Fresh, handmade rigatoni and gnocchi lie on silver trays at Pietro’s Italian Market while spaghetti and fettuccini are hung to dry by the window. Shelves stacked with popular Italian goods such as olive oil and authentic Italian cookies fill the market. Nearby, under a display case, colorful flavors of made in-house gelato wait to be sampled.
Pietro’s Italian Market and Coratti’s Pizzeria Bar & Bocce, an attached restaurant, are owned by Pete Coratti and his nephews, Peter and Anthony. The dual businesses opened on East William Street in Ann Arbor in July.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Coratti said he and his nephews learned most of their cooking skills in Italy. They spent three weeks learning how to make Napoli pizza in Naples and a week in Bologna learning how to make fresh gelato. Coratti said he believed it was important for the restaurant’s dishes to be homemade and authentic.
“It’s very labor intensive, and we have people making pasta here every day, and it’s worth it,” Coratti said. “But it took some getting used to.”
In addition to fresh pasta and pizza, Coratti’s Pizzeria has two bocce ball courts upstairs open for customers to play while enjoying their food. Coratti said he grew up playing bocce ball in his backyard and wanted to incorporate the game into the restaurant.
Coratti’s Pizzeria has two other locations: one in Milford — the original site of his restaurant — and the other in Howell. There is currently another location in Lansing, near Michigan State University’s campus that is under construction and has not yet opened. The Ann Arbor location is the first of the family’s restaurants to serve a student-dominated customer base.
Coratti said the restaurant aims to cater to both the student population and the Ann Arbor community.
“You can come here as an 18-year-old freshman and grab a pizza and ice water for seven bucks,” Coratti said. “You can come as a family and get an expensive bottle of wine with nice entrees. Same with the market, you can come grab an Italian soda or Italian cookies. … There’s something for everybody.”
Coratti told The Daily the pizzeria has gained more traction through social media and word of mouth as the fall semester has continued, especially compared to the summer.
“My favorite thing is getting all the kids in here,” Coratti said. “Because we opened when the kids weren’t here, and we had lots of adults and neighborhood people here. Running the $5 pepperoni and getting all the students to come and have gelato, that’s the most rewarding.”
In an interview with The Daily, LSA sophomore Aidan Jacob, a server at Coratti’s Pizzeria, said he had to adjust to the restaurant’s growing customer base, but has loved watching the restaurant get busier since its opening.
“It was really cool to see over summer how we started to pick up business from the days we were super slow compared to Welcome Week, when we were bombarded with people,” Jacob said.
Caleb Meloche, the storefront general manager of the Ann Arbor location and former server at the Howell location, told The Daily accommodating an increasing amount of restaurant traffic took some adjusting.
“I had worked at Howell, and we knew how to be busy at the Howell restaurant,” Meloche said. “We didn’t know how to be busy here yet, and we really were able to figure things out.”
Working in a family-owned restaurant is not new to the Coratti family. Coratti’s grandmother and uncle owned Gregg’s Pizza, a pizzeria and Italian restaurant in Detroit that was in the Coratti family for more than 60 years. Coratti ran the restaurant up until last year.Coratti said despite not all of the staff being blood-related, he makes it clear that all of their employees are family. Meloche said he feels like a part of the family.
“We all call him Uncle Pete,” Meloche said.
Daily News Contributor Bridget Scully can be reached at bscully@umich.edu.
