On almost any given day, customers can see Joey DiBuono weaving through his restaurant. He stops at nearly every table, not just to take orders or ask how the food is, but to check in on a personal level. He asks how the grandkids are doing, cleans up after the little ones and hugs familiar faces.
To him, seeing regulars is the best part of the job.
“I have four generations of people coming here,” Joey DiBuono said. “It’s incredible.”
His customers often stop him in the middle of his shift to share memories. They’ll point out which table they always sat at and who from Joey’s family served them.
Nestled in Little Italy, Joey DiBuono, 69, runs Tufano’s Vernon Park Tap, a traditional Italian joint that has been in his family since before he was born. As the third-generation owner, he works closely with his sister, JoAnn DiBuono, 74, and his daughter, Darci Pinello, 38, nearly every day.
On the North Side, the scene is different, but the rhythm is the same. At Sun Wah BBQ, the air is heavy with the smell of roasting meat and five-spice. Whole cooked ducks hang from hooks in the front windows, catching the attention of pedestrians.
Inside, the energy is immediate. Servers with food carts zoom between tables, large and small. Overlapping conversations in Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Spanish and more fill the open dining room as a regular walks through the door.
Once Kelly Cheng sees her, she doesn’t need to ask. She immediately starts placing the woman’s usual order: salt-baked chicken, chicken chow mein and fish with baby bok choy. The same dishes her grandfather ordered when he brought her here as a little girl. Kelly said the woman has had the same order since she was 4 years old.
“They become cousins,” Kelly said. “Family.”
Kelly, 48, is quick with a joke and always ready to tell a story. She runs the front of house, taking calls and greeting customers, many of whom she’s known since she started working at the restaurant as a kid.
Kelly, along with her siblings, Mike Cheng, 43, and Laura Cheng, 40, co-own the Uptown Hong Kong-style barbecue restaurant famous for their Peking duck dinner.
Laura, the youngest sibling, is Sun Wah’s executive chef. Her hair is often pulled up beneath a hat, and she is almost always wearing an apron. Though bashful, she speaks at length about her food. Mike is quieter and says little, preferring to stay in the kitchen where he roasts nearly 1,000 ducks per week.
Though both restaurants are in different parts of the city and serve cuisines from different parts of the world, their stories are surprisingly similar. Both began with immigrant families who wanted to share the food they grew up with while building a life in Chicago. Their children were raised inside the restaurants, busing tables, greeting customers and working long hours in the kitchen.
Over time, Tufano’s and Sun Wah evolved from modest neighborhood spots into James Beard Award-winning institutions. Once primarily serving their own ethnic communities, they now draw customers from across the city and beyond. Family has become staff who have stayed for decades and the customers who have returned for generations.
Even as the businesses expanded, neighborhoods changed and the restaurant industry evolved, the DiBuonos and the Chengs said the goal has remained the same: preserve the sense of comfort, tradition and community their relatives created years ago.
Origins and expanding beyond the neighborhood
Joey DiBuono’s grandparents, Joseph and Theresa Tufano DiBuono, opened Tufano’s in 1930.
As immigrants from outside Naples, Italy, the couple knew they wanted to turn the small barroom that was originally owned by Theresa’s brothers into a restaurant. It quickly became a neighborhood favorite, attracting athletes and celebrities with its family-style Italian dishes like lemon chicken, fried calamari and a variety of pastas.
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While Al Capone has been rumored to have frequented the restaurant in its early years, Joey said he never actually came in. The famous mobster did, however, enjoy Joey’s grandfather’s cooking, so Joseph would cook for Capone and his family outside of the restaurant.
“It was nothing to hide,” Joey DiBuono said. “They were very good friends.”
His grandparents, who lived next door, built a kitchen in the back of their house, passing food through a window into the restaurant. As a kid, Darci Pinello said she remembers eating dinner at her family’s house, then crawling through the window into the restaurant. That window can still be seen today in Tufano’s current kitchen.
Sun Wah’s story starts in New York. Eric Cheng, the founder and father of the current owners, immigrated to New York in the 1970s and started working in a Chinese kitchen. He eventually opened his own restaurant, the original Sun Wah BBQ. The storefront was small but required grueling work, often keeping him away from his wife, Lynda, and their four children.
In an effort to spend more time with his family and move his business elsewhere, he settled in the Chicago suburbs. He opened Sun Wah BBQ in 1987 as a hole-in-the-wall along Argyle Street.
The demands of the restaurant grew quickly, and Eric Cheng found himself constantly away from home. Before long, his wife joined him to help manage the workload.
So, when her mom had to go out of town, Kelly Cheng offered to help. She was about 8 years old at the time, and has been working in the restaurant ever since.
She started at the front, ringing up customers and packing takeout orders, before eventually moving into serving. By her teenage years, Eric Cheng trusted Kelly to run the place when he had to step out.
“I was probably robbed two or three times,” Kelly Cheng said. “The first time I cried. The second time, I went after the guy myself.”
Meanwhile, her younger siblings, Mike and Laura, grew restless at home with their grandparents. They soon asked to join the business too. Before long, nearly everyone in the family had a role at Sun Wah BBQ, including their sister, Cindy Spencer, who later chose to pursue a career outside of the restaurant.
Joey DiBuono started working at Tufano’s as a teenager. By then, his father, Salvatore “Sam the DA” DiBuono, was the second-generation owner. At 16, Joey DiBuono bused tables alongside neighborhood friends. Over time, he worked his way through every role, including cooking, serving and management.
Though he grew up wanting to be a hockey player, Joey DiBuono was just 25 years old when he took over Tufano’s in the early 1980s after his father died. A spitting image of Sam, with the same smile and dimples, Joey said he had big shoes to fill. He relied heavily on the women in his family, including his mother, aunts and especially his grandmother, Theresa, who worked in the kitchen nearly every day through her late 90s.
“My grandmother was way ahead of her time and she taught me a lot,” Joey said. “She was the backbone of the operations.”
JoAnn DiBuono, Joey’s sister, came to the restaurant later in life after spending 35 years as a court reporter in Cook County’s criminal courts. When their mother got sick, JoAnn stepped in and hasn’t left since.
“I don’t have to work,” JoAnn said. “I’m retired. But this is my purpose. To carry through the tradition of what my grandparents started.”
She handles the books, scheduling and hiring. She calls herself the restaurant’s troubleshooter. Whenever a problem comes up, she’s the first person called to fix it. She lives just two doors down from Tufano’s.
Joey’s daughter, Darci Pinello, started cashing checks at 16 and now manages the restaurant’s parties, catering and social media.
“People come here because they want to see someone in the family, it makes them feel at home,” Darci Pinello said.
Her twin sister, Disa, also grew up working in the restaurant. She has since stepped away, but returned temporarily while the business was struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sisters created their own dish, the D & D Special, a small shell pasta topped with vodka sauce and peas.
The Cheng siblings stepped in to run Sun Wah BBQ in 2008. By then, Laura had gone to culinary school, Mike had served in the Army and Kelly had started her own import-export business. When their father realized he was getting too old to manage the restaurant on his own, he asked his children to help, and they agreed without hesitation.
“I didn’t want to see it go,” Laura said. “It’s not just for Dad, it’s about that sense of security for our customers, knowing that each time they come back, even if they move away, that can they come back and they see that we’re still here, we’re still going.”
Soon after the siblings took over, they decided to expand. They moved Sun Wah around the corner to an old auto-repair shop on Broadway. The space is almost triple the size of the original Argyle storefront.
“It definitely came with a lot more headaches, a lot more work,” Kelly said. “But also with that satisfaction that we can feed that many more people.”
It has high ceilings, exposed brick walls and minimal decoration, giving it an industrial, no-frills feel. The kitchen stretches from the front of the restaurant along the side wall and into the back of the dining room. The sound of chopping and plates clattering echoes through the open room, where conversation builds into a steady hum that fills every corner.
Running the restaurant didn’t come easily for the siblings. Working together every day brought tension. While things have calmed over the years, the siblings still bicker and often disagree.
“Sometimes we want to kill each other, dig a hole and say, ‘Bye!'” Kelly said.
Yet, one of their biggest disagreements has now become their household staple.
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Around the time that they became the main owners, Kelly read about Peking duck in a magazine. Although it’s a northern Chinese dish and they typically serve southern food, like Hong Kong-style lo mein or shrimp wonton soup, she thought it would be fun to add to the menu for a week or so.
“Making and carving the duck was stressful,” Laura said. “I didn’t find it fun; it was just a lot for me to handle.”
After initial pushback from Laura, all three siblings agreed to try it out.
“If anyone’s got an idea in our head, we run with it until it’s completely dead, same with our dad,” Kelly said.
They prepared a dozen ducks as a test run, and by the end of that first weekend, they were sold out. Demand for the Beijing Duck Dinner grew rapidly through word of mouth and early food bloggers. When they considered removing it from the menu, customers pushed back.
“The repercussions of that statement was insane,” Kelly said. “Not only did we overbook like all the tables for the duck, the customers were saying, ‘Don’t take it off the menu, please don’t.’”
Now, on any given day, nearly every table orders the Peking duck. Servers carve the duck tableside, slicing the crisp skin and tender meat in full view of nearby tables, which only prompts more customers to ask for it.
Down in Little Italy, Tufano’s most popular dishes are the most traditional. Their lemon chicken, eggplant parmesan and tomato sauce, which they call gravy, are recipes that have remained unchanged since the beginning.
“The tradition of the recipes being handed down from my grandparents, that’s really the foundation of everything,” JoAnn said. “Simple homemade food, nothing fancy, that’s what people want.”
She said dining at Tufano’s should feel like stepping into your grandma’s house. Wood-paneled walls are lined with decades of photos, autographed Blackhawks jerseys and warm Christmas lights. The smell of simmering garlic and tomatoes drifts through the casual dining rooms where families gather around crowded tables.
While the neighborhood was once predominantly Italian, it is now far more diverse. Still, many of the restaurant’s longtime traditions remain the same, from handwritten chalkboard menus and a cash-only policy, now including Venmo and Zelle, to making every customer feel like family.
In some cases, those customers have become family in the literal sense, including Darci’s husband. In 2010, Phil Pinello stopped by the restaurant with his son and nephew before one of the Stanley Cup playoff games. Darci was their server.
“It was love at first sight,” Darci said.
Phil told her he had an extra ticket to the game, but Darci had to decline and finish her shift. With the dinner rush, she didn’t get a chance to give him her number; that is, until he came back the week after.
“I gave him my number that night, and that was it,” Darci said.
According to JoAnn, roughly half of their customers are generational. They come for a weekly meal, celebrations and even to remember those who have passed.
“They’ll come just to honor their family and friends because this is something that they’ve known,” JoAnn said. “People have a connection to us. That’s the greatest part.”
At Sun Wah BBQ, some customers have been coming in since the restaurant first opened in the ‘80s. Children who once needed booster seats now walk through the door with their own families. Toddlers who pointed at the ducks hanging in the window are now grown, placing the same orders their parents placed before them.
One couple had their first date at the restaurant more than 20 years ago. Now their son works on staff.
“They share their great news or sad news, and we’re here with open arms or sarcasm,” Laura said.
The next generation carries on a legacy
While Sun Wah primarily had an Asian customer base when it first opened, today it draws people from all across the city and beyond.
To the Chengs, it means they get to share their family legacy with more people. Their father instilled in them the importance of knowing where they came from.
“Continuing the restaurant and our businesses as a legacy is a continuation of that culture,” Kelly said.
The DiBuonos feel the same way. Joey, JoAnn and Darci each hope to carry on what their family started.
“It’s an honor, I’m really blessed,” Joey said. “I mean, it’s a lot of hard work, I’ve put in a lot of hours. But they left me quite a legacy and I try and continue to keep it up in honor of them.”
When asked how she thinks her grandparents would react if they saw Tufano’s today, JoAnn started to tear up.
“They’d be so proud of us,” JoAnn said. “I think about it a lot.”
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Neither the Chengs nor the DiBuonos have any plans to give up their family businesses. Both families hope to continue serving food to their communities for as long as they can, possibly passing on the legacy to the next generation.
After all, their kids have already started working.
At Tufano’s, Darci’s daughters, 10 and 8, bus tables and cash out checks. At Sun Wah, Laura’s 9-year-old daughter runs a boba stand, and Kelly’s daughters, 14 and 12, help run credit cards.
If he were to offer advice to the next generation in family businesses, Joey has a simple lesson: “You just treat people the way they want to be treated; it goes a long way.”
Tufano’s Vernon Park Tap, 1073 W. Vernon Park Place, 312-733-3393, facebook.com/tufanosrestaurant
Sun Wah BBQ, 5039 N. Broadway, 773-769-1254, sunwahbbq.com