When it comes to moms and Mother’s Day, dads can’t compete.
Moms rule; they’re smart ones. Dads are the joke, the Homer Simpsons of the world. For Mother’s Day, families go out to restaurants. For Father’s Day, Dads go outside to barbeque.
But dads have one thing over moms – age is on our side.
Consider that a week ago today, Father’s Day, Antonio Cagnolo became a new dad.
Cagnolo will be 61 on the Fourth of July.
Too old? Nah. The famed restaurateur – South Coast Plaza’s Antonellos is just one of his eateries – has his father’s genes on his side, not to mention his mother’s.
Grandpa lived to be 98. Grandma lived to be 106.
Yes, Cagnolo’s wife, Fiorella, deserves most of the credit for baby Talisa.
But the Roman god, Cupid, certainly played a role.
• • •
Cagnolo is from a small town in Northern Italy. And that’s important if you want to understand his passion – being a restaurateur – and his love – family.
He came of age in a town of 500 when the remnants of World War II still hung in the air. But the bitter taste of battle was soon overtaken in the fertile valley of farms and vineyards where good food and family had been hallmarks for centuries.
The son of a coal deliverer, Cagnolo grew to six-foot-four and appeared destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. But the young teenager wanted to go in another direction – he just wasn’t sure exactly what it was.
Sometimes, it was goofing around with his buddies in the river that his mother said was off limits, and for good reason. Cagnolo couldn’t swim.
But learning to cook under the direction of his mother, Mama Pina, Cagnolo soon discovered he loved everything to do with food, including serving it and seeing customers’ satisfaction.
He washed dishes and worked as a waiter at a restaurant so large it could handle seven weddings at once. The guests’ joy filled his spirit.
“I enjoyed living the life,” Cagnolo says during a wide-ranging talk at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, his new-born daughter sleeping a few feet away. “I loved being with people.”
At the end of middle school, Cagnolo set out on a path that would lead him to become one of the most celebrated restaurateurs in Orange County.
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Cagnolo moved to Germany when he was 16 and enrolled in hotel management school. For two years, eight hours a day, six days a week, he studied. He learned French, Spanish and English. He dreamed of becoming a hotel manager.
After graduating, he moved to England to work and then caught a break to work in Monte Carlo. But as wild as Monte Carlo’s summers were, the winters were equally boring. When he was offered a job on a cruise ship, he jumped.
That ship eventually introduced him to America and Southern California. In 1975, he started working in Orange County. Four years later, the boy who grew up in a small town opened his own restaurant in one of the most successful malls in the world.
Today, Cagnolo also operates three sister restaurants, Quattro Caffe, Nello Cucina and Antonello Espresso Bar.
He acknowledges the recessionary last four years have been tough on the restaurant industry. But Cagnolo says that along with some belt-tightening, sticking to his simple model of good service and good food proved successful.
If Cagnolo’s life sounds picture perfect, the truth is that life is always more complicated.
• • •
Eighteen years ago, Cagnolo became a dad for the first time. But, as I said, life is complicated and family relations are no different. Still, his daughter spent summers in Italy learning Italian from Mama Pina.
Recently, however, the complications began to untangle and father and daughter are connecting. With baby Talisa, the healing couldn’t come at a better time.
But for years, it appeared that as important as family is to Cagnolo, his baby-making days were over.
Then, Cagnolo happened to visit Rome and walk into a certain restaurant.
At the same time, a woman who danced for such stars as Madonna happened to be in the same restaurant.
That was Fiorella, the new mom who sits next to me while her five-pound, six ounce daughter swathed in a pink blanket sleeping the sleep of innocents.
Fiorella and Cagnolo, both with mutual friends, talked for two hours. They shared the same family values, the same devotion to Italian culture. But their link ended there.
Until four years later.
Again, both wound up in the same restaurant at the same time. But this time there were no mutual friends. They had lunch. They had dinner. Soon, Fiorella – properly escorted by a girlfriend – flew to Orange County to visit.
In 2010, they married on Table Rock in Laguna Beach. Fiorella was 35. It was time to start their family.
• • •
Fiorella lost her first two babies before her third trimester. Then she became pregnant with twins. But one couldn’t survive and the other’s chances were iffy.
For months, the couple was in and out of Hoag. They spent Christmas Eve in the emergency room. Fiorella couldn’t stop throwing up.
Learning her father had just died seemed like a horrible omen. For five days, Cagnolo cared for his wife, feeding her, giving her IVs and stomach injections.
Things finally settled. As a surprise three weeks before a scheduled C-section, Cagnolo flew in Fiorella’s mother last Sunday, June 10. But as the couple drove to LAX, Fiorella started having contractions. Her water broke at the airport.
As Fiorella tells her part of the story, Talisa wakes and starts to cry. Fiorella’s mother, Bruna Barbato, who only speaks Italian, soothes the baby. I mangle a few words in Italian, “bella.” Grandma smiles.
Dad beams at the scene, three generations in one room. He offers, “All the problems go away when you see this baby come into the world.”
What about mom’s dancing career?
Now it’s Fiorella who smiles. “Now I dance with my baby.”
I ask about Father’s Day plans. The family has none.
Dad’s too busy being a dad.
David Whiting’s column appears four days a week; dwhiting@ocregister.com.
