E.V. Originals

When Jim Lolli launched The Hungry Monk in 2010, he obviously wanted to serve good food. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just inexpensive pub fare like burgers and wings. But good pub fare.

Lolli also wanted to incorporate his longtime passions for craft beer and sports. He even came up with a slogan to define his goal for the Chandler restaurant and bar: “Where great food, craft beer and sports collide.”

As “The Monk,” as it’s affectionately known to its legions of devoted fans, approaches its all-day fifth anniversary party Saturday, it’s safe to say, by any measure, Lolli has been wildly successful.

Related: 5 ways The Hungry Monk is celebrating its 5th anniversary

Sure, you can find restaurants with fancier food. You can find bars with more beers on tap. You can find sports bars with more TVs.

No place in the Valley, however, seems to put it all together like The Hungry Monk.

‘‘We got a Best of Phoenix award from New Times,” Lolli says, “and the article said, ‘A lot of people struggle to do one thing well. These guys figured out how to do three things well. The food’s very good, great craft beer bar, and they do sports very well.’

‘‘And that’s what I really wanted. That was the goal.”

Born and raised in Detroit, Lolli’s dream was to play professional hockey. “But something happened. It was called lack of talent,” he says in a quip more humble than accurate.

Having worked in concession stands since age 15, he began manager training at McDonald’s and had his own restaurant by age 20. After a few years, he jumped to a human resources position at Little Caesar’s.

In 1992, Lolli’s wife, Carol, was recruited to run a Sports Authority store in Phoenix, and he got an HR job with a Valley pharmaceutical company. And then a chemical company. And then an aerospace company.

In 2007, after 26 years in the corporate world, Lolli decided it was enough.

“I wanted to get back to my roots in the restaurant industry,” he says. “But I’d been out of it for so long, I really did not have the confidence to develop my own concept.”

He decided to open a franchise of a fast-growing, Cincinnati-based chain called Buffalo Wings & Rings, often compared to Buffalo Wild Wings.

“When I chatted with them, they had never had anybody do the craft beer thing, so they gave me permission to do carte blanche,” he said.

After finding a 3,600-square-foot location he liked on busy Chandler Boulevard just east of Dobson, Lolli opened his doors in 2008, doing “reasonably well” for the first two years.

Then there was a leadership change at Wings & Rings. Suddenly, Lolli no longer had carte blanche with his 27 craft beer taps.

“Basically they accused me of bastardizing their concept,” Lolli says. “They said I could only have 10 tap handles, and they would dictate what beers would be on them.

‘‘I told them to pound sand.’’

Lolli negotiated out of his franchise agreement, and prepared to open his own concept, similar to what he already was doing. He just needed a new name.

“I went on a couple of beer websites and wrote down the names of the top 100 beer bars in country,” he says. “The name ‘Monk’ popped up twice, and I really liked that name.

‘‘The 16th- and 17th-century Trappist monks in Europe were the best brewers on the globe, so I knew I wanted that name. I stuck the moniker ‘Hungry’ in front of it for the food aspect.”

The Hungry Monk kept about 60 percent of the Wings & Rings menu, by Lolli’s estimate, and all 27 beer taps. In those days, it was one of the only places in the Valley where you’d find six or seven IPAs on at the same time.

“Fast forward to now, everybody carries craft beer,’’ Lolli says. ‘‘Everybody rotates their handles very aggressively. So we’ve kinda throttled back on the IPAs. Now we have much more variety.”

Imperial stouts and IPAs remain his personal preference of beer styles, but his changing-daily tap list is a draw for beer geeks and novices alike, drawn by promotions like the Monk’s popular $3 Craft Beer Wednesdays.

They also come for a hundred other reasons. An early-morning World Cup soccer match, a Detroit Tigers season opener, a men’s catwalk for breast cancer, a Beer & Bacon Night, a beer-and-doughnuts breakfast, a chili cook-off, a stouts-and-pancakes dinner…

And then there are the many food specials, both weekly ($9.99 all-you-can-eat boneless wings on Mondays, 59-cent wings on Tuesdays, etc.) and everyday (a $6.99 lunch menu, including side and beverage).

‘‘We’re regular-driven, there’s no question about it,” Lolli says. ‘‘About 80 percent of our customers are very loyal. We see them all the time. The other 20 percent probably come in three or four times a year.’’

Perhaps The Monk’s greatest asset, though, is it’s comfortable, no-drama, everyone’s-welcome attitude, something exemplified by the laid-back Lolli and appreciated not only by customers but also breweries and distributors.

‘‘At the end of the day, the beer community has insanely embraced us,’’ Lolli says. ‘‘I kinda don’t want this to be in an article, but – you know what? – we’re not assholes to deal with. We don’t ask for much.

‘‘I hear this from almost every distributor: ‘You guys are the easiest to work with.’ I don’t moan and groan about anything. I don’t demand anything. If you can get (a certain beer), great. If not, no worries.’’

The Hungry Monk has spread its wings in recent years. It debuted a food truck, known as The Traveling Monk, in 2013. And this summer it opened a second location in Prescott, where Lolli and his wife have a second home.

Lolli admits the Prescott venture wasn’t really planned. Rather, the opportunity presented itself when downtown’s Firehouse Kitchen unexpectedly went up for sale and was too good of a deal to pass up.

Despite his corporate background, Lolli says he has no plans to build an entire chain of Hungry Monks.

‘‘I tell everyone if I ever try to open another restaurant, someone has permission to smack me.’’

(E.V. Originals are a series of occasional profiles chronicling the backstories of the places that give the East Valley’s food and drink scene its distinctive flavor.)

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It’s rare a small independent restaurant finds itself in the crosshairs of a huge national chain and lives to tell about it. Tott’s Asian Diner has done it twice.

In 2006, Pei Wei, the fast-casual offshoot of P.F. Chang’s, opened one of its nearly 200 locations next door to Tott’s, offering a similar menu of wok dishes influenced by China, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

After Tott’s more than held its own against the corporate behemoth for four years, California-based Habit Burger Grill decided Tott’s space was the perfect spot for its first Arizona location.

Before we get to these battles, though, a little background is in order.

Talk of the Town Asian Diner – the official name, although everyone just uses the acronym Tott’s – was born in 2003, taking over Yoshi’s Asian Grill on the southeast corner of McClintock and Guadalupe in south Tempe.

The new owner brought in two consulting chefs from Hong Kong to create a menu, and enlisted the help of his brother-in-law, Yung Truong, who’s run Tott’s since day one.

Truong’s strategy? Offer tasty yet healthier versions of traditional Asian dishes, in large portions, and at affordable prices.

“If we cooked 100 percent authentic, I don’t think a lot of people would eat our food,” he says. “The way we cook is for a new generation. Less oil, no MSG added – that’s why people love our food. Because it’s fresh.”

No detail is too small for Truong (pictured above with assistant Paul Galbreath). Vegetables are sliced daily. The limited amount of oil used is soybean oil. The dining area is always spotless. Staff is required to wash their hands not once but twice before handling food.

The first several months were slow, Truong remembers, until Tott’s received a glowing review from Adrienne Frank, dining critic for the East Valley Tribune’s Get Out magazine.

A surge of soon-to-be-regular customers, and a host of other media acclaim, quickly followed.

There goes the neighborhood

Orange chicken, lightly breaded and covered in a sweet, gooey sauce, became the signature dish, although the pad thai was a close second. “And our sweet and sour chicken is popular with older customers,” Truong says. “We have some seniors who regularly drive all the way from east Mesa for it.”

Tott’s quickly became a neighborhood favorite, drawing a eclectic mix of families, co-workers, college students, and more than a few members of the media – all of whom were surprised when P.F. Chang’s decided to open a Pei Wei next door.

“We had a lot of local support, people who came in very angry,” Truong says. “‘Why does a franchise come in here?’ they asked.”

Fearing the worst, Truong’s brother-in-law considered converting Tott’s into a Hawaiian BBQ joint, a fast-growing concept in the Valley at the time.

“I said, ‘If you change it, I quit,” Truong says. “‘Give me six months,’ I said. ‘If we’re getting kicked bad by Pei Wei, we’ll change it.’ Guess what? We got more customers.”

Indeed, customers rallied around the small independent. Many Pei Wei diners discovered the food was better next door at Tott’s. Some of Pei Wei’s cooks left to work at Tott’s.

And so Tott’s might have spent years basking in a rare victory over a national chain. But it proved to be short-lived.

“One day I was at Starbuck’s (which shared the two-suite building with Tott’s),” Truong says. “‘Tott’s Asian Diner is done,’ the manager told me. I said, ‘What the heck are you talking about?'”

Tott’s lease was almost up, and Truong and his brother-in-law had agreed to a five-year extension. The landlord, however, had other plans.

Habit Burger, which was launching a major expansion into the Valley, was in. Tott’s was out. It was given 30 days to vacate.

Challenges are nothing new

Many people might have thrown in the towel at that point, but Truong is not like most people. Although his parents are Chinese, he was born in Vietnam, where his family owned a coffee and tea plantation, and grew up in Hong Kong.

In 1979, at age 19, Truong moved to California, Americanizing his first name from Duong to the easier-to-pronounce Yung. His name, however, was the least of his problems.

“After 1975, the tea and coffee plantation was gone,” he says. “The Communists took everything. It was very tough on my family. I had to send money home.

“I was working two jobs, and I had to learn the language. I was a janitor at night for years, and I went to school to learn English. It was a difficult situation.”

The burden eased over the years as family members joined him in this country. In the meantime, Truong started a family of his own. He moved to Gilbert because of the town’s highly regarded schools.

Today, he proudly talks about his son and daughter attending ASU, where he’s majoring in biochemistry and she’s studying to be a nutritionist.

Given his work ethic, Truong didn’t sit still. Acting on a tip from a former customer, he discovered an available space – a former fast-casual Pickup Stix – just three miles south of Tott’s former home.

His brother-in-law decided not to join in the new Tott’s venture, so Truong began the process of putting his home up as collateral. At the last minute, however, his brother-in-law decided to join him again.

“I said. ‘Fine. You want back in? You can be in charge of financials, but I’m in charge of the business,'” Truong says.

On Feb. 18, 2011 – just two months after closing at the previous location, Tott’s reopened on the northwest corner of McClintock and Ray in Chandler. That first day, the line stretched out the door (pictured above).

The battle goes on every day

As its 10-year anniversary approaches, Tott’s remains popular. Revenues are up, but so are expenses. Food costs have soared in recent years, but Truong has balked at passing them along to customers.

“Our goal is to stay fresh, good cooking, and competitive price,” he says. “Our shrimp dishes have 14 shrimp. Shrimp went up $3 per pound this year, but I’m not going to cut the number of shrimp. Chicken went up, too.”

The menu and recipes remain almost the same as the day the restaurant opened. Orange chicken still is the No. 1 seller, although Singapore rice noodles and Kung Pao also are favorites of its new neighborhood.

Truong considered getting a liquor license to serve beer, but learned it would require expensive renovations to the restrooms and a fence around the sidewalk patio.

He’d also like to provide delivery service but can’t figure out how to do it and keep the food as hot and fresh as that served at the restaurant. And he refuses to compromise on quality.

Truong also refuses to take days off. He says he hasn’t had a vacation in seven years, fearing “if one thing goes wrong and that customer spreads the word around, we’re done.”

It’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course, for a restaurant that averages four stars in nearly 200 Yelp reviews and has earned four-star reviews from the Arizona Republic and East Valley Tribune.

“We’re very fortunate to have good and loyal customers,” Truong says. ” That’s how we’ve stayed in business for 10 years.”

Tott’s Asian Diner, 4030 W. Ray Road, Chandler (map), is open 10:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 10:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday, and 11:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sunday. 480-897-7928. tottsasiandiner.com.

Other E.V. Originals:
Vic Buono has been dishing N.Y.-style pizzas for 25 years
Romeo Taus ‘engineers’ culinary success with Euro Café

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A native of upstate New York, Vic Buono didn’t even know there were other styles of pizza.

“I never knew there was ‘New York-style pizza’ until I got out to Arizona,” Buono says. “I thought pizza was pizza. I come out here and there’s California pizza, Chicago pizza…”

But it’s New York-style pizza that’s Buono’s bread and butter, so to speak. Saturday, he celebrates the 10th anniversary of his third East Valley pizzeria, Nicantoni’s in Gilbert.

It’s been a 25-year East Valley career that Buono never anticipated.

Raised in Saugeties, N.Y. – best known as the site of the second Woodstock festival in 1994 – Buono watched his parents operate a string of restaurants, bars, and delis. “And that was the last thing I was ever gonna do,” he says.

His parents moved Vic and his three sisters to Lake Havasu for Buono’s final year of high school. Havasu, he found, was a “one red light town,” adding “I missed those big spring parties by a few years.”

So, after graduating in 1981, he moved back to New York. He wanted to get into graphic art, “but I liked food and a place to live, and being a freelance artist didn’t pay the bills.”

Eventually Buono went to work in an uncle’s pizzerias. “I saw my cousin flipping pizzas and driving around in a new Trans-Am,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Working in a restaurant might not be so bad after all.'”

Back to Arizona

By 1988, Buono, just 25 years old, was ready to open his own place. His thoughts returned to the Valley. With scouting help from his parents, who had moved to Tucson, and a sister at ASU, he found a former Italian restaurant for sale at Dobson and Guadalupe in Mesa.

Buono’s Pizza was born. It was an overnight success. OK, not quite.

“It was horrible,” Buono recalls. “It was a different concept (than the previous tenant). They did sandwiches and entrees – no pizza.”

After struggling for two years, he was ready to call it quits. “I was gonna put the place up for sale and go back to New York,” he admits. Suddenly, though, business took off.

“I’ve always had good referrals – one person telling another,” Buono says. “Right around that two-year mark, though, it just kinda exploded. Ten people telling 10 others. We had a good run after that.”

The Mesa space soon expanded. A liquor license was obtained. A second pizzeria opened in Gilbert.

After nearly a decade of winning local awards for his pizzas, though, Buono began to feel burned out. He got divorced. He sold Buono’s to an employee who still operates it under the name today.

Buono spent a few restless years looking for what’s next. He bought a chiropractors office. Then a paint-your-own pottery place. He went bankrupt and lost both. He painted houses.

“At 40, I couldn’t find a decent-paying job with no college (degree) and two kids,” he says. “I thought, ‘I better get back into the restaurant business.'”

Second time around

In 2003, he bought Islands Pizza in a strip mall on the northeast corner of McQueen and Warner in Gilbert. Buono renamed it Nicantoni’s, a combination of his two kids’ names – Dominic and Toni.

The 1,100-square-foot space was too small – “We were having growing pains,” he remembers – but he couldn’t afford to expand. That problem was solved four years later when he was hired as a consultant for a new Chandler restaurant called Gennaro’s.

Buono put his consultant’s fee into another 800 square feet, allowing him to add more dining room space and a full bar to Nicantoni’s. He decorated the interior walls with New York-inspired graffiti, and added Big Apple memorabilia to the tables.

He credits his food’s popularity – both at Buono’s and Nicantoni’s – in part to Roma Food, a New Jersey-based supplier whose flavors are familiar to former East Coast residents. “We don’t have the majority of the (East Valley’s) people (as customers), but we have the majority of the East Coast people,” he says.

He also points to his pizza crust. “A lot of the first-timers that come in appreciate how it’s cooked,” he says. “So many people are used to their slices out here just flopping over, of just being kinda mush. They’re like, ‘How do you do it?'”

It’s a formula for success that’s worked for 25 years. “I’ve still got quite a few customers from Buono’s that come in,” he says. “It’s weird seeing the second and third generations. They used to come in when they were like that (holding a hand about three feet above the floor) and now they’ve got kids like that.”

Still the same

Some things haven’t changed. Buono refuses to do delivery, believing it’s more harmful than helpful to a pizzeria. He’s also not a proponent of coupons.

“I can’t give $1 off and get the same net as other pizza places that have coupons for $5 off,” he says. “They’re starting at $17 or $18 a pizza, and I’m at $12, $13.”

Working six long days a week doesn’t lend itself to much of a life outside the pizzeria, but Buono recently bought a ’72 Firebird he’s been spending “too many hours” working on. He also rides a black Harley-Davidson, and hosts a Bike Night every Thursday at Nicantoni’s.

As for the future, Buono says he’d love to open a new place someday, somewhere he could “go bigger and bring it a notch up.” More immediate, though, he’s getting married again at the end of the year.

There’s also his 50th birthday looming in March.

“It’s a little scary,” he admits. “I’m finding I’m not as close to retirement as I was hoping to be.”

He pauses, looks around his restaurant, and laughs.

“I’m hoping to have a heart attack here so I don’t outlive my savings.”

Nicantonii’s, 1430 W. Warner Road, Gilbert (map), is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.(-ish) Monday through Saturday. Info: 480-892-2234 or www.nicantonis.com.

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Romeo Taus is the first to admit he’s not a trained chef. But the many fans of his Romeo’s Euro Café over the past 20 years probably would be surprised to learn the round-about way he eventually found himself in the kitchen.

Born and raised in Romania, Taus immigrated to the U.S. with his parents and sister in 1973, settling in Detroit, where he earned an engineering degree from Wayne State University and was recruited into a Chrysler’s engineer apprenticeship.

There was just one problem: “Once I started working, I didn’t want to be an engineer,” Taus says.

Shifting gears, Taus decided to return to school to earn a business degree – paid for by Chrysler – until, that is, Lee Iococca took over the troubled company and laid off a lot of workers, including Taus.

He briefly went to work for deep-discount drugstore F&M Distributors, which would be a mostly insignificant line on his resume except it’s where he met a part-time stocker named Janice Butler.

When Butler decided to move to Arizona to live with her grandmother, Taus tagged along, landing a job with Drug Emporium, helping the fast-expanding chain open stores in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

“A guy I knew at Drug Emporium had an opportunity to take over a deli on the south shore of Long Island,” Taus recalls. ‘‘He went back there in the summer. I went out there for Labor Day and he talked me into staying.”

He and Janice – they had married in Hawaii in 1984 – spent a year and a half on the East Coast, but Taus found making sandwiches to be “mindless work.” And then there was what he politely calls the region’s “second economy.”

“Let me put it this way,” he says. “If I had stayed there, I would have been filthy rich, dead or in jail. Dead or in jail was not acceptable so I came back to Arizona.”

He found himself back in the Valley with no idea what he wanted to do. But he was about to meet a man who would change his life forever.

In 1989, Nick Ligidakis was on his way to becoming a Valley culinary legend whose numerous Mediterranean-influenced eateries were known for large menus, huge portions and, notably, the owner’s fiery disdain of any diner who tried to request an alteration or substitution.

‘‘I liked his food, I liked his energy, I liked his concept,’’ Taus says. ‘‘Remember, this was when Wolfgang Puck was starting to put goat cheese on pizza, and Nick had that flair.’’

Working out of his Golden Cuisine of Southern Europe at Tower Plaza in Phoenix, Ligidakis taught cooking classes every Sunday.

‘‘I watched magic being made,’’ Taus says. ‘‘I was his towel boy. I would listen to him talk about food and I would just salivate. It was the original farm-to-fork (concept).’’

Taus convinced Ligidakis to sell him a 25 percent stake in the restaurant, and he began to learn.

“This was the guy who did everything from scratch to order,’’ he recalls. ‘‘It wasn’t out of a bag. You could absolutely taste it. He’d take two, three or four things – Mediterranean-influenced – and put them together to create a dish. Was it authentic? No. But it was authentic Nick.

‘‘Well, monkey see, monkey do. So that’s what I started doing.’’

In the summer of 1990, Ligidakis went to Greece for six weeks, entrusting Taus to run the restaurant and uphold his high standards.

‘‘That’s when I knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,’’ Taus says.

Taus found a strip-mall space for the original Romeo’s Euro Café at Southern and Longmore in Mesa, walking distance from where he and Janice were living near busy Fiesta Mall.

‘‘It was a Mexican restaurant that never opened,’’ he says. ‘‘But they had put in a (stove exhaust) hood, sinks and bathrooms.’’

Additionally, Red Robin was taking over a nearby restaurant. Taus approached the outgoing owners and bought all their kitchen equipment, allowing him to open June 1, 1991, on a shoestring budget.

‘‘I had to ask my wife if she had $100 for me to put in the register,’’ recalls Taus.

The original menu was small – pizzas, calzones, just four appetizers and six pitas – and the mom-and-pop operation struggled to bring in $100 to $150 a day. ‘‘Tepid at best,’’ Taus admits.

That changed when critic Penelope Corcoran, who then was writing for Phoenix New Times, gave Romeo’s a glowing review under the punny-but-not-exactly-accurate headline ‘‘Grecian Formula.’’

Sales doubled overnight. Tables were full. Lines formed. Staff was hired.

The menu quickly grew to several pages, boasting dozens of popular new entrees like Pork Molise, Kasseri Chicken, and Shrimp Korfu. The space also expanded, incorporating the East Valley’s most mouthwatering dessert case and an art gallery and coffeehouse called Undici Undici.

‘‘We had a quite a bit of success,’’ Taus says. ‘‘We had 175 seats and an hour wait.’’

But circumstances beyond Taus’s control soon intervened. After Sept. 11, 2001, business dropped 20 percent. The nearby Motorola facility began reducing its workforce.

‘‘Then Chandler Fashion Center put the dagger into Fiesta Mall,’’ Taus says.

Taus met Joe Johnston – another engineer-turned-restaurateur – and Tad Peelen at their Coffee Plantation in downtown Tempe in the ’90s and admired how they converted an old brick building in downtown Gilbert into popular Joe’s Real BBQ.

A half-block from the barbecue was an 1,800-square-foot space in historic Heritage Court that previously housed the five-star Café au Pwah. In August 2004, it became the new home of Romeo’s Euro Café.

Its small size – compared to the original café’s 6,800 square feet – necessitated a smaller menu, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at the current multi-page menu.

‘‘There’s no back room, so I have to go shopping very day,’’ Taus says. ‘‘The funny thing is we have people who come in and still order dishes from the old menu. Fortunately, we have the recipes archived.’’

One of the perks of the new location, though, is a private dining room for weekly ‘‘Taste of Euro Café’’ dinners, which Taus started last year. The dinners, hosted by Romeo and Janice every Thursday, feature smaller portions of five menu items.

“It started out as a table of 10, but I can’t keep it at just 10,” says Taus, admitting that as many as 20 people reserve seats some weeks.

“I want to have a forum to let people know why we do things the way we do,’’ he says. ‘‘At the same time, this is a 20-year work in progress. I want to see if the selections on the menu are still relevant to today’s taste buds.’’

Which isn’t to say he’s willing to compromise his principles: huge portions of good-tasting food made from scratch.

‘‘The way I see it, there are very few people in the industry that truly have the passion,’’ Taus says. ‘‘It’s sad, because it’s a reflection of what the collective palate asks for.’’

Romeo’s Euro Café, 207 N. Gilbert Road, Gilbert (map), is open 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon-9 p.m. Sunday. ‘‘Taste of Euro Café’’ dinners are held at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays and are $27 per person plus tax and tip. 480-962-4224. www.eurocafe.com.

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