Spaghetti's: Italian fare with Texas flare

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 15, 1990 by Tracey Taylor Woodard

Spaghetti's: Italian fare with Texas flare

Dallas concept finds its niche with fast-service Texas-style Italian food

DALLAS -- What do you get when you cross miniscule space in a heavily industrial neighborhood, Italian cuisine with a Texas twist and stacks and stacks of Nation's Restaurant News newspapers?

The answer is Spaghetti's, a fast-service Italian concept with low prices and NRN-bedecked walls that owners Phil and Barbara Becknauld hope to insert into Dallas grocery stores in the near future.

Design-engineer-turned-restaurateur Becknauld has operated the little restaurant in a warehouse district near Dallas' Love Field for more than a year now, but it isn't necessarily the location or the NRN-inspired decor that makes the restaurant unique.

Spaghetti's serves made-from-scratch pizza ($2.90), spaghetti ($3.25-$5.25), lasagna ($4.95), sandwiches ($2.25-$3.95), soups ($1.75) and salads ($1.25-$2.95) to a variety of customers, with an average wait of less than five minutes.

Becknauld, who designed several of the restaurants in Dallas' popular West End district, uses a freezer-to-microwave system that he likens to the early American education system.

"t's like a one-room school house that teaches first grade part of the and then second grade and then third. I use my kitchen for different things at different times."

Making use of a couple of freezers, a six-burner stove, a steam table and a microwave oven, Becknauld schedules kitchen time according to need.

Mornings at Spaghetti's are spent making the sandwiches and salads, icing the beer and other engaging in preparatory maneuvers. From 11 to 2, the three-person staff is busy heating entrees and serving guests. Afternoons are used for cleanup and bookkeeping. On Saturdays and Sundays, Becknauld said, the kitchen operates as a commissary where he prepares most of the entrees, packages them in single-serving containers and freezes them.

The decor of the restaurant -- more than 50 framed front pages from Nation's Restaurant News -- was his wife's idea.

"We needed something colorful," she said. "And Phil had stacks and stacks of these newspapers around the house. Everybody is interested in restaurants. It seemed like the perfect solution to me."

The Becknaulds keep the latest issue in a frame near the counter, where patrons place orders. After a week it gets moved to somewhere else in the restaurant.

"We keep whole copies of the newer issues around," she said. "People often want to finish reading the articles or look at the rest of the paper while they're eating."

The recipes for the food, dubbed It-Tex cuisine by Phil Becknauld, are his personal home recipes adapted to serve many. It-Tex, he said, is the spaghetti-and-meatball type of Italian that Texans are accustomed to eating. It's heavy on chunky, cubed tomatoes and light on oregano, basil and garlic.

"An Italian could never run this place," he said, laughing. "They could never lower themselves this way."

Average tickets at Spaghetti's, which until very recently was open only for lunch, are $5.10. Though frozen for a short time, Spaghetti's entrees are made fresh from scratch each week. Individual portions are heated as ordered.

And because the restaurant uses commissary-style cooking, he feels the concept is a perfect fit for grocery and convenience stores as well as for gas stations -- anyplace that needs a low-maintenance restaurant.

"I did it from an engineer's standpoint," he said. "It requires no venting and very little actual cooking. I could teach anybody how to do it in seven hours."

The Becknaulds recently opened Spaghetti's on Friday and Saturday nights because of requests from regular customers. Results have been mixed. Though the night crowds have dwindled, Becknauld remains optimistic about the future of the restaurant.

"If my luck holds, and I have been extremely lucky," he said, referring to his low-rent location in a rebounding area of Dallas, "we'll open another one soon, maybe in a grocery store."

PHOTO : Above: The exterior of Spaghetti's in Dallas. Below: Owners Phil and Barbara Becknauld

PHOTO : inside their restaurant. The walls are adorned with covers of Nation's Restaurant News.