TUCSON, AZ — On the busiest day in the 35-year history of Tino’s Pizza, every table in the restaurant was empty. Still, as they had done for decades under the watch of owner Dino Chonis, the employees worked the ovens as the flurry of carryout orders nearly overwhelmed them. Some waited nearly an hour for their pies.
It was not a normal day at Tino’s.
The family-owned restaurant closed its dining room on March 17, limiting its operations to take-out and delivery orders to comply with the social distancing norms of the coronavirus crisis. It would turn out that shepherding his restaurant through a transition to quarantine conditions, without resorting to layoffs, would be among Chonis’ final accomplishments in his long career as Tucson’s “Pizza Man.”
Earlier this year, Chonis had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer. On April 13, he died at the age of 59.
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In tribute, customers called in their favorite orders at the Tucson pizza institution, buying “every dough ball in the shop,” says Morgan Chonis, the pizzeria owner’s daughter. But more than just ordering pizzas, what stunned Morgan and her family was what the customers left behind, written in marker and paint on one of the restaurant’s outer walls.
The messages told the story of the man behind the pizza.
Friends, relatives and customers covered the blank surface with notes of love for Dino Chonis. When they left the store with their pizza, they also marked the wall with decorations, photos and inside jokes. Someone illustrated a life-sized Spider Man, Chonis’ favorite superhero, hanging upside-down above the words “Half Man Half Amazing.”
“Thank you for everything D! You took a chance on me and made me a better person.”
“I won’t stop looking for you in the back when I come in for the best pizza.”
“Arm wrestling CHAMP!”
“You were an amazing friend.”
“I carry everything you taught me in my heart every day.”
To be clear, this wasn’t vandalism.
In an April 14 Facebook post, the shop had announced its temporary closing to mourn Chonis’ death. The post included a request: “In lieu of a service, at this time, friends and family and anyone who shared a memory with Dino are encouraged to come by the shop and write a note or story on the wall.”
The response still came as a heartwarming surprise to Morgan Chonis and her family.
“It’s been really amazing to see how many people’s lives he touched,” she says. “There are people who came to the restaurant when they were 9 years old, and now they bring their daughter. The restaurant’s been there for 35 years, so people have decades of decades of memories. There have been people who have been coming religiously every single week for more than one or two decades.”
It was more than just great pizza.
“My father had so many friends,” she adds. “He would stop by other restaurants on his way to Restaurant Depot, and pop in the back and do dishes during a busy lunch. He would just do stuff like that. He was one of those people.”
For the family, stories about their father already form a mythology, one that goes beyond charitable acts of dish-washing. For instance: Shortly before he opened Tino’s in mid-1984, the not-yet Pizza Man of Tucson asked his future wife out on a date by sending her a heart-shaped pizza.
For Morgan, who by middle school was pulling shifts behind the counter with father, Tino’s was more than just a place for pizza. She remembers her father questioning customers about their families and talking glowingly of his own.
That was the thing about the Pizza Man:
“It was never about pizza,” says Morgan. “If you walked in, you’d see him making pizzas, or making dough in the back. He’d stick his head out down the hallway and ask you, ‘How’s the family?’ He never ever talked about himself. He wanted to talk to you.”
Even with quarantine preventing the community from attending a public service, perhaps it’s fitting that the conditions conspired to transform the restaurant’s large blank wall into a mural to the Pizza Man. Morgan notes that her father — who has baked a special heart-shaped pizza for his wife every Valentine’s Day for the past three decades — had previously waved off suggestions for adding a mural to the store’s plain west-facing wall.
“My mom told me, ‘He left it just for us.'” Morgan says now. “‘He left a big spot for everybody.'”
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