​​Gino Valpredo carries a plate of house tri-tip served over greens to one of the few empty four tops in the Luigi’s dining room and eases into a seat. He takes a sip of water and looks around the restaurant. It’s a pretty typical Thursday afternoon: busy but not packed as the lunch crowd starts to ebb. 

Valpredo unrolls his fork and knife from a napkin, ready to take a bite of his meal before pausing as a customer approaches. He puts down the utensils, nods and greets the man as he walks past. 

“Legacies,” he turns back to me after the brief interlude, “can be a challenge. The lineage — that part of it — there’s a lot to live up to.”

Valpredo would know. With the help of his mother and siblings, namely sister Lanette Caratan, the restaurant’s general manager and sommelier, he’s been at the helm of the 112-year-old Bakersfield institution since the late ’90s — the fourth generation in his family to do it. 

For most locals, the east Bakersfield restaurant, grocery store and delicatessen is the go-to place for home-cooked Italian meals. It’s a destination to have a drink and catch up with friends and the place for long lunch on a Friday, to enjoy a plate of wild mushroom agnolotti cooked with brown butter, sage and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Or close your eyes and take a bite of the Luigi sandwich: dry and cotto salami, mortadella, provolone, swiss, mustard, lettuce, onion and Luigi’s sauce — preferably served on a hard sourdough roll baked daily around the corner at Pyrenees French Bakery. 

Luigi’s is also a local favorite pit stop to grab a bottle of wine, some frozen ravioli, marinara and, of course, the minestrone to stick in the to-go cooler before heading out of town for the weekend. 

Valpredo knows the secret, and it’s one he and his family have lived with their whole lives and passed down from generation to generation: It’s not just about the ingredients in their treasured recipes, but how the alchemy of the food and the actual building make people feel. 

And he says the look, feel, scent and pace of the place is the one thing, over everything else, that has to remain steady in spite of the changing world that surrounds it. 

Valpredo understands, with the newfound clarity that COVID-19 brought, that the day to day of both living in the present and acting as head curator of a family legacy can pose equally pressing but separate sets of problems. 

Customers wait to be seated at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

Luigi’s is a standout in a neighborhood that has been transitioning away from its postwar heyday for more than a half-century. Aspirationally known as Old Town Kern, the district lies just east of downtown, defined by Baker Street, Bakersfield’s original pre-freeway thoroughfare. It used to be its own hive of activity with movie theaters, department stores, the town’s favored stationer and men’s outfitter along with Tally Records, where country music star Merle Haggard recorded his first tracks. 

The neighborhood has also been a hub for some of Central California’s most revered eateries for more than a century. In addition to Luigi’s and Pyrenees, there is Mexican restaurant Arizona Cafe (which opened in 1953) and Basque restaurant Wool Growers (opened in 1954). 

Old Town Kern was once anchored by Noriega Hotel, started by Basque immigrant Faustino Noriega in 1893 as a boarding house and a recipient of the James Beard Foundation America’s Classics Award in 2011. But Noriega Hotel closed permanently in April 2020. 

“Hell yeah, Noriega’s,” Valpredo eulogizes one of the all-time great large-scale communal dining experiences like an old friend. “All my kids had at least one birthday party there. Just watching them run up and down by the tables. A place to go eat and sit and chat and — we lost a great business down here.”

Luigi's owner Gino Valpredo, far right, looks at a list of customers waiting to be seated at his restaurant in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

Valpredo recognizes that visiting Old Town Kern, for most Bakersfield residents, requires a little extra effort. 

“There’s not much left on Baker Street,” he says. “We’re blessed. We do have a great little jewel here. People have to come here as a destination. We used to always hear a million things about revitalizing Old Town Kern, but really, it’s the businesses that keep people coming back.”

Bakersfield City Councilmember Andrae Gonzales, whose district includes downtown and east Bakersfield, agrees. ”Those restaurants are the anchors of the neighborhood,” he said in 2019. “They are beacons of hope for the whole area.”

And while Bakersfield residents have voted to fund a revitalization in the neighborhood, when it came time to break ground on new housing projects, the coffers were short. Though redevelopment and restoration efforts in the downtown are underway, the results in east Bakersfield, thus far, are nil. 

“It’s pretty apparent that homelessness continues to plague our community,” Gonzales said. “You see signs of it in Old Town Kern. You also have a lot of vacant buildings, and that contributes to the blight of the area, which in turn creates other issues.”

Valpredo admits he is constantly struggling not only with external crises from the neighborhood being in flux but also with keeping the internal mechanisms of his own business working at the same time. 

General manager and sommelier Lanette Caratan works on a display in the deli at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

“It’s a 100-plus-year-old business in a 100-plus-year-old building. It gets tough,” he says. “Right now, we’re looking at a door that’s been used for 60 years. How do you replace it and keep it authentic? The bar has been there since ’43, and it’s Formica. I can’t find another one like it and at the same time don’t know what else to put in there, so it’s all chipped.”

While he can replace a broken stove or fix a drip in the bathroom sink, one thing will always remain the same: “The food,” he smiles before finally taking the first bite of his lunch. “If you didn’t like the sauce 30 years ago, you’re not going to like it now.”

Over the decades, Luigi’s has been a grocery store, a filling station, a bakery, housing for immigrant families and yes — even a bootlegger hub during Prohibition.                                                              

Housed in its current location at 725 East 19th St. since 1910, it’s more than a legacy spot and a point of pride for Central California. Along with Molinari Delicatessen in San Francisco, it’s one of the oldest family-run delis in the United States.

(Left to right) Michelle Ulloa, Tori Mashburn and Bob Gibbons share a laugh while drinking Moscow mules in the outdoor patio area at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

In 1905, Joe “Curley” Lemucchi emigrated from Lucca, Italy, and found his way to Bakersfield. He met and married another Italian immigrant named Emelia and started a grocery store with an adjoining diner called Curley’s Cafe, where Emelia’s minestrone and Bolognese sauce became the draw. Five years later, Curley and Emelia outgrew their first location and moved the business to its current location.

The couple had four children, Louis “Luigi,” Lena, Harry and Helen. Of the bunch, Luigi was the standout athlete. In 1931, during the Taft vs. Kern County High School (renamed Bakersfield High School in 1945) rivalry game, Luigi, under center, led his squad to its fifth consecutive county championship by scoring all five of the team’s touchdowns. 

Luigi planned to attend Santa Clara University the next fall but ended up staying at home and helping with the business after his brother Harry died in a hunting accident. When Curley died in 1952, he took over and renamed it Luigi’s.

Customers look at menus before ordering at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

And while he didn’t dare tinker with his mother’s recipes, Luigi started decorating the place the way he saw fit, which evolved into a massive display of sports and historical photographs, a living document of Kern County and its residents. 

“I started collecting the pictures back in 1926, my first year at Kern County Union High School,” Luigi told the Fresno Bee in July 1970, “and have been doing it ever since. But I never thought I’d wind up with as many as I have.”

Any one individual is difficult to locate on the walls in Luigi’s because there are, for the record, tens of thousands of faces immortalized on them. In fact, just as it was a half-century ago, almost every inch of Luigi’s is filled, now with more than 125 years’ worth of photographs starting with one from 1897 of Bakersfield High School’s original football team. 

There are sports-related stills and headshots of Hollywood celebs. There are state and national politicians and plenty of local gentry. Likenesses of the most notable Bakersfield residents of all time in their prime occupy prominent locations. There’s Bakersfield High grad and Hall of Famer Frank Gifford just a few feet over from Bakersfield Christian grad and three-time Pro Bowl selection Derek Carr. Generation upon generation on display — one right next to the other.

Before he took over the restaurant, Valpredo carried grandfather Luigi’s legacy on the field. In the mid-’80s, he was the featured back for the dynastic Garces Rams varsity football squads that won consecutive Valley championships all four of his prep years (’85-’88). Once high school was over, he spent two seasons carrying the ball for Bakersfield College before transferring to Arizona State, where he finished his playing career in 1992. 

A customer looks at the historical and vintage photographs that line the walls at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

And while Valpredo acknowledges those teams and their place among the town’s luminaries, he is quick to deflect the attention away from his own legacy, or even those of the most famous Kern County-raised products. 

Instead, he gestures to a century’s worth of anniversary and wedding parties featuring regular folks toasting into the lens, eyes half shut, or a man in uniform going off to or returning from war, or the occasional lonely sap immortalized for all time drinking at the bar. 

But there is a section that’s particularly close to Valpredo’s heart, one he refers to as the family wall. It’s a collection of his ancestors, from Curley to Luigi to his parents to his kids and every aunt, uncle and cousin in between. 

“The other night, I was here late waiting on a repair,” he recalls, “and I looked at that wall, something I walk by every day. Just the faces, people I’m related to. I wondered what they knew, what they would say, all that knowledge up there just staring back.”

After college, Valpredo says he did what many Central Valley kids do and started to find his way in the bigger world. “I wanted to explore a little, so when I was 22 or 23, I went to Italy and took a cooking class,” he says. “I loved it, absolutely. I wanted to stay there and cook. It’s always been something I’ve been drawn to.”

Grandfather Luigi also felt most at home in the kitchen. 

Cook Johnny Tarnoff, right, prepares some dishes inside the open kitchen at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

“I’ve been at this spot all my life — 60 years,” Lemucchi said in the early ’70s. “My father started the store. I come from quite a line of cooks. My dad was quite a chef, and my mother came from a family of cooks. I do all the cooking now. I’ll tell you.”

Valpredo returned to Bakersfield and soon became more than just an extra set of hands around the business. His mother and father had taken Luigi’s over only six years prior, and though they’d been around it their whole lives, his parents were still figuring out the ins and outs of the operation.  

“They just said, we’re going to treat people the way we want to be treated,” Valpredo says. “My dad — he’s a farmer — had been coming down after work, learning recipes and so forth from my grandfather. And then I came along, and it was just hands-on training.”

Valpredo started his ascent by working in the kitchen, and in spite of his experience cooking abroad, his first job was scrubbing pots and pans. 

“At some point, I was full-time kitchen and stayed there for quite a while,” he says. “My dad left me after a year and went back to farming, and from there, I pretty much did everything. I served tables, worked in the deli, ran the deli for a while — but the kitchen was my passion; it’s always been my part of it.”

The Luigi’s bar, next to the deli and grocery area, still occupies the same cramped and arterial space that connects the store to a concrete building that once was Shell Oil’s Kern County corporate offices and now serves as the restaurant’s main dining area. 

Customers line up to buy orders in the deli at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

It’s a sliver of a thing where three’s a crowd, but 30 is a party. Even with a handful of revelers, a small birthday celebration at one end and a trio of old friends meeting up at the other, the bar feels like it’s at constant capacity, but it also can always squeeze in one more. On Friday evenings or weekends, there’s no choice but to literally rub elbows with your Bakersfield neighbors. 

The patrons on the afternoon I was visiting were very willing with their praise, as folks enjoying themselves at the bar can be, saying they’ve been to Luigi’s a million times, mentioning that the place is like family — it’s home — and no matter how far they travel from Bakersfield, when they’re back in town, it’s the place to go to feel grounded again. 

One customer, Bakersfield native Michele Thorn, was sure to remind me of one thing: “Everyone in this town comes through here and has for a century, and you feel that each time you walk in,” she said, “the passage of one generation to the next.”

That sentiment was echoed by Luigi himself more than five decades prior. When asked what it’s like to see a son accompany his father into the bar for the first time, he said, “It’s kind of an occasion to serve them both a beer with the old man’s picture on the wall.”

On my way out, Valpredo waves me over. I trail behind him as he ducks through a small doorway behind the deli counter and temporarily disappears into a temperature-controlled storage room where boxes of imported wines and cheeses and San Pellegrinos are stacked floor to ceiling. He walks over to the corner of the area, slides back a trapdoor and somehow squeezes his 6-foot-plus frame down a steep and rickety set of stairs. 

I follow him to the basement. The floor above us creaks as customers shuffle across the old black linoleum, shiny from decades of use. 

“I hope they don’t cave in on us,” Valpredo jokes as he snaps an incandescent overhead bulb to life in the cramped, dusty space. He motions to the area where casks of homemade wine were stored during Prohibition.

“It’s pretty common knowledge they did what they had to do,” Valpredo says as he leans against a supporting beam half slumped over from the low clearance. “I don’t think my uncle or my grandfather ever had to serve time for it. But they pushed it. At least three times, Luigi was arrested or cited, maybe did a night, but he got through.”

On a whim, when Valpredo was younger, his uncle came down and drained all the old spigots from that era’s wine, which was probably vinegar by that time anyway, Valpredo says. “Still, what a thing to have.”

Surrounded by reminders of the past, Valpredo pauses and looks around. He says his four children are getting older, now aged 16-25, but he doesn’t want to speculate or speak for whether they’ll choose a path similar to his. The business is a crazy one, at times unrelenting, he says — and he’s good whether or not they become a part of it. 

Then he mentions Luigi. “I wish my grandfather was still alive,” he says, sharing the story of the fateful evening in 1989 that was Luigi’s last shift. “One day he left — walked out of here and went straight to the hospital and never made it out.”

General manager Lanette Caratan and her brother, owner Gino Valpredo, hold some of their branded wines inside their deli at Luigi's in Bakersfield, Calif., on April 1.

Once Valpredo and I got back up to the main floor, he walks me to the front door to bid me farewell. Between us, customers and employees do their dance in the grocery section. A pair of teenagers are there to pick up a few boxes of food. The bar is getting increasingly noisy. The back patio starts to fill up. A visiting college baseball team files into the restaurant; perhaps they’ll be on the wall someday too.

While Luigi’s stakes its reputation on consistency, Valpredo says changes both big and small are the real constant. 

“The town is changing,” he says, referencing the influx of new residents pouring into Bakersfield from other California metros. “We do have a lot of people who are leaving for good. But we also have new customers that we’re calling regulars. You miss some people, but you love to see new ones. There are also people coming into town — the demographics are shifting. I love when people come here from LA or SF and say, ‘Oh my God, this is a great find.’ It means everything.”