Dining at Tina’s Italian Café and Bake Shop is like dining at a Sicilian kitchen table.
Plates are set atop handmade crocheted tablecloths, which are protected under plastic. They were made by Tina’s mother, who can’t speak a word of English but won’t let that stop her from telling stories about her family’s life back in Sicily, where she lives for half the year.
There are family photos everywhere: in neat rows on the table near the front door, hung in the back hallway and taped to the ancient cash register that requires counting up to make change.
Comfortable and at home — that’s exactly the way Tina Tortorici wants her Gurnee café and bake shop to feel.
“It’s like somebody’s house with 14 tables and lace crochet tablecloths and the real Italian way with plastic on the tablecloth, you know,” Tortorici said. “I love my language and talk Italian a little bit to everybody so they can learn it.”
She visits every table with a hearty, “Mangia!,” in between cutting bread hot from the oven, making espresso and serving salads. At a back table you can find her mother, crocheting quietly.
“Yes, I have time to talk,” Tortorici says in her heavy Italian accent. “My bread is in the oven.”
Tortorici went to school in Italy to be a teacher, “but I never teach one day of my life,” she said.
Instead, she came to America and found friends with restaurants and helped them, and later opened her own place, Tina’s Italian Café and Bake Shop in 2001 in her new hometown.
Her recipes are handed down from her nonna. “All my recipes are homemade. I never went to culinary school. I make my own sauce, cookies, bread, dressing, nice salads and balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil, fresh strawberries and mixed berries. She teach me simple recipes, I have a few ingredients with fresh garlic, onions, oregano, basil and good extra virgin olive oil.”
Daily specials are handwritten and copied for each table. “For lunch we have a nice Imbottito or nice meatball sandwich, chicken salad on focaccia. Lasagna, focaccia bread, sandwiches, meatballs, Bandiera, eggplant parmigiana, bolognese sauce. Everything. Whatever we make is popular,” Tortorici said. “I like it and I will keep doing it until I am 100 years.”
Pricing: Salads from $7.50 for La Casalinga to $9.99 for low-carb. Soups are $2.99 for cup or $4.99 for bowl. Sandwiches are $8.25 from provolone e verdure to panino di manzo. Specialties from $8.25 for bake shop special of half sandwich and house salad or cup of soup to $9.99 for eggplant Parmigiana. Desserts from cannoli to Tina’s mascarpone brownies. Beverages from espresso to mochas. Catering available.
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Hours: 10:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday.
Tina’s Italian Café and Bake Shop is at 5101 Washington St., Gurnee. Call 847-244-9001 or go to www.tinasitaliancafe.com
Shonda Talerico Dudlicek is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.