The story below is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Owner Marty Montano reflects on 55 years of his family’s Roanoke restaurant, from gourmet grocery beginnings to a treasured community fixture.
John Park
Marty Montano looks back on the family legacy and passion for food.
It’s 2:00 p.m. on a Friday when I step into Montano’s Restaurant and the lunch rush is still in full swing. Friend groups crowd around tables in the main dining room, a few folks linger at a long table bobbing with birthday balloons and a couple guys at the bar squeeze lemon wedges over fresh oysters. Bustling around the floor is Marty Montano, who helped build his family’s business from a gourmet grocery store into a thriving Roanoke restaurant fixture. As the business celebrates 55 years, Montano reflects on his family’s legacy, his passion for food and the people who make it all worth it.
Before Montano’s became a restaurant, the business started as a specialty grocery store founded by Montano’s father, Phil. Phil was an insurance salesman with a passion for food, and as a lobbyist for Allstate Insurance, he frequently obliged friends’ requests to bring back foods from Washington, D.C. that they couldn’t find in Roanoke, such as Italian bread, Italian cold cuts and certain Kosher items. Phil had dreamed of starting a gourmet grocery store; although he was months away from being fully vested at Allstate, Montano says that his father quit because his integrity was compromised, so the opportunity came sooner than he thought.
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“I can remember when he came home, he drove up in the driveway and he told my mother and she freaked out,” Montano says. “She immediately went back to teaching school because we were all young kids and she wanted to make sure that she could put food on the table.” Montano describes his mom’s typical day: making breakfast and doing meal prep before leaving for a day’s teaching, then coming home to prepare dinner followed by lesson plans.
Phil opened Chef ’s International Gourmet in 1969 in Cave Spring Corners, starting with a deli, scratch-made salads and gourmet domestic goods, eventually expanding into beer and wine. Montano recalls taking the school bus to Cave Spring Corners and doing his schoolwork in the store’s back room so that Phil could have dinner at home with Montano’s mother, Marie, and his three sisters. Once it was closing time, his dad would pick him up and he’d have his supper.
Doug Miller
The original caption that ran with this photo in December ‘94: “The eclectic space will remain ambitious. The new space (see rendering in background) will make room for 26 diners.”
After local supermarkets started stocking similar items, Phil imported goods that catered to recent immigrants from places such as Vietnam and the Philippines. “My father was like their little goodwill ambassador here in Roanoke,” Montano says. “Anytime they had a question, he would solicit someone to give them an answer.”
Over time, the gourmet grocery was so successful, Phil opened a second location at Towers Shopping Center where Montano started working as a grocery clerk when he was around 22 or 23 years old. Business was good; but then Phil and Montano noticed that local grocery stores started picking up the noodles, canned goods and other products of Asian origin, too. “Finally, I said to myself, ‘If that’s going to be the trend, then we need to switch this to the restaurant,’” Montano says, noting that the space had four tables.
He seized an opportunity to upgrade the Towers location while his parents were on vacation. He knocked down walls and installed new ones, painted, added tables and chairs and hired a couple cooks. One of Montano‘s biggest coups was purchasing and installing a 40-foot bar—purchased from local French restaurant Le Gourmet—to sell liquor and beer by the glass. Phil balked at first; with their Catholic background, Montano says his father “thought that was the worst thing ever because here we were supposedly letting the devil in.” But when they started making such good profit they started paying vendors COD (cash on delivery), Montano says he earned his father’s respect.
Over the course of 10 years, the restaurant blossomed from 12 seats to 86 seats. When the Montano’s lease at Towers was up, they found a new space in the old Mick-or-Mack at Townside Festival Shopping Center. Here, Montano added to the 150-seat dining room by installing a bar area and private dining rooms. “You have to be careful what you wish for, because I started with 12 seats and now I have 272,” Montano says.
Montano’s opens at 8:30 a.m. for breakfast (a service that started in late February/early March), runs non-stop food service until it closes around 11:00 p.m., serving an estimated 200 to 500 people daily. Montano is there every day from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and returns for Friday and Saturday dinner service.
Courtesy of Montano’s
Montano’s location from previous spaces allows for more diners, private events, live music and, of course, the gourmet items like decadent desserts.
Montano credits his parents with instilling in him a rigorous work ethic. “When you have a good work ethic you have what’s called a servant’s heart,” Montano says. “Because you would rather someone feel good about something that you had bestowed upon them.”
John Park
To support the restaurant’s growth and Montano’s ambition, Montano’s now employs 53 people, many of whom match Montano’s work ethic and hospitality philosophy. “We have people that have worked here for 15, 18, 20, 30 years,” Montano says. “One of the managers here started out there as a server when we only had about 18 chairs.”
In addition to their dedication, staff have made their mark on the restaurant’s legendarily expansive menu too. Montano explains that as he hired people to work in the kitchen, which included chefs from places like Louisiana, France and New York, he learned from their talents and encouraged them to contribute dishes. Montano’s own voracious culinary curiosity has had an impact too. Montano, a self-taught cook, says his passion and culinary know-how came from his mother. “It was my mother that I was calling. When I first started, I would try to duplicate [her] recipes because they were so good at home,” Montano says, fondly recalling her red sauce, eggplant parmesan, pickled eggplant salad and stuffed artichoke hearts. As Montano developed his palate, his mother was able to troubleshoot flavors for dishes outside her repertoire too. “I have magazine recipes in my office that are probably 30 years old because I always collected, looked, read,” he says. “When I was excited about a recipe, I’d go try it. And we still do that.”
Each Monday, Montano picks a set of recipes for the “weekend features” that he thinks guests will find appealing. He then meets with his staff to review, make and try the recipes, working out any kinks by Wednesday. Come Friday and Saturday, guests can choose from up to 10 specials, like a recent appetizer of fried green tomatoes topped with fresh crabmeat and Montano’s Southern-style chow-chow and an entrée of Spice Seared Miso Butter Glazed Salmon.
“I’ve always taken a basic item and nuanced it to make it different, but I haven’t taken people out of their comfort zone,” Montano says. With that ethos in mind, Montano continues evolving the menu to reflect culinary trends, providing ample opportunity for honing his culinary creativity and flexing his business savvy. “When you start to pigeon yourself in one genre, then you lose the ability for people to explore other genres within your business. Once you do that somebody has to be in the mood for a specific item. Here they don’t have to be,” he explains. “This is the easiest place to come to, and to agree on, but it’s also the most difficult place to make up your mind.”
John Park
One recent menu addition, the fan-favorite poke bowl, took Montano three months to develop. This included researching online recipes from Japan, Hawaii and California and cross-referencing review sites and user comments to find out what “nuances” made each bowl “the best,” plus multiple rounds of testing. The final version features tuna marinated in a homemade ponzu sauce, herb-infused rice, an anchovy, bacon and honey dressing, and a Mediterranean salad blend tossed with another custom dressing.
It’s clear that Montano relishes the menu R&D process and that his passion for food, business and hospitality are key drivers of his restaurant’s success. But perhaps most central to the Montano legacy are those Montano serves.
“They say ‘When you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life.’ And that’s sort of true because I’ve touched so many lives,” Montano says, noting that the restaurant’s busiest days cover about 600 people. “And that’s rewarding. Because a lot of people don’t get to have that kind of impact.”
The story above is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!