Bringing Family Into the Kitchen

Keeping Up Family Traditions

And while many people wake up to the smell of bacon and pancakes, Campanaro, who is married, gets nostalgic waking up to the smell of browning meat.

Joey Campanaro got his start in the business by washing dishes to pay for a boat.

(Courtesy The Little Owl)

"One of the first memories that I have in my home is when on Sunday morning when the windows in our house would fill with steam from the pots of boiling water cooking pasta and you know the smell of Sunday gravy, which starts early in the morning and browning meatballs and browning sausage," he said.

It's not something he recreates in his New York City apartment, but rather at the restaurant.

"It's cute," he said. "Sometimes these windows fill up with steam and it reminds me of my childhood."

Another childhood tradition he keeps up is eating fish on Christmas eve, a practice that stemmed from his Roman Catholic, Italian-American upbringing.

"They call it the feast of seven fishes," he said. "We don't really practice it that strictly but what we do do is we make this dish called spaghetti and clams with shrimp."

Now he shares holiday cooking duties with his brother Louie Campanaro, who is also a chef.

"I do a dish, he'll do a dish, my mom will do a dish," Campanaro said. "My grandmother isn't with us anymore, but the only thing she did was make the cookies."

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This Christmas they were trying to get the whole family together again. While big family dinners used to be a mainstay, getting together now takes a bit of effort.

"Unfortunately we're sort of all over the place," he said. "The way that we grew up is very different from now because we were always all together, so getting together these days is more of a challenge than crossing the street. There's a lot of traveling involved and we're not getting any younger."

But it's worth it, he said, to try and keep some semblance of tradition for the family's youngest generation.

"It won't exactly be the same, but I'll definitely put on [an] album … 'Mob Hits' or something like that," he said. " I'll put the old Italian songs on, we'll play some Louie Prima, some Frank Sinatra, and my mother will probably smack my brother Michael in his face again."

The latter in itself has become somewhat of a holiday tradition in the Campanaro family.

"My brother Michael likes to get the attention so he tries in many ways to be charismatic and get the attention and sometimes my mother doesn't always approve," he said. "And he always used to sit to the right of her at the dinner table and that was, she had her rings on that finger, so a lot of times it's a funny story, before we sat down and Mikey was feeling a little attention needy he would say, 'Ma, take your rings off' before we sat down.''