Dear Vance:
Is it true that Coletta’s, the Italian restaurant on South Parkway, introduced pizza to Memphians? And if so, when did that momentous event take place in our culinary history?
— P.T., Memphis.
Dear P.T.: Pizza is such a popular dish, with more combinations of toppings than I can calculate with my desktop abacus, that one would think it had been here, there, and everywhere — even in Memphis — forever. And what was once a lunchtime or certainly dinnertime meal can now be enjoyed throughout the day, even for breakfast, though the Lauderdales prefer to stick with caviar and Vienna sausage, as we have for generations. But the truth is that it is indeed a relatively recent dish in these parts, and it was indeed first served at Coletta’s.
But here’s the thing. Coletta’s didn’t begin as a pizza parlor. It started as a soda fountain.
Here’s what I know, after chatting with Stephen Coletta, the fourth generation of the family to be involved in the restaurant business in Memphis. The year was 1923, and his great-grandparents, Emilio and Candida Coletta, decided to open an ice cream parlor in a humble brick building at 1063 South Parkway East, in what was mainly a residential part of town. Since those new parkways were considered the boundaries of our city limits at the time (hard to imagine, I know), they called their new establishment Coletta’s Suburban Ice Cream Company.
An early photograph (above) shows the Colettas standing proudly behind the marble counter of their gleaming new establishment, with rows of soda glasses on shelves behind them, and hand-lettered signs announcing ice cream sandwiches, ice cream bars, popsicles, and sundaes. The sherbet selection for that day, scribbled on a blackboard, was pineapple. It’s a fine-looking place, all right, but the photo shows that something was missing.
Customers.
Almost immediately, the Colettas determined Memphians wanted something more than just ice cream. “So they offered what you might consider a weird combination,” says Stephen. “The menu included ice cream, pasta, and beer.” But that pasta meant basic dishes like ravioli and lasagna. No pizza on the menu. Not yet.
The business was a success and son Horest Coletta took it over in the 1940s. Another photo of the interior from this time (above) shows the rather drastic transformation, with the walls cluttered with menus and lists of sandwiches for sale, and ads for all sorts of products: Dr. Pepper, Green Spot soda, Portina cigars, and Choca-Lac drinks. The name officially became Coletta’s after they stopped concentrating on ice cream and soda fountain dishes and offered more traditional Italian fare, such as lasagna and ravioli. But after World War II ended, soldiers who had been stationed in Europe — Italy, in particular — returned to Memphis with tales of an unusual, utterly flat, round dish, and Horest was intrigued.
“My grandfather went to these new pizza parlors that had opened in places like New York and Chicago,” says Stephen, “and he came back and added pizza to the menu.” The exact date has been lost to history. “I only know it was in the late 1940s,” he says.
And nobody wanted anything to do with it — a pasta dish you ate with your hands? Why, you’d never see a Lauderdale doing such a thing, even in our private dining hall.
But Horest was clever. He knew that Memphis was, then as much as now, a barbecue town, so he thought: “Okay, you don’t want pepperoni. What would happen if we put barbecue meat and barbecue sauce on a pizza?”
Here’s what happened. “It was an immediate hit,” says Stephen, “and barbecue pizza is one of our signature dishes today.”
Coletta’s opened a second location on Summer Avenue, just east of Mendenhall, in the late 1950s. Run by Horest’s son, Jerry (this would be Stephen’s father), it drew the same crowds as the original location until a disastrous fire in 1996. The restaurant had closed for the evening, so there were no injuries, but the structure was a complete loss. After debating several years whether to rebuild, the Coletta family, which now included the fourth generation (are you keeping up with all these Colettas?) of Stephen and sisters Lisa and Christina — decided to build a brand-new and larger facility at 2850 Appling Road.
Over the years Coletta’s has attracted quite a few celebrity customers, none more famous than Elvis Presley. In the late 1960s and 1970s he made a few personal visits to the South Parkway location, but to avoid making a scene he usually sent Priscilla or one of his pals at Graceland to fetch him boxes of pizza. “We’d just keep a running tab,” says Stephen, “and Colonel Parker would come in and take care of it.”
“I never planned to be in the restaurant business,” says Stephen. “When I was in school, I saw how much my father, and his father, and his father put into it, night after night, and I didn’t want any part of it. But then I started working here a few days a week and — well, now I’m in the restaurant business.” He points out that the menu has expanded to include seafood and other non-Italian dishes, and he’s proud of the fact that almost everything they serve is homemade: the bread, pizza dough, sauces, dressings. Even the sausage is ground and flavored there.
“It’s an awful lot of work, and if you don’t enjoy it, you won’t last,” he says. “But I really do enjoy it, and we’re coming on 20 years now.”
The original location, now managed by Jerry Coletta after Horest retired, claims to be one of the oldest restaurants in Memphis. A few other places here make that same claim — the Arcade, Little Tea Shop, Jim’s Place among them — but Coletta’s is that rare eating establishment that has remained in the same location, and in the same family, for its entire existence. In five years, it will celebrate a century of dishing out tasty Italian food in Memphis.
Got a question for Vance?
- Email: askvance@memphismagazine.com
- Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, 65 Union Avenue, Suite 200, Memphis, TN 38103