Chowhound is a weekly column about what’s trending in Detroit food culture. Tips: [email protected].
For starters, let this Dearborn boy make a clear distinction: Pizza rolls are freezer food manufactured by soulless mega-conglomerates as subsistence fodder for the populace feedbag; bite-sized, cardboard wonton-wrapped fritters piped with mush a pizza-eating mother bird might readily regurgitate for her young. A proper pepperoni roll is a different story: A somewhat-appropriated, working-class rite of dietary passage which generations of suburban Detroiters cut their teeth on as a staple of local food culture.
Some say the prototype rolls were a 1927 original construct of one Giuseppe “Joe” Argiro, a Fairmont, West Virginia bakery owner who saw an untapped market in the many Italian immigrants working up midday appetites in his coal-mining community. Others speculate these same miners’ wives may have cooked up the idea themselves; packing an easy-to-bake, portable, affordable, and homemade meal of high protein, fat, and carbs all rolled into one ready-to-eat handful back in those days when lunch pail, pre-union and federal labor law workforces were afforded a mere 15-minute meal break.
Whatever happened down there, pepperoni rolls became a thing up here a few years later. With Ford’s Rouge Plant employing thousands including émigrés from down South, an enormous, better-paid workforce created opportunity in Dearborn for food and beverage entrepreneurs. As streetcars and affordable Model T’s trafficked masses yearning to be fed and watered, bars, restaurants, and bakeries started lining the roads leading to and from the factory (Schaefer, Miller, Michigan). Roma Bakery (opened in 1930) is generally granted pepperoni roll pioneer status; its heyday as singular purveyor of the product stretching from the ’50s until the early ’70s, when my old neighbors on Reuter Street, John and Virginia Errigo, turned things into a competition by opening Capri Bakery. (4832 Greenfield Rd.; 313-584-4449.) Virginia — daughter of Hugo Imperi, Roma’s founder — started jumping off the back of her dad’s work trucks at ten to deliver bread orders. Her husband John — one of those Ford Motor Company employees — couldn’t resist all the Imperi family had to offer, apparently. The rest is history. They debuted Capri in December of 1973. This Christmas, their ongoing family business will gift us with its 50th anniversary. Astride those two success stories, Dearborn Italian Bakery (nicknamed “D-I-B” by its loyalists; 24545 Ford Rd., 313-274-2350) and its Livonia sister (“L-I-B”) stand as tenured, equal thirds in the triumvirate pantheon pepperoni roll purists pledge undying allegiance to in these parts. While Roma Bakery continues to thrive, the incarnation I remember is but a memory (a change of ownership years ago took an interpretive turn with the ‘ole rolls I recall, unfortunately for me). Capri remains Capri. Smelling their goods again, I’ve floated from the front door to the counter like Bugs Bunny on the wafting scent of fresh carrots. I had to choke down becoming choked-up at my first Capri pepperoni roll order in decades, and cried seeing the Errigos again in press photos framed there on the wall. They’re both gone now. Still, I’m guessing God’s got Virginia baking again, at least for Sunday dinner. As for Hugo; namesake grandson of Roma’s founder, whom I was once used to seeing behind the counter licking the self-inflicted wounds of a young man who liked living the life of a pepperoni roll empire prince: I trust he’s up there as well; a wing man of his now-off duty guardian angel.
On that note, I’ll wrap. Pepperoni rolls speak to this city’s food religion. To hell with Jeno’s and Totino’s. I wandered forty years in the desert (Southwest), tempted over time by everyone from stoner friends to my own children to accept less and give up on God’s perfect Italian grab-and-go grub as some prandial paradise lost. Even so, I held out a hope; praying for that taste of home again. These days, for just a few shekels more than I shelled out before leaving Dearborn in ’83, I’ve gotten back one of the blessings money can buy a guy who’s back in Heaven over one of his hometown’s purest and simplest pleasures.
And hat’s off to this lady for feeding the universe this rebuttal-worthy morsel: Google reviewer “Brenda” posted a three-star review for Mad Nice recently (Oct. 4), put out over the restaurant’s dress code policy:
“Not happy with the no hat policy for women,” Brenda specified. “As a black woman hats are often part of our ensemble… Seems discriminatory to me. The hostess said this was what the owner wanted. What is the reason?”
Granted, B.; the answer you got wasn’t much to go on. Still, owners can make those calls. Next, Brenda cited kitchen staff wearing baseball caps as a double standard, but sanitation requires those, of course.
“How does that help when their hair was falling from under the cap?” she challenged, suggesting hair nets instead. I’m with her on that one.
“I have a problem with this policy and so do my Facebook friends. Some say as a result they will not try the restaurant.” Brenda insinuates that she’s rallying some troops against Mad Nice over their stance. Then she appeals to reader empathy over bad hair days and such before dipping back into the prejudicial well:
“It feels, looks, and little (sic) discriminatory to me.”
Between you and me, B., I can’t see a reasonably minded restaurateur establishing a policy likely to restrict and/or offend large populations of potential customers. Gender prejudice seems unrealistic. Perhaps she was suggesting another kind. In the end, after making that worldly traveler argument many resort to (she’s eaten in New York without ever being asked to doff a cap), she finally gets around to asking the question she should have asked first, and directly to a manager or owner rather than out into the angry and vengeful, rhetorical ether of social media:
“What is wrong with a stylish hat and I am not talking about a baseball cap?”
But did you do that, B.? It doesn’t look like it. Maybe next time.
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