By Tonia Moxley
The Roanoke Times
July 26, 2005
Summary: Brick oven pizza draws students, while homemade pasta draws a local chef.
BLACKSBURG — All those guys you see tossing pizza dough in New York restaurants, ah, they’re just showing off, according to Viktor Plumbi, head pizza maker at Ceritano’s Ristorante, Blacksburg’s newest Italian restaurant.
Throwing the dough makes it too thin in the middle and too thick on the edges, Plumbi said. Instead, he prefers to use a rolling pin on the crust and finish shaping it by hand on the bread board.
Then he dresses it with a variety of traditional Italian toppings, including homemade sausage, imported cheeses and meats, vegetables and fresh herbs.
In about four minutes, the finished pie comes steaming out of the 700-degree wood-fired brick oven that dominates Ceritano’s kitchen.
Plumbi, a 24-year-old Virginia Tech student from Albania learned to speak Italian and make traditional pizza pies while studying to be a painter in Florence, Italy.
But head chef Tina Librone does the heavy lifting in the kitchen, making all the pasta, sausages and sauces from scratch.
Librone grew up on a farm in Abruzzi, Italy, a small city on the Adriatic Sea.
The oldest of four daughters, she learned to make gnocchi — dumplings made with flour, potatoes and eggs — when she was just 9 years old.
“I never weigh. I use my hands and eyes” to measure, Librone said while rolling out and cutting the doughy pearls for the lunch and dinner special.
Michael Porterfield, executive chef at Mountain Lake Hotel in Giles County, is a regular Thursday customer at Ceritano’s.
He comes for the homemade gnocchi, which he said is “an experience you can’t get short of New York City or Chicago.”
Librone tosses the cooked dumplings with a variety of her made-to-order sauces, from spicy marinara to a pink cream sauce with ham and mushrooms called boscaiolo.
Blacksburg has other Italian restaurants such as Vincent’s and Zeppoli’s, but they mostly focus on fine dining.
Rustic Italian cuisine like Ceritano’s is a taste Blacksburg didn’t offer before, Porterfield said.
The cucina povera, or “poor cooking,” tradition of Italy is the art of making do with very little. Librone is its heir.
She has been amazed to find fine restaurants in America selling — for $15 a plate — pasta and beans, an Italian dish of necessity devised during and after World War II when Nazi invaders killed the village livestock for fun.
“Now it’s a delicacy,” she said.
But to Librone, it’s still a working woman’s dish not worth more than about $6.
Doris Fleming, owner of Zeppoli’s, which has been serving customers on University City Boulevard for nine years, said she’s not worried about another Italian restaurant coming to town.
Fleming said she thinks her parking lot and her wine tasting room set her apart.
“Everyone has their niche. We all just seem to find an equilibrium,” Fleming said.
Librone came to the United States in 1999 with her husband, Nino Ceritano, who owned a Philly cheese steak restaurant in Blacksburg in the 1980s.
Librone and Ceritano opened Bella Vista Ristorante in Pearisburg in 1999, but it burned down.
Then Librone opened a catering business in Bonomo’s Plaza in Blacksburg and served to-go dishes out of the shop.
Eight months ago, the couple, along with Ceritano’s son Marco, opened the new restaurant at 428 N. Main St., the old location of the Virginia Tech Museum of Natural History.
Tech psychology student Amy Glover tried the pizza and Librone’s homemade meat lasagna and was pleased.
“You can tell its authentic. It’s different,” Glover said. “I’ll definitely come back.”
Graphic: Ceritano’s Ristorante
Address: 428 N. Main St., Blacksburg
Hours: Open for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday; closed Sunday.
Phone: 443-9135
Published correction ran on July 28, 2005
Abruzzi is a region in Italy. This information was incorrect in a story about Ceritano’s Ristorante in Tuesday’s Current.
Copyright The Roanoke Times 2005
Tags: Blacksburg, Italian, restaurant, Virginia Tech