The Life and Times of Monte's Venetian Room

Carroll Street between Third Avenue and Nevins Street, a sleepy residential block lined with houses, a couple of parking lots and some quiet, small-scale industrial buildings, seems an unlikely location for one of the best-known Italian restaurants in Brooklyn.

But Frank Sinatra used to sing at Monte’s Venetian Room, the older parishoners at Our Lady of Peace Church told Father Patrick Boyle. Monte's and the church are located a block apart on Carroll Street, east of the Gowanus Canal.

Things were different when Rose Castlevetre was born in the neighborhood 76 years ago, she told me at the bar in Monte’s on a recent afternoon. There was more active industry on the surrounding streets and more barge traffic carrying goods along the canal just west of Nevins. Mom-and-pop stores abounded, including a grocery she remembers on the block.

“There used to be businesses all over the place," she said. "People came for lunch, dinner.”

Local workers and residents were the customers of Angelo’s, Rose said, a low-key Neapolitan restaurant and tavern that Angelo Montemarano and his wife, Filomena, opened in 1906. The Montemaranos grew produce in the backyard and lived with their children in an upstairs apartment. Angelo’s was a speakeasy during Prohibition, with a chute to the basement in case the staff needed to dispose of bottles ahead of a police raid. Years later, when Rose was a young girl, her family used to send her by with a bucket to be filled with beer.

In the late 30s, with Angelo’s son Nick Monte running things along with his wife Joyce, Angelo’s became Monte’s Venetian Room. (Monte and Montemarano are variations on the same family name.) The new, more elaborate design featured red booths for seating and painted murals of Venice on the walls.

Nick Monte owned the restaurant for most of its run. He was a saltwater enthusiast, who, according to the New York Times used to swim daily in a pool filled with East River water at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. In the 50s he bought Gurney’s Inn, a seaside hotel in Montauk, and turned it into an 11-acre resort and spa where guests could take hot-saltwater Roman baths and luxuriate with French mud treatments. Nick became a community leader in Montauk and died in 2007 at the age of 90.

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"It used to be three deep back then. You couldn’t get at the bar.”

I was talking to Rose's nephew Sal, around the corner from Monte’s at . Aside from the glow of the Super Eight Hotel across the street, most of the stretch of Third Avenue outside was dark on a hot summer weeknight. Now in his 40s, Sal remembers hanging out and exploring the empty lots around the Gowanus Canal with Dominick -- his cousin, Rose's son -- when they were kids.

Monte’s was a central part of the neighborhood, Sal said. He recalled the old restaurant front, with its awning and small rectangular window. In the summer, the management opened the fire hydrant in front for the kids running up and down the block.

“Everybody used to sit out on their front stoops," he said. "Every house used to have maybe five, six people.”

Later, Sal and Dominick worked at Monte’s, parking customers’ cars in the lot next door. Sal remembers the bands playing on Saturday nights, the giambotta stew, the wooden phone booth and the old Prohibition-era chute, repurposed by the staff to throw empty bottles through into a basement bin. During the day, you could get hero sandwiches, hamburgers on toast and Italian ices to go.

At night, the clientele came from near and far. Sal mentioned politicians, ballplayers Joe Torre and Joe Pepitone, priests from Our Lady of Peace, doctors from Methodist Hospital, fruit merchants from Court Street, comedian Pat Walker and billionaire hotel magnate Leona Helmsley, who brought her dog along with her. Rose mentioned James Caan, Danny Aiello and golden-era Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. There was a night in the 70s, recalled by the New York Post, when Sammy Davis Jr. showed up and performed a spontaneous concert into the morning hours.

“The Gallo brothers hung out there all the time, all three of them,” Nick Monte’s nephew Paul Monte, who now runs Gurney’s Inn, told me.

In the 60s, local gangsters Larry, Joe and Albert Gallo became famous for their headline-grabbing style and their war against mob leadership, waged from the home base they set up in a couple of President Street apartments.

The look of Monte’s made it a desired locale for movies, too. In Prizzi’s Honor, John Huston’s 1985 mafia-themed dark comedy, a key meeting between a couple of cops and a gangster takes place in one of the red booths. In the 1990 film Men of Respect, John Turturro carries out a mob hit, popping off gunshots while patrons at the bar dive for cover.

Sometimes the restaurant would throw street fairs on Carroll commemorating its birthday, like the one Sal recounted for me from the late 70s. There were crowds, and people competing to climb a greased pole and grab the bag of money at the top.

In 1978, the Times reported, Monte’s painted the Carroll Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal green, white and red -- the colors of the Italian flag. When the bridge reopened in 1989 after four years of repairs, the Times noted, Monte’s made a 100-foot-long hero sandwich, seven feet short of the length of its span.

“You know, we’ve been through Prohibition and two world wars and never closed a day,” Nick Monte told the Times during the celebration. In 2008, however, after Nick had died, Monte’s shut its doors, and stayed closed for more than two years. During that time, its future seemed undetermined, until it reopened earlier this year under new ownership.

Those new owners are Rose Castlevetre’s son Dominick and his wife, Tina Esposito. The Castlevetres and the Montemaranos are related by marriage. As Dominick talked with some regulars at the end of the bar, Rose and Tina showed me an old black-and-white photo of a young woman at a microphone stand where Sinatra and others used to sing for dancing couples. That was Dominick’s Aunt Nancy, who married one of Nick Monte’s brothers and worked at the restaurant as a manager.

“Monte’s was known as a local restaurant catering to professionals and blue collar people, and we are the same,” Tina said. She and Dominick kept the tables and chairs, replaced the floor and stripped the walls down to the original brick. (The murals and a chandelier were reportedly removed before they took over.) They took out a back wall, exposing the kitchen to the dining area. They kept the original wooden bar near the front, covering it with a marble top.

They also brought in a new menu, less classic and more ambitious, prepared by an Italian chef. Chicken parmigiano was replaced by free-range chicken breast in a white wine herb sauce, for example. They added dishes like garganelli with roasted duck and mascarpone and trenette with wild boar ragu. And they introduced thin-crust pizza, made in a new wood-burning oven brought over from Italy.

“We’re not just serving parmesan meals like American Italian food,” Tina said. “We’re serving traditional Italian food from north and south.”

Paul and Sal both wished the new owners luck.

“It’s nice for it to be open, to see that the block has got light on again,” Sal told me at Canal Bar. “I hope it lasts for another hundred years.”