Down cellar steps worn smooth from nearly nine decades of use, Dan McCrery leads the way through a sprawling warren of rooms that are the essence of Tosi’s carefully curated drink menu. We start at a slide that carries cases of booze from the delivery area upstairs and segue into a large room lined with shelves filled with craft beers and spirits.
But McCrery saves the pièce de résistance for last, opening the door to one of only a few climate-controlled wine cellars in Southwest Michigan. Here is an oenophile’s delight—bin after bin of wines ranging from the affordable, Tabor Hill Demi-Sec for $21 per bottle, to the budget-busting (depending upon your budget) Opus One, priced at $500.
“That reminds me, I need to put in another order for Opus. We sold our last bottle the other night,” says McCrery, who co-owns Tosi’s Restaurant with his wife, Lori.
McCrery didn’t know much about wine when he started washing dishes in Tosi’s kitchen at age 16 but he’s learned a lot over the last 36 years he’s worked here, taking courses and attending tastings at high-end Chicago restaurants under the tutelage of sommeliers. He says he doesn’t have the palate of a sommelier but is good at listening to what his customers have to say.
“I make recommendations on what they tell me and what they’re eating, but if they don’t like my recommendation, we cork it up and get another bottle for them,” he says. “And at the end of the evening we enjoy the wine that got rejected.”
Reds predominate, McCrery continues, noting they sell almost twice as many as whites, though they have an extensive list of those along with rosés and bubbles. This being an Italian restaurant, there are a lot of what he calls the Bs: barberas, brunellos, barolos, and barbarescos, as well as Tuscans. Other musts include the fiaschi or straw-wrapped bottles, such as a 1923 Villa San Giovanni wicker Chianti. “You really can’t have an Italian restaurant without a couple of those,” he says.
Tosi’s roots stretch back to 1939, when the Tosi family opened Resort Del Lago on 10 acres of land that ran along the crest of a hill parallel to Lake Michigan. It was typical of the many resorts along Ridge Road back then, a draw for Italian families wanting to escape the heat of Chicago. Even Al Capone and his men, who are fondly remembered for tipping well, liked to spend time in Southwest Michigan, where they combined business with pleasure, hiring Italian farmers to grow wheat, corn and rye for distilled spirits. Al was doing grain to bottle before it became cool.
Mama Tosi, as Henrietta Tosi was known, cooked chicken cacciatore, malfatti (spinach and ricotta rolls in house-made Bolognese and béchamel sauces), and manicaretti (pasta layered with ham, Swiss cheese, and tortellini in a béchamel sauce) for groups as large as 125 in the resort’s spacious dining room, and guests could stay in small cabins on the property.
Their son Emil Tosi transitioned the family business to an upscale restaurant filled with art collected on his trips to Italy and even a century-old pasta maker from Milan that’s still being used to make pasta fresh daily. Ever the entrepreneur, when Emil heard the Whitcomb Hotel in downtown St. Joseph was closing, he hired their Austrian/Swiss baker—who had worked at Hotel Sacher in Vienna—and built the Bit of Swiss Bakery for him on the Tosi property.
The McCrerys continue another long-held tradition by hosting powerhouse winemakers such as Angelo Gaja and Bruno Giacosa and pairing their wines with specialty dishes prepared in Tosi’s kitchen.
“Our guests love meeting the winemakers,” says McCrery, adding that wine preferences are as individual as the taste itself. “There are no right or wrong choices—the best wine is the one you enjoy the most.”
Tosi’s Restaurant
4337 Ridge Rd.
Stevensville, MI
269.429.3689
tosis.com
Travel/food writer Jane Simon Ammeson lives on the lakeshore in Stevensville, Michigan, and is a James Beard Foundation judge and a Taste Awards judge. She is the author of 17 books, including Classic Restaurants of Michiana and America’s Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness. Her book Lincoln Road Trip: The Back-Roads Guide to America’s Favorite President won the Bronze Award in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for Best Travel Book. Follow Jane at janeammeson.com and instagram.com/janeammeson.
