It’s all in the family at Napoli Restaurant in Collier

During not quite yet 35 years of serving food, Napoli Italian Restaurant in Collier already has had three generations of contributors to its success.

Already staking a claim the fourth is young Carmine McCarty, who started to become eminently familiar with the business with the closing of childcare centers at the start of the covid-19 pandemic.

“We brought him to work with us,” Don McCarty, his father, said, “and he’d come back and make pizzas with us.”

Now approaching his eighth birthday, Carmine has developed a knack for preparing pies that impresses his parents.

“He has a pretty good technique,” mom Nicole McCarty said.

The 2001 North Allegheny High School graduate is the daughter of Napoli founders Diane and Bob Steffl, and Carmine’s story is beginning to resemble that of Nicole and younger brother Bobby.

“It started when I was 5,” Nicole said. “We came to work with our parents, and we rolled silverware and we bused tables.”

That was in 1988, when Bob, who had been managing pizzerias, mentioned to Diane:

“I think we would be better off doing this ourselves.”

Despite having recently moved from Scott to Franklin Park, the Steffls opened their pizzeria and hoagie shop in at Collier’s Great Southern Shopping Center, where the restaurant was a mainstay for more than three decades before moving up the street to larger quarters.

In the meantime, Bob and Diane launched a second location in North Strabane Township, managed today by Bobby Steffl and his wife, also named Nicole. And the McCartys manage the expanded Napoli at 1273 Washington Pike.

Although her children originally pursued other career paths, Diane Steffl is happy with their final choices.

“After they went to college, they realized: No, we want to do the family business,” she said.

Diane acknowledges the contributions of her own parents, who represent the first Napoli generation, toward the restaurant’s initial prosperity and subsequent longevity.

“We got a lot of our Italian recipes from them. Our sauce, our meatballs, our manicotti: All that is from them. Our eggplant, yep,” she said. “And when my mom wasn’t helping us at the restaurant, she helped with the kids.”

She’ll admit that the going was rough for the first few years, but by 1995, the Steffls had added to Napoli’s offerings by acquiring a liquor license. Business continued to thrive, to the point where the plentitude of patrons outgrew the cozy confines.

And so as of early 2020, relocation was on the horizon.

“We decided to go ahead and take this space, and then covid hit,” Diane said. “And then two full years later, between covid and all the problems that came with it, here we are.”

The new Napoli, which opened in the fall, includes voluminous dining and bar areas, plus the kitchen has its own prep section. And the dominant feature is the banquet room.

“We weren’t going to take this whole building. We were going to take maybe three-quarters of it. And then when Peters Place closed,” Diane said about the popular Collier restaurant, “we heard so much about nowhere to go to have a banquet.”

The room pretty much continues to be booked solidly, and the establishment as a whole continues to do well, even through the travails of the pandemic.

“We actually put the dishes away and brought out all the to-go containers, and just made it a takeout restaurant,” Diane said. “And we have loyal customers, which made all the difference in the world.”