The Family Restaurant Where Everyone Has More Than One Job

By Human Business Works

In 2018, a San Francisco girl brought a television crew to the pizza place her mother remembered from high school.

The restaurant was Giorgio’s Pizzeria, on Clement Street in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond. KQED described it as a place where generations of families had been coming for pizza since 1972. The daughter was introducing a restaurant she liked. Her mother already knew it. That small overlap of two generations at the same table said something about the place before anyone needed to explain its history.

Giorgio’s is still there. Its website says the restaurant has now been serving thin-crust pizzas, calzones, pastas and salads for more than 50 years. The dining room has changed recently and become smaller, but the restaurant still operates from the same Clement Street address.

What has kept the place moving for all that time is harder to see from a table.

Behind the familiar idea of a family restaurant is a less tidy reality. In a family business, a person can have a title, but the work rarely stops at the edge of it. Someone who handles customers may also be dealing with a broken fixture. Someone who learned to make pizzas may later become a manager. A cashier may eventually become a partner.

At Giorgio’s, that pattern has repeated for decades.

The restaurant began in 1972 under George Anastasia. By 1978, it had become too busy for a one-person operation, according to its application to San Francisco’s Legacy Business Registry. Anastasia sold the restaurant to Tony Contini, who soon brought in his brother, Victor Contini Sr. The brothers kept the original recipes and pizza-making methods, but the operation around them became a family effort.

Tony handled lunches. Victor handled dinners. Their mother, Anna, kept the books.

Already, the restaurant was stretching beyond the simple picture of two brothers making pizza. Somebody had to be there when the lunch crowd arrived. Somebody had to carry the restaurant through dinner. Somebody had to know what the numbers looked like after the last table was cleared.

Then more of the family came in.

By the mid-1980s, Victor’s wife, Marian, was working at the front of the restaurant. The city record describes her responsibilities as greeter, cashier and host. Three descriptions for work that, from a customer’s side of the counter, might look like one job.

Their children started working there while they were still young. Victor Jr., Robert and Pamela moved through jobs that included pizza cook, food server and manager during their school and college years. Tony’s children, Susan and Michael, also worked in front-of-house positions.

Then there was Tony Markwick, a childhood friend of the family. He started at Giorgio’s in 1986 as a part-time cashier. Years later, he became a managing partner.

That is what a family restaurant can do to the meaning of a job title. The title describes what someone is doing now. It does not necessarily describe what they did last year, what they will be doing five years from now, or what they will need to do when something goes wrong.

And things do go wrong.

On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California. Giorgio’s Legacy Business application says the power went out across the Richmond District and the restaurant’s large front windows were broken. Its gas ovens, however, were still usable.

The restaurant stayed open and served people in the neighborhood.

There is something revealing in that detail. A restaurant may spend years building routines, schedules and divisions of labor. Then the windows break, the electricity disappears, and the only useful question becomes: What can still be done?

Family businesses often seem built around that question even on ordinary days.

By the time Giorgio’s submitted its Legacy Business application in 2020, another generation had taken responsibility for the restaurant. Victor Jr. was heading the kitchen and maintaining the original recipes and techniques. Robert, Pamela and Markwick were handling areas that included front-of-house operations, technology, maintenance and human resources. The application also noted that the current partners’ children had begun spending time working around the restaurant.

The work had changed. The pattern had not.

There was still food to make, but also payroll and staffing to think about. There were still customers walking in the door, but also equipment, systems and repairs somewhere behind the experience those customers saw.

That hidden layer is easy to miss in a restaurant.

A customer sees a pizza arrive.

The family running the place sees the order that had to be received, the ingredients that had to be stocked, the dough that had to be prepared, the person who called in sick, the register that has to balance, the table that needs clearing, the delivery that has to leave on time and the piece of equipment that started making the wrong noise an hour ago.

Giorgio’s has long employed people outside the family too. Its Legacy Business records describe a large staff over the years that has included kitchen workers, managers, servers, delivery drivers and cashiers, while its current website continues to advertise dine-in, pickup and delivery.

So the story is not that one family does everything by itself.

It is that family ownership tends to erase the comfort of saying, “That isn’t my department.”

When the restaurant has your name, your parents’ history or your childhood inside it, the boundaries between jobs become unusually thin. A teenager can start at the register and learn the dining room. Someone who served tables can eventually be responsible for managing people. The person protecting an old recipe may also have to think about the newest piece of technology in the building.

Meanwhile, customers keep coming in.

Some of them have been doing that for generations themselves. KQED’s story about a daughter returning to her mother’s old high school pizza spot was not unusual enough to surprise the restaurant. It was part of the pattern. SFGATE wrote years earlier about another customer who remembered Giorgio’s from childhood and later brought her own daughter there for cheese pizza.

That may be the quiet exchange at the center of a long-running family restaurant.

On one side of the counter, families return and notice how much feels familiar.

On the other, another family keeps changing jobs to make familiar possible.