By Deborah Ensor
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
December 15, 2002
In its day, it was considered one of the greatest restaurants in San Diego. Called “Pork Chop Hill” by Joe Namath, movie stars went to eat there, big bands went to play. But for 17 years, Casa di Baffi has sat empty.
Late in the evening, though, interior lights sometimes faintly illuminate the cracked and empty red vinyl booths. Booths that once held many a romantic couple, swooning to great music and even greater Italian food.
The building is shuttered, the parking lot empty. Graffiti often covers the windows and walls; whiskey bottles sometimes litter the alley; homeless people occasionally camp on the roof.
To many in the Hillcrest neighborhood, Casa di Baffi is an eyesore, eating up valuable real estate in an area that has seen major revitalization.
But to George Pernicano, owner of the now-defunct House of the Moustache, as Casa di Baffi translates from Italian, the restaurant, shuttered or not, contains his memories.
“Yes, it’s a valuable piece of property,” Pernicano said. “But it’s my life in there.”
The property, on Sixth Avenue between University and Robinson avenues, takes up more than one-third of a block in Hillcrest. The building, including a basement, is about 19,000 square feet, the total lot about 25,000. The parking lot could hold about 80 spaces. Estimates put the property’s worth at $3 million or more, though no one can know for sure unless an appraisal is done.
Planners and developers have eyed the property for years, hoping Pernicano would sell it – or, if not, reopen it, rent it out, or at the very least, lease the empty lot to ease the area’s parking problems.
“We’d like to see the area as vibrant as possible and not have a key structure in the middle of the community sitting there lying dormant, full of graffiti, with no possibility of even changing that situation,” said Warren Simon, executive director of the Hillcrest Association, the local merchants group. “Everybody comes to Hillcrest passes by that building and sees that as a reflection of our community.”
Pernicano has no desire to sell his restaurant. Instead, he does what little is needed to keep the building in line with city codes. He turns on the lights once in a while. He visits several times a month, does a little upkeep, tries to keep an eye on the graffiti.
Pernicano isn’t interested in leasing it, either, saying he doesn’t want the headaches of a landlord. Nor does he have any immediate plans to reopen.
“My chef retired,” he said. “You can‘t get a chef like I had.”
He is hanging on to the property for tax reasons, he said, and, more so, for sentimental ones.
“I’m not selling nothing,” Pernicano said. “To sell it would be like selling my body. My body and soul are in there.”
In San Diego, the famously moustachioed Pernicano, now 85, is synonymous with Italian food. He came here in 1946 from Detroit, opening a pizza restaurant in Hillcrest. Pernicano and his brothers and, eventually, his sons, opened pizza places. The Pernicano family still has restaurants in Pacific Beach, El Cajon, Scripps Ranch and Lakeside.
In the early 1960s, Pernicano, by then a minority owner of the Chargers, opened Casa di Baffi on Sixth Avenue, and it soon became a gathering place for the famous and the hungry.
Jimmy Dorsey, Lawrence Welk, Rudy Valle, Jackie Gleason.
“They just came because they heard about the place,” Pernicano said.
People still talk about my restaurant all the time. There was no restaurant in the country like it. That’s why people still talk about it. ‘Oh God, I miss your pork chops,’ they tell me. I didn’t have no big menu. I was a fussy guy. You eat my way and my style, and if you don’t like it, don’t come back.”
Casa di Baffi closed in 1985, and though it has been opened for a few parties over the years, it basically has sat shuttered and dormant since.
“It’s been a blight to the Hillcrest community for a long, long time,” said Alan Sachs, chairman of the local planning group, the Uptown Planners.
San Diego City Councilwoman Toni Atkins said she often hears from residents and business owners about the property.
“People drive by and wonder, ‘Why can’t you do something?’ Atkins said. “For years we’ve gotten calls, I’ve lost track of how many.”
Atkins said the city cannot force a business owner to operate full time and said that Pernicano has done the minimal needed to avoid code violations.
Her office hasn’t approached Pernicano directly, but other people have at various times over the years. The Uptown Partnership, which works to get additional parking opportunities in the area, sent a letter to Pernicano a few years ago. It included a computer simulation of what the building could look like redeveloped. The agency never heard back.
Greg Cabana, a friend of Pernicano’s, said he has tried over the years to help broker several deals, but nothing has ever panned out.
Simon, of the Hillcrest Association, sees Pernicano several times a month when the old restaurateur makes his way to Hillcrest to keep an eye on things.
“I regard him as one of my friends,” Simon said. “I talk to him about our community needs. But he refuses to see community concerns. We haven’t found anything that can bring out an allegiance to Hillcrest in him.”