Vito’s Lives

The sky is pitch-black as I park my car along a seemingly dead stretch of Main Street on Saturday night in Waitsburg, Washington. I had driven 300 miles from Seattle to get to this tiny town that measures roughly 10 blocks across in each direction. Twenty minutes northeast of the Eastern Washington metropolis of Walla Walla (pop. 34,060), Waitsburg feels like it’s nestled in the middle of nowhere, a speck of civilization among rolling hills of wheat, at the cusp of the Palouse. I can’t see any of the rugged landscape or cow town charm at this hour, though. Downtown’s inky darkness is only interrupted by a few cones of cold light cast from intermittent street lamps. 

Yes, that Vito’s. It’s all here: the high-back banquettes upholstered in burgundy leatherette, the low lights, the clink of glasses amid a soft babel of voices no doubt talking about local gossip, creative pursuits, or other revelry. But this reincarnation of the beloved Seattle establishment, far from the gaping pit of rubble and remnants of foundation currently covered in graffiti at 9th and Madison, isn’t a carbon copy. There are discrepancies. The concrete floor is now covered in faded Persian rugs. Instead of smoked mirrors, the walls are rugged rock. There’s no disco ball or mural, but there is art: some antique earthenware figures in the corners, framed etchings and paintings on the walls. It’s also much smaller—a fraction of the original footprint. And no, the cougar is not there.

As people trickle through the door, it fills up quickly. A saxophonist takes a perch on a stool by the bar and starts up a meandering, breathy improvisation. Another musician with an electric guitar soon joins him. 

Where are these people coming from? I wonder. Seated to my right is a lawyer from Seattle, with his wife and a small cohort of friends who have made a weekend sojourn. There are locals like the sixth-generation farmer (in cowboy boots and hat), as well as a former Seattle DJ who now resides in Walla Walla. A 20-something couple canoodles in the back corner, their bodies cradled by Naugahyde. Local chef and four-time James Beard Award nominee Mike Easton slips in after service at his nearby restaurant, Bar Bacetto, has wrapped for the night. A few city and county officials drop in. Even the mayor is here. 

Some of the people in the room—like the young couple who drove from Spokane—don’t know about the Vito’s that existed at the intersection of 9th Avenue and Madison Street for nearly 70 years. They’ve never heard whispers of the debaucherous Mafia dealings, been captivated over a cocktail by Ruby Bishop on the ivories, or been heartbroken by the theft of Barbara. They came tonight for the art and the atmosphere; they came for this Vito’s.

***

If you were in Seattle in the 2010s, you probably, at one time or another, found yourself wedged into one of those high-back red benches—the ones Roberts wrote about, with cherries and panties jammed into the cracks. Just a few blocks from Town Hall and conveniently close to—but off the beaten path from—everything downtown or Capitol Hill, Vito’s was the perpetual de facto site of after-parties for art walks, museum fetes, Town Hall talks, and just about any other kind of event that required a continuation at a second location. 

Somewhere in a box I’ve got a treasured hoard of Instax photos from one of the epic annual Vito’s Halloween costume contests; that year, the winner was a woman dressed as Rosemary Woodhouse, complete with a pixie cut and a demonic fetus inside the glowing globe of a prosthetic belly. Another photo from another year shows me bent over getting spanked on my 36th birthday (by the friend who would go on to officiate my wedding). My last memory of the Cougar Room was a VIP soirée to celebrate a world-famous Mexican artist passing through town, the long table laden with a cornucopia of surreal decor and hair-raising cocktails—a party fit for Dalí. The boozy house-made cocktail cherries steeped in cinnamon still haunt me.

At least, that’s how I knew Vito’s. Vito’s has existed in numerous incarnations; if Vito’s has as many lives as a cat, it’s burned through more than half of them. What is it about a place like this that it refuses to die?

Vito’s Restaurant & Lounge opened its doors in the spring of 1953, founded by brothers Vito and Jimmy Santoro. They were working-class kids born and raised in the industrial factory town of Torrington, Connecticut. Both served in the military, stationed in the Pacific during World War II, and they fell in love with Seattle when they passed through. After the war, both brothers made their way back to Seattle, penniless, as the story goes, and found employment tending bars and working at local restaurants.

They arrived at an auspicious time for entrepreneurs in the restaurant industry. Washington State legalized liquor by the drink in 1949, and Seattle saw a wave of fine-dining and cocktail bars opening as a result, including Victor Rosellini’s Victor’s 610 and Peter Canlis’s eponymous establishment. Working at Victor’s, Vito was making enough to buy himself a brand new Cadillac. When he decided to open his own restaurant, he hocked the car for $2,500 to take out a lease on the ground floor of the Assembly Apartments, a four-story building built in 1902 that stood half-sunk into the slope of First Hill at the corner of 9th Avenue and Madison Street. Jimmy joined Vito in building out the place on their days off from their other restaurant gigs. 

Within six months, Vito’s cemented itself as a popular hang among sports fanatics, journalists, and neighborhood regulars. The food sucked (initially), but Vito made up for it with his big, affable heart and East Coast conviviality. The stiff drinks didn’t hurt, either. Nor the vibes. From the outset, Vito’s was dripping in an aesthetic that toed the line of high and low: dim lights, white linen, decadent mid-century sleaze, and a perpetual veil of cigarette smoke.

The legends hung over the place as heavy as the tobacco haze. There was supposedly a tunnel that ran underneath Madison Street connecting Vito’s to the Sorrento Hotel, allowing high-profile visitors and—more salaciously—gangsters to come and go unbothered and unseen. Its existence has been neither confirmed nor denied.

Vito’s legendary mob ties and seedy off-the-record proceedings were not the stuff of fiction. Lawyers, politicians, off-duty cops, bookies, judges, and Jesuit priests all rubbed shoulders there on the regular, with city officials often retiring from the courtroom to solve problems around the family table or in the inner sanctum of the Vagabond Room (later rebranded as the Cougar Room) during Thursday lunch or afternoons.

In July 1971, 54 Seattle public officials, including the sheriff and other high-ranking police, were charged with bribery, graft, perjury, and contempt—all part of a complex payoff system that, by all accounts, unfolded at Vito’s. The Vagabond Room, ever stocked with a private stash of top-shelf liquor in unmarked bottles, was bugged by the Feds leading up to the indictments. In his trial testimony, assistant chief of police (and Vito’s habitué) Milford E. “Buzz” Cook claimed the Thursday lunch crowd called itself the Pitty Pat Club (nicknamed after a card game). Both Cook and police captain Lyle LaPointe went to prison for their roles in the scandal.

But it wasn’t just gangsters and gamblers seated at the family table. Vito had a soft spot for the aging folks who lived in retirement homes around the neighborhood; his discount meals for pensioners drew a different kind of regular crowd, whom he welcomed to eat at the table with him. 

Some things at Vito’s could always be counted on: Jimmy’s wife, Eleanor Santoro, served as host with her best friend Virginia, the pair eternally smoking cigarettes at the front. Cannelloni stuffed with veal and beef, smothered in sauce and a heavy blanket of grated pecorino, was the unchanging house special that was never on the printed menu and always the most popular dish (even during years when reviews were less than rapturous). A taciturn all-female waitstaff, dressed in black and white, were all business and took no guff. According to one regular, as reported in a 1982 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Vito liked to joke that the restaurant was successful for three reasons—no view, no parking, and no waitresses under 50 years old.” 

Business at Vito’s boomed over the next three decades. In 1962—the year of the Seattle World’s Fair—Jimmy paid $9,100 for a new Cadillac, one of only five of its kind made that year. A habitual heavy drinker, Jimmy died just nine years later at the age of 52. Vito continued to run the restaurant on his own until 1994, when he was forced to sell due to declining health, and passed ownership to his bar manager. Vito died in 2000, aged 79. An article in the Seattle Times reported the scene at his funeral, attended by over 300 family and former customers who gathered to pay their respects to “Uncle Vito.” 

The business changed hands multiple times after Vito passed, its mid-century sparkle dissipating with each failed attempt at a reinvention. After limping along as a dive, the restaurant was resurrected by one new owner as a hip-hop club, but the fatal shooting of Nathaniel Lee Thomas on the Vito’s dance floor in November 2008, which was preceded by a drive-by shooting outside the club in June, brought Vito’s to a halt. 

The restaurant sat empty for two years until 2010, when business partners Jeff Scott and Greg Lundgren—who had jointly opened the Hideout just up the street in 2005—purchased the restaurant, signed an 18-year lease on the space, and began work on restoration. They had both grown up with fond memories of a Vito’s they dreamed of resurrecting. Like the Santoros, they rolled up their sleeves. They reupholstered the booths and refurbished the kitchen, ripped out the dance floor and installed a mahogany bar. They also brought back a grand piano. 

Vito’s reopened on September 19 of that year, with live music five days a week. The lineup of regular performers reads like a who’s who of the 2010s local scene: Ron Weinstein, Kareem Kandi, Prom Queen, Jerry Zimmerman, Tim Kennedy, Afrocop, Martin Ross, Ben Von Wildenhaus, Jovino Santos Neto, Lushy, Yada Yada Blues Band, and Kate Olson. And then there was Ruby Bishop—pianist and vocalist, local jazz legend, friend of Louis Armstrong. Bishop was 90 years old at the time Vito’s was being renovated. She walked through the construction mess, introduced herself to Lundgren, and requested a job. After sitting down and rattling off a song, she was hired on the spot. Her Sunday night residency at Vito’s continued until her retirement at 97. 

This new iteration of Vito’s took advantage of its proximity to cultural institutions—the Frye Art Museum, Sorrento Hotel, the Hideout, and Town Hall were all within a stone’s throw—to cement itself as a second location for cultural events. An affordable happy hour menu helped cultivate a starving-artist clientele. A new 35-foot-long mural commissioned by local artist Warren Dykeman stretched across the west wall of the lounge; its mid-century-inspired graphic design featured a waterfall of colorful blobs plunking like bright raindrops across a dank gray backdrop filled with boxy figures playing imaginary jazz. 

The final touch was the transformation of the Vagabond Room. After searching for the better part of a year, the new co-owners eventually located and purchased the perfect taxidermied cougar—regal and recumbent on a log—from a woman in Northern Canada whose husband had killed the creature decades before. They named the cougar Barbara (an homage to a longtime manager and fixture at the old Vito’s) and installed her behind glass in front of a custom diorama designed by Jennifer Zeyl and painted by Jason Puccinelli. In the hall leading past the bathrooms into the newly christened Cougar Room, framed photos and Polaroids of Vito and Jimmy alongside chefs, regulars, and various goodfellas—ghosts of Vito’s past—lined the wall. 

“It is the place where we plan on growing old in, and with any luck, you will too,” Lundgren told Bethany Jean Clement in a Stranger article ahead of the reopening. “Three generations of Seattlittes have histories here, and this fall we welcome them all back. … We hope to serve the grandparents, the parents, and their children.”

That would not be the case. Like all restaurants, Vito’s shuttered their dining room during the pandemic and had to survive by offering takeout drinks and dinners. Then, in June 2022, a fire ripped through the upper floor of the building. The flames didn’t touch the restaurant, but 20,000 gallons of water used to extinguish the fire crashed through the ceiling, causing massive water damage. 

Repairs that began shortly after the fire were brought to a halt in August, due to the extensive structural remediation deemed necessary for the entire building. The hits kept coming. On November 29, 2022, Vito’s posted the news about a Thanksgiving weekend break-in. The building’s owner reported that thieves had climbed construction scaffolding to enter the building via the third floor. They ransacked the place thoroughly, stripping most of the building’s wire and copper pipe. In Vito’s, the Cougar Room’s vitrine was smashed, glass scattered across the floor. They took Barbara.

The building, and Vito’s, sat empty and in limbo for a year and a half until a second fire ravaged the location on New Year’s Day, 2024. Lundgren and Scott announced the restaurant was permanently closed two days later. 

The city mourned a collective loss. But unbeknownst to Seattle, it was also during this period that two people gave in to their wild idea, and transported Vito’s—what was salvageable, anyway—300 miles away to Waitsburg, piece by piece.

Jaatinen, who grew up in a village (pop. 500) in eastern Finland, arrived in Seattle in 2014 to work for Microsoft. She was intrigued by the eastern part of Washington; an ex had proclaimed that “there’s nothing beyond Ellensburg.” After they broke up, she explored what actually did exist east of nowhere, eventually purchasing five acres of land in Central Washington amid vast swaths of sagebrush. There, she would host weekend gatherings for artists and musicians; the only rule was that they must bring an instrument. One time, Roberts arrived with an entire piano strapped in the back of a pickup.

When the two first met, both were in relationships with other people. Both also shared an affinity for art, and they continued to cross paths until acquaintance became friendship, then friendship became something more over a fateful bottle of rum and Cuban cigars one evening at Roberts’s home on Whidbey Island.  

Each of them had known the old incarnations of Vito’s. Roberts was writing from firsthand experience when he laid down the lines in his poem:  

meanwhile doting at the dark corner table
a waitress scratches real “special”
and shuffles to piano jazz
a priest and union boss belly to the bar

Roberts grew up patronizing the Italian joint well before he could legally drink—at 14 or 15, he guesses; the memory’s foggy. His father, John A. Roberts, Jr., was a prominent trial lawyer. One of his law partners was John Ehrlichman, who later served as Richard Nixon’s chief domestic affairs adviser before being imprisoned for his role in Watergate. Like many Seattle attorneys, Roberts’s father frequented Vito’s. Young Roberts, meanwhile, enjoyed sneaking into the men’s room to ogle Leo Jansen’s famous reclining nude mounted on the wall.  

Roberts went on to study and practice law himself. Still “wet behind the ears” as an attorney, he was initiated into the art of a Vito’s negotiation. “Come hell or high water, at noon the judge would call a lunchtime recess,” Roberts recalls. “If things weren’t going well, he’d say, ‘I’d like to invite counsel to approach the bench.’ Then, privately to the lawyers: ‘Counsel, there are chinks in the armor on both sides here. I suggest that we repair to Vito’s and see if we can’t work this out.’ I was thinking, what the fuck does that mean?”

They called it “the lasagna settlement.” Roberts remembers walking into Vito’s, his eyes adjusting to the dark, before being ushered back to the Vagabond Room. There, martinis awaited, lined up on the table, as lawyers set about hashing things out.

“It felt like walking into the Titanic after it’s been underwater for a couple of decades.”

Jaatinen discovered the later incarnation of Vito’s after she arrived in Seattle. “I navigated new towns and cities with jazz bars,” she says, “so Vito’s was my place from day one. I could sit at the bar with an Old Fashioned and listen to live music, no matter what day of the week.”

When Roberts and Jaatinen’s friendship finally turned romantic, they committed to taking things casually, “one season at a time.” The seasons piled up, and when the two found themselves quarantined and restless in 2020, they started dreaming up projects. “If not now, then when?” Roberts asked. A dilapidated empty building on Main Street in Waitsburg offered an opportunity. 

At the time, Waitsburg didn’t have much going on: a grocery store with plenty of empty shelves, a coffee shop, and, impressively, a weekly newspaper. But the wider Walla Walla Valley offered ample infrastructure and culture, from an airport and three colleges to a robust wine industry. Nor was Waitsburg new to attracting creatives in search of an eastern outpost. Its diminutive Main Street and surrounding blocks of ornate 19th-century homes had drawn culinary destinations worth the drive, including Easton’s Bar Bacetto and, before that, Jim German’s jimgermanbar. 

Of the many empty buildings in town, Jaatinen and Roberts chose the Royal Block. Constructed in 1888, the two-story Italianate-style commercial building, known as the Loundagin Block & Hotel Royal, originally housed a mercantile on the ground floor and guest rooms above. Over the next century, it took turns as pharmacies, restaurants, apartments, and a craft store.

When they got the keys, the building was in a shambolic state. 

“It had a lot of work to do, but it had good bones and a good spirit,” says Roberts. He and Jaatinen plunged into renovation, shouldering the bulk of the construction themselves, while living in a loft in a back corner of the dilapidated second floor. Raccoons populated the basement, which had partially caved in years before, thanks to a busted water line. When, six months into renovation, they finally switched on the HVAC to see if it worked, feathers and debris from a family of barn owls blasted through the ductwork. 

Today, Royal Block is an art- and poetry-filled boutique hotel that melds Jaatinen’s sense of Nordic austerity with Roberts’s collection of antiques and art—much of it locally sourced over the years. Roughly 90 percent of the wood used in the renovation is reclaimed, including old structural beams repurposed into stairwells, lofts, and architectural details. The ground level houses a lounge, a bar, and a book-lined library where Roberts and Jaatinen host monthly artist talks, film nights, and a Ghost Club, where cocktails and Japanese bar food are served to honor the dead. Behind the building, a new commercial kitchen serves events that spill out into the alley. There, a reclaimed loading dock has been turned into a stage. In September, the Royal Block hosted its second annual block party that drew more than 350 guests.

Then, there’s the red light. Locals know that when it’s on, Vito’s is open.

Royal Block was already fully operational as a hotel when Vito’s experienced devastating fire and water damage in 2022. Both Roberts and Jaatinen, like all of Vito’s regulars, were heartbroken by the news. Never ones to sit still, they got an idea. 

Some details of the salvage operation remain purposefully shrouded. (Was anything at Vito’s completely aboveboard?) At some point between the two fires, Roberts and Jaatinen set out to retrieve whatever bits of Vito’s hadn’t been completely destroyed. They pulled up one night in Seattle with a 26-foot U-Haul. They didn’t need a key or crowbar to enter. They did need a shovel. 

Electricity to the building had long been cut, so they wore headlamps and masks as they shoveled a path through debris piled on the floor, past loose wires and metal stabbing from the ceiling. Pieces of the famed Polaroids were smashed on the floor along with needles, rotten potatoes, and sludge everywhere. The grand piano lay shattered in pieces in the corner. When they pulled a banquette away from the wall, an entire run of mirrors above it came crashing down. “It felt like walking into the Titanic after it’s been underwater for a couple of decades,” Roberts recalls. When she came across the Cougar Room door, Jaatinen insisted they take it, despite its colossal weight.

Among the things rescued from the wreckage are several banquettes, a portion of the wall that once separated the host desk from the dining room, a few unsullied copies of the last menu ever printed, and a handful of the original Vito’s rocks glasses—incredibly unbroken—which they found on the floor near the entrance. The glasses were the last thing they grabbed on the way out. After many passes through a high-temperature dishwasher, now they’re used to pour Finnish gin for guests seven feet underground in Waitsburg.

***

When Roberts is done reading his poem, he invites others up to the front to read or perform, whenever they feel moved. There are books of poetry everywhere, piled at the end of the bartop and scattered across martini tables. 

As a Saturday night at Vito’s in Waitsburg winds down, hours after I arrive, the patrons trickle back out the door into the alley dipped in red. The Vito’s at Royal Block is not the Vito’s of Madison Street, but it’s got the same bones. Good bones. Thanks to judges and poets and people just crazy enough to improvise some crazy shit, Vito’s lives. 

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Related reading: Four years ago, Vito’s beloved stuffed cougar went missing. Where in the world can Barbara be?