Remembering Maria D’Orsi
September 7th, 2007 by Cliff Bostock in NewsMy condolences to the family of Maria D’Orsi, 86, who died Sept. 3, in Columbia, S.C. Longtime Atlantans will remember Maria as the operator of Gianni’s, a tiny, groundbreaking Italian restaurant named after her husband.
I don’t recall exactly when Gianni’s opened, but it was in the ’70s. The restaurant was located next to a convenience store on Peachtree in Buckhead. There were about six tables and people endured endless waits to get seated. The restaurant was so small and the waiting crowd so large that one often stood over a table, glaring at diners as they leisurely sipped coffee.
Maria was the center of attention at the restaurant. She worked 30 years as a ballerina at the San Carlo Theatre in her native Naples, and she certainly brought charisma to her work as a chef. Every time I entered the restaurant, which was often, she shouted “Hello, beautiful!” — as I’m sure she did to everyone else.
Always dressed in white and talking a blue streak, Maria seemed completely informal. But I would see her out shopping at a mall now and then — dressed to the nines and looking quite elegant.
Because seating was so limited at Gianni’s, she often came out of the kitchen and insisted strangers share a table. On several occasions I was stuck with people so boring and so chatty that I finally decided I’d rather wait another 30 minutes than dine with strangers. Maria teased me about that frequently.
My favorite dish at the restaurant was scungilli (conch) in a fra diavolo sauce. No other restaurant in the city served it (although Alfredo’s featured it for a few years). Generally, the restaurant’s food was a radical departure from the overwrought Italian-American cooking that dominated the city then.
Eventually, Maria moved Gianni’s up the street to the present location of Georgia Grille. Frankly, it was never the same there. The atmosphere felt too formal and the dining room too large following the raucous scene at the original restaurant. I believe the restaurant also reincarnated itself in the Northlake area for a while.
You can read Maria’s obituary here.
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