Mario’s: The Oven Is Still Burning

There was a time when opening a restaurant required food, tables, chairs and somebody in the kitchen who knew what he was doing. Today it apparently requires a concept.

The concept must have a story. The story must have a brand. The brand must have a logo suitable for T-shirts, baseball caps and insulated drinking vessels. Somewhere along the way there should be a cocktail involving rosemary smoke.

Mario Fratangeli seems to have missed the seminar.

In 2003, he opened Mario’s Woodfired Pizzeria in a modest storefront at 594 Third Street in Beaver with the dangerously uncomplicated idea that he would make good pizza in a wood-fired oven and people might pay him to eat it.

Twenty-three years later, the oven is still burning.

This is no small accomplishment in the restaurant business, where longevity is generally measured in dog years and the place everybody was talking about last February may be a nail salon by October. Mario’s has become something increasingly valuable: a restaurant nobody has to explain.

You walk in. You sit down. Somebody feeds you.

The room is bright and open, with big windows looking onto Third Street, and when it fills up—as it frequently does—the noise level rises to the point where you can safely discuss family finances without worrying about the next table. Behind it all is the wood-fired oven, which gives the place its heartbeat.

And the pizza is the reason to begin there.

The Margherita is the best demonstration of what Mario’s does well because there is nowhere for anybody to hide. Crushed tomato, mozzarella, fresh basil, crust. That’s about it. No truffle drizzle. No hot honey. No artisanal sausage made from a pig that attended Montessori school.

The crust comes from a real wood oven with the little scorched blisters around the edges that tell you actual fire was involved. It is crisp where it ought to be crisp, soft and airy where it ought to be soft and airy, and tastes sufficiently good that you find yourself eating the edges instead of leaving them on the plate as evidence.

There are more elaborate pizzas—the Speciale, Margherita Con Salame, Arduini, Napoli, Rosemaria, roasted pepper and pepperoni—but Mario’s has never seemed terribly interested in discovering pizza’s next frontier.

This is reassuring. Pizza has already been discovered.

Mario makes the dough himself and has been doing it for roughly two decades. His philosophy seems to be that if something matters, you ought to keep doing it yourself.

This is not the modern theory of management, but it produces better pizza.

The other surprise is that pizza is only half the argument. The kitchen makes its own pasta, and the specials board is where things become dangerous to a person who arrived firmly intending to have “just a pizza.”

There may be homemade spaghetti under Chicken Francaise, gnocchi, tortellini, Tuscan chicken, pesto Alfredo or pork osso bucco over Parmesan risotto. There are also greens and beans, frequently improved by hot sausage, which is one of those dishes Italian-American civilization gave us to prove that vegetables need not be punitive.

And then there is Mario’s wedding soup, which deserves more attention than soup usually receives. It is rich, comforting and unmistakably homemade—the sort of wedding soup that makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered inventing soup in a can.

Then there is the wine.

Beaver remains a dry borough, one of those charming Pennsylvania arrangements that remind us Prohibition was repealed nationally but never entirely accepted as settled law around here. Mario’s solution is BYOB. Bring the bottle you actually want, pay a modest corkage charge and drink it with dinner.

I rather like this.

A restaurant wine list often requires you to choose between a bottle you have never heard of for $48 and a bottle you vaguely remember seeing at Giant Eagle for $14. At Mario’s, you can arrive with an old favorite under your arm and feel briefly like an Italian uncle on his way to Sunday dinner.

On a Saturday evening, bottles appear on the tables, the room gets louder, people talk across one another, and Mario himself may wander over to see how things are going. He is very much an owner who works the room, and, in the time-tested Italian tradition, he appears to regard flirting with the ladies as one of management’s legitimate responsibilities. Nobody seems terribly alarmed by this. The ladies generally give it right back to him.

Staff members tend to stick around long enough to recognize people. Customers do too.

That is how a restaurant becomes a neighborhood institution.

Fratangeli has expanded over the years, first with Mario’s Dockside Grille in Bridgewater and, since 2023, Mario’s 410 Grille on Wolf Lane, where his daughter Alyson has been involved.

But the little restaurant on Third Street has remained.

That matters.

Beaver County has spent much of the last half-century watching familiar things disappear. Mills disappeared. Department stores disappeared. Family businesses disappeared. Restaurants where everybody knew somebody disappeared. We have become accustomed to driving past a building and saying, “Remember when that was—?” which may be the unofficial Beaver County conversational opener.

Mario’s has stubbornly refused to cooperate.

It is still there.

Mario has never built much of a celebrity-chef mythology around himself. There appears to be no heavily promoted tale of apprenticeship in Tuscany, no sacred tomato sauce handed down by a great-grandmother in Naples, no formative summer spent foraging for porcini mushrooms with an elderly monk.

His biography, as far as the public record is concerned, is considerably less cinematic.

He opened a restaurant. He made the dough. People liked it. He kept making the dough.

There is something admirable about that.

We live in an age obsessed with novelty. Every business is urged to disrupt something, reinvent something or become the “next” something. Restaurants change menus, names and concepts while consultants explain the importance of creating an experience.

Mario’s offers the increasingly radical experience of getting dinner.

You can take your family. You can meet friends. You can bring a bottle of Chianti. You can order the Margherita you ordered the last time and discover that it tastes pretty much the way you remember. You can have a bowl of wedding soup. Mario may flirt with your wife.

Then you can look toward the back of the room.

The fire is still going.

After twenty-three years, that may be the best review of all.

If you go: Mario’s Woodfired Pizzeria, 594 Third Street, Beaver. Open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Saturday, noon–9 p.m.; closed Sunday. BYOB. (724) 774-9300.