By Dennis Getto
Journal Sentinel restaurant critic



At age 50, Mary Jo Beniger got an opportunity that she couldn't pass up.

"I was given the opportunity to buy my old high school hang-out," she said. "And when you're 50, you don't say no."

That was in August 1993. Six years later, Mary Jo and her husband, Bill, have renamed the old Pizza Village restaurant Nonna Maria's, redecorated it with everything from train photos to antique accordions and are making some of the best pizzas north of Milwaukee.

I had heard about the casual restaurant from a friend who was impressed with its unusual pizzas. I had driven past the place several times but had always dismissed it as a neighborhood bar that, like many in the state, serves pizza as a sideline.

I wasn't sure what to expect when a friend and I walked in. It was a Saturday night in August and a television in the corner of the dining room was tuned to a Green Bay Packers exhibition game. On the wall above our booth hung a collection of four framed photos of famous locomotives.

Then the clock struck 8 p.m. and a train whistle drowned out all the other noises in the 42-seat restaurant.

I looked over to the door of the kitchen where Bill Beniger, a train enthusiast, was waiting for his next pizza to deliver. Fifty percent of the restaurant's business is carry-out.

"It's a clock," he explained. "It's one of my proudest possessions."

Later, Bill and Mary Jo came over to our table and told us the story of Nonna Maria's.

For years, they said, the couple owned a landscaping business and a greenhouse on Sheboygan's north side. Mary Jo learned about fresh herbs by growing many of them. She also had a food background gleaned from two years of home economics and related classes at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in the early 1960s.

"Bill always said, 'Someday I'm going to buy you a restaurant,' " Mary Jo explained.

That opportunity came along in the early 1990s when then-owner Ross Russo offered the Pizza Village for sale.

Mary Jo Beniger had fond memories of the old restaurant and had attended Sheboygan South High School with the restaurant owner's son. "It was the first place I ever tasted pizza," she said.

She and Bill bought the Pizza Village and have made it a work in process ever since.

One step was to paint the restaurant walls two of the three colors of the Italian flag: deep green and red. Then they decorated the place with a collection of pictures, posters and other personal touches. A glass case in the dining room holds a number of exotic wood pens that Bill Beniger made. A half-wall between the kitchen and dining room holds several cribbage boards that all look as if they'd seen a lot of pegging.

I'm not sure I would have noticed an organ in the back corner of the dining room if one of the Benigers' friends hadn't walked in and started playing. Listening to the classic song "Smile" reminded me of the old Lawrence Welk television show.

But what really interested me was Nonna Maria's extensive menu, which offers everything from simple spaghetti and meatballs ($8) to baked Portobello mushrooms and vegetables served on pasta ($9.75).

That mushroom and vegetable dish proved a formidable entree - a mound of perfectly cooked noodles beneath a canopy of grilled zucchini, red onions, green peppers, carrots and thick slices of meaty mushroom, all tied together by a lively olive oil and garlic sauce.

Even better was sweet Italian sausage on pasta ($9.75), which topped thin spaghetti with a lively tomato sauce flavored with the Benigers' own homemade Italian sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes and onions. The entrees were served with a small hot loaf of homemade Italian bread, studded with black olives and rich with the flavor of olive oil.

While those entrees were great, it was Nonna Maria's pizzas, which take up a whole page of the house menu, that drew me back with three friends in tow.

From the list of special house pizzas ($12.25 small, $16 medium, $19.50 large), two seemed to jump out at us - green cheese and ham and almost white. For comparison, we also ordered the house supreme pizza ($15.25) topped with sausage, mushroom, onion, pepperoni, ham, green pepper and black olives.

The menu warned us that the two house specials would take some time to prepare so we also ordered soup ($2.75) and side salads ($2.50).

Served with homemade Italian toast, Sicilian chicken and harvest tomato soups were both delicious. The chicken soup brimmed with carrots, onions, celery and plenty of shredded chicken, all bound together by a fragrant broth. Harvest tomato was thick and rich with the flavor of fresh herbs.

House salads were bright arrangements of romaine with sliced radish, red onion, carrot, tomatoes and croutons. They tasted best with the house sweet, oil-and-vinegar dressing, which the Benigers have named La Dolce Vita ("the sweet life").

All three pizzas ranked high against those that I've eaten anywhere.

Green cheese and ham may have sounded like the title of a children's book, but it was wonderful, a substantial but crunchy crust heaped high with mozzarella, Parmesan and Gorgonzola cheese and chunks of smoky ham. The almost white pizza could have come off the pages of a glossy food magazine. It was topped with fresh slices of tomato and zucchini over a layer of mozzarella, parmesan, Gorgonzola and ricotta cheese. Fresh oregano and basil gave the pizza a magnificent flavor.

The heavily loaded supreme could have competed well with the best American-style pizzas I've tasted around the state.

If there was anything on Nonna Maria's menu that I wasn't fond of, it was an appetizer of Italian nachos. Somehow, the characteristically Mexican corn chips tasted out of place beneath their all-Italian topping of Asiago cheese, olives, green onions and tomatoes. Pesto crostini ($4.50), bright with fresh basil puree, proved a better choice.

For dessert ($3.50 each), the house tiramisu was good, but I preferred a fresh berry cake, moist and loaded with raspberries and blueberries.

While it's several miles east of Interstate 43, Nonna Maria's is open Sunday and would make a perfect stop on the way back from Door County or a Packers game.

The restaurant does not have a liquor license, but the Benigers hope to obtain one in the near future.


Appeared in the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel on Sept. 12, 1999.