottle of McIlhenny Tabasco red pepper sauce, a plastic Smart & Final mustard bottle, an obligatory black plastic container of pink packets of Sweet ‘N Low, white packets of Equal “tastes like sugar” sweetener and plain white packets of Real Sugar.

Like most American males I put on weight during the winter, and “The Mess” (red beans, seasonings, topped with lettuce, tomatoes and Italian dressing) and the soup (with three packets of crackers) fills my expanded appetite.

Total cost: $10.50, not including Sally’s tip.

I t’s 2 p.m., lunch is over, and so is Uncle Gerald’s pinochle game (he lost $6) over at the corner table by the window, a game that commenced on portable green felt, about an hour earlier, after Gerald’s friends Merl Schneider and Fran Menante showed up and Gerald didn’t have to play solitaire any more. Greg has returned from an errand, and he and his uncle (retired from the Southern Pacific Railroad) and I sit down at a table in back and rehash the history of the Coney Island Bar.

An Italian immigrant, John Gallo, a stonemason from Turin (that’s in the northwest corner of the boot), arrived in the Land of Opportunity in 1904 and (like so many who headed West) stopped in Virginia City, then made his way down the mountain and across the valley to Reno, which he found reminded him of his valley in Italy—ringed by snowcapped mountains, like the Piedmontese Alps. So he stayed put, building foundations of houses.

His daughter, Mary (John and Gerald’s mother; Greg’s grandmother), and her husband, Ralph Galletti, owned the Sugar Plum sandwich shop, and then, in 1927, opened the Coney Island Tamale Factory, right at the west end of Sparks where it ran into Reno’s Fourth Street, which was part of the east-west U.S. 40.

The name “Coney Island” came from a family recreation and amusement park that had been built in the early 1900s by a German immigrant, Otto Benschuetz, who owned a beer distributorship in Reno. He owned the Wieland Park and Beer Garden, then turned the site into a resort based on the famous Coney Island in Brooklyn. The park declined after Benschuetz’s death in 1912, but the name for the street stuck for decades (today it’s Galletti Way).

The early 1930s were still two decades away from the boom of fast-food eateries. University of Nevada students cured nighttime hunger pangs by driving out to the Reno/Sparks border and ordering tamales, served by a Sparks High School student named Nettie, Ralph and Mary’s daughter (Gerald’s sister; Greg’s aunt), a slim, pretty little brunette who was quick on her feet.

Ralph and Mary also worked day and night to supply tamales for now-forgotten places such as Beckers, the Wine House, the Bank Café, the Monarch and the Hole in the Wall at Lake Tahoe. John (Gerald’s brother; Greg’s dad) carried on the business after Ralph and Mary passed on.

The core of regulars grew accustomed to the no-frills dining room, which featured no table settings or menus (the latter since have been added). Habitués knew what to expect on which days. John’s son, Greg, learned the business from age 11 or 12, helping out and carrying on the family tradition. He moved behind the bar at 21 and took full control of the business 10 years later. John has passed away, but Jean is still with us, and her oil paintings of high-desert landscapes and wildlife adorn the restaurant’s walls.

The likes of hotelier Barron Hilton, astronaut Chuck Yeager and actors Bill Murray and Jim Nabors have sat down to plates of pasta at the Coney Island Bar. The place simply has withstood the test of time—as well as traffic rushing along Prater Way. In 1989, a Reno newspaper story noted that “wayward cars and hurtling trucks may damage but can’t destroy” the venerable restaurant. In a 12-month span, three out-of-control vehicles slammed into the building, including a truck.

“A truck came off the freeway here,” Greg remembers, pointing north to where the eastbound I-80 off-ramp runs behind the building. “He came pretty fast. I guess the road here was slick and he was out of control.” The freeway exit circles around and puts traffic down on Fourth Street. The truck hit the corner of the Coney Island’s west wall, creating a delayed shower of bricks that smashed a telephone booth and demolished the old neon sign.

It happened at 9:30 in the morning, when the only clients were a neighborhood coffee klatch solving the world’s problems. There was a crash—Greg thought someone had been in an accident out on the road—then the building shook.

The landmark survived. Thirteen years later, Greg has no plans to sell. Tall, unshaven, wearing a Mt. Rose Ski cap, he cuts the image of the hardworking dad getting little sleep with an 8-month-old son in the house. He and his wife, Dana, also have a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. Will Greg groom Nicholas, Olivia and Jacob—the next generation of Gallettis—to handle the business when they’re old enough?

“Hell, no,” Greg says with a smile. “Hopefully they’ll go to school and make some money.”

He’s cut his own hours back to about 50 a week and feels comfortable leaving the business for a few days now and then in the hands of trusted employees. The restaurant is always busy—Greg runs private dinner banquets (serving 20 to 80 diners) throughout the year for families or clubs, and Christmastime already is booked. “Some customers have had their Christmas parties here for as long as I can remember,” Greg says.

The Coney Island Bar supports Greg’s family just fine. It’s not going anywhere, and neither is its established clientele.

“There was a base here when I got in here. It was pretty easy for me to get started. I don’t think we’ll ever sell the business,” Greg says.

“I like it too much. It’s a good little living.”

Anyway, he feels a responsibility to keep the place going. He’s even cooked dinner on Sundays for customers who couldn’t make it in any other night.

“We have some really old guys come in here, and they’ve come in here since they were 7 or 8 years old. As far back as they can remember."