Former Dino’s owner Alfredo Crolla reflected on his memories of the Glasgow restaurant and why people still miss it.
Growing up in Glasgow, Dino’s on Sauchiehall Street was one of my favourite places to go with family.
We had countless family dinners there over the years and I was very sad to see the place close their doors back in March 2014 after serving Glaswegians for almost fifty years.
Trips to Dino’s after seeing a film at Cineworld on Renfrew Street or shopping in town with my granny are etched in my childhood memories.
It was the place where I, like many other Glaswegians, fell in love with Italian food and coffee.
Dino’s was a place that showcased the very best of Glasgow hospitality and somewhere you could head to no matter what the occasion was.
Some folk used to enjoy watching the world go by on Sauchiehall Street as they sat outside with their cappuccino while others headed into the warm and inviting little restaurant for a pizza or bowl of pasta.
I sat down with Dino’s owner Alfredo Crolla to hear more about the story of the restaurant.
Its now been 12 years since Dino’s on Sauchiehall Street closed. Can we go back to the start and how you came about acquiring Dino’s?
We’ll go back to 1980 when I heard that Dino’s was for sale. At the time, the restaurant had a really good reputation however it was closed and bankrupt at the time.
I then put an offer in to buy it without seeing the place. The idea was that if anyone knew I was after it, then it would of had other people wanting to put in an offer.
The previous owners who were a group of three or four people tried to raise the money to once again buy the restaurant. They asked me to hold off with my offer, but I regrettably told them that business is business.
I suggested to them that they came and worked for me for a period of one year, and they did that.
Dino’s had a place next door called Ferrari. They also had a wonderful name in the city of Glasgow, so I acquired the two of them. Dino’s was in the middle, and Ferrari was on the right.
To the left there was an empty unit available which I also acquired so that I could extend Dino’s to a capacity of about 170 covers.
Dino’s was very successful because of where it was. We catered for everybody, we catered for a person who wished to have a cup of tea, or a snack, a lobster or a T-bone steak. T
hat made it very popular as we were there for 35 years.”
Why after 12 years do people still miss Dino’s?
It was run by me. I wanted to run a restaurant my way. I wanted to have people eat a plate of pasta the way my mother used to make it and then the way my wife made it.
Every day at Dino’s my wife would make my lunch and the chefs all wanted to taste the lunch that my wife made me.
Slowly, but surely they started to copy the standard of the food that I liked.
Do people still stop you and tell you stories about Dino’s and how much they miss it?
People used to say to me then, and still say to me now, that they miss Dino’s.
When I go into Sauchiehall Street I meet my customers, and they say to me that they are missing Dino’s. ‘My mother used to take me there as a child’, ‘that’s where I got engaged’ or ‘I used to take my children there’ are things that people tell me.
First it was the location, then it was that it was easy to enter into a restaurant without putting a hole in your pocket.
The food was good and the coffee was good.
Even though you are now retired Alfredo, how much joy and satisfaction do you take from seeing your son Remo run Little Italy on Byres Road and your other son Domenico and grandson Alfredo run Oro in Shawlands?
I’m very happy and I made sure that I taught them in the right way.
I taught them how to run an honest business and taught them to have a restaurant which you can walk into with your head held high, you need to offer the best that exists.