Nicholas A. Barraco, 79, whose pizza restaurant on the Southwest Side became a neighborhood landmark, died of complications from renal failure Monday, Dec. 30, in Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
In the more than 35 years Mr. Barraco ran Vito & Nick’s at 84th Street and Pulaski Road, it became a common site for family birthday parties, said his daughter Rosemary George. Many young adults had their first taste of beer there and more than once, neighborhood youths on summertime scavenger hunts would try to sneak out with a salt shaker, she said.
Through it all, Mr. Barraco was a constant presence who would step out of the kitchen to greet old friends.
He loved the business so much that he kept an apartment above his restaurant for years, said his daughter, who described him as a gregarious host in a family where the restaurant business was the business.
“They all called him `the Godfather,'” his daughter said. “It was a joke, but he ….was the pillar.”
Vito & Nick’s was started by his father. His parents were Italian immigrants and, in the late 1920s, they opened a tavern and restaurant in an Italian neighborhood on the Near West Side.
Mr. Barraco attended Calumet High School. He finished his diploma work after joining the Army during World War II, when he was stationed in an Army Air Forces medical unit in England.
While there, he met the former Mary Cuniff, then serving in the British Army. They married in 1943.
After the war, Mr. Barraco returned to the family business, then located on West 79th Street, and in 1965 he moved the restaurant to 84th and Pulaski.
His children later went into business with him, but Mr. Barraco never tired of working, his daughter said.
“He didn’t want to retire,” she said. “He grew up with all of this.”
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Mr. Barraco’s first wife died in 1980. He married the former Maria Konrath in 1982.
Mr. Barraco is also survived by four other daughters, Kathleen Cryan, Donna, Lee Marback and Sandra Leonard; two sons, Nicholas and Vito; two stepchildren, Jeffrey Riedel and Karen Boll; a sister, Lee Musso; 20 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Visitation is scheduled from 2 to 9 p.m. Friday in Robert J. Sheehy & Sons Funeral Home, 4950 W. 79th St., Burbank.
A mass will be said at 10 a.m. Saturday in St. Denis Catholic Church, 8300 S. St. Louis Ave.