Tommy Marcos Sr. sits in his office behind the restaurant’s bar, the plain wood-paneled walls covered with photos of babies and kids. The backs of his hands are darkened and dried with age, and his voice purrs softly and slowly. On one desk sits a seemingly obsolete adding machine. On another, flat panel computer monitors balance the restaurant’s budget.
Marcos Sr. works every day but Sunday. But at this point, his job is more ceremonial than anything else.
“I don’t really work,” the 81-year-old says. “I just sit in this chair and figure the bills out.”
Now in his 50th year of running the Adelphi restaurant that has been a gathering place for university students, faculty and alumni, Marcos Sr. has passed off most of the grunt work to his son, Tommy Marcos Jr. For this family, as well as other employees and steadfast customers, Ledo’s Restaurant is life. And as the restaurant is celebrating its 50th anniversary of business, the status of the place as a lifelong staple for area residents has never been more evident.
The restaurant is a juxtaposition of the new and old guard. At 49, Marcos Jr. has been largely overseeing the operation more and more as his father has aged. Marcos Sr. still pays the bills and does what he can from the office, but he’s not as mobile as he used to be, Marcos Jr. says.
Three days a week, Marcos Sr. has to cut his hours short to undergo kidney dialysis. He was injured while working as a radio engineer, communicating from ground to air, and once had to bail out “and evidently had a bad landing,” Marcos Jr. says. But while he says the treatment has weakened his father, he still defers to the man that started it all.
“I still look at him as the owner,” Marcos Jr. says. “I’m president of the corporation, but the father’s the big boss. [I’m] the big guy, but I still take my lead from him.”
This job is something Marcos Jr. has been groomed for his entire life. He started bussing tables at the restaurant at age 15, and at 21, he went full time as an assistant manager. That was in 1976.
In 1989, a young waitress named Susan started at the restaurant, and by 1993, she was part of the family – literally.
“She got a job at the restaurant and we just became friends and started dating, and eventually, you know, we got married,” Marcos Jr. says. Today Susan Marcos is a full time mother of three, ages 5, 6 and 10, but she’s still on call part time for the restaurant.
“She can’t escape it,” Marcos Jr. says with a laugh.
The office as well as the dining room are filled with touches of local history. By the vestibule to the dining room hangs a bright banner emblazoned with a proud Testudo and the words “Go Terps,” and next to it a black-and-white team snapshot of the Washington Senators, reading “Griffith Stadium 1954.” On the wall near the bar, a frame displays a piece of the floor from the old Cole Field House court, with the name “‘Lefty’ Driesell” scrawled onto it.
On a weekday afternoon, a party of five sits among the crowd, the room filled with the aroma of the restaurant’s fabled square pizza. They are fresh off their shifts at the Hyattsville Public Library, just five minutes down Adelphi Road, in for a good and cheap meal like they have individually enjoyed for 35 years.
Kelley Perkins, 42, of Hyattsville, says she has been a customer since even before she started at the library, and that was 18 years ago. Back then, she came with friends because they didn’t have jobs and could afford the food. Now, her brown hair streaked with gray, she has come with the group for decades.
Susan Mester, 55, of College Park, did graduate work at the university and has been coming to Ledo’s for 35 years. It’s her favorite place to eat, she says, as well as that of friends who have moved out of the state.
“Whenever they come here, they want to come to Ledo’s,” she says. And the chain of Ledo’s pizzerias across the Mid-Atlantic isn’t the same, she says. “This is the real Ledo’s – It looks the same as it did 35 years ago,” she says of the dark brick and wood-paneled walls with mirrors and antique green wallpaper.
Marcos Sr. says after 50 years of business, these days it’s common for him to see second- and third-generation customers.
Kendra Wolfe, however, is a second-generation employee. She has been working at the restaurant for 22 years, following in the footsteps of her mother, Fran, a 35-year veteran.
Her parents moved from Chicago when she was 2 and settled in the area because of her father’s job in the navy. Fran Wolfe found her first job at the restaurant, and would often bring daughter Kendra along. At 14, Wolfe got a job of her own, first answering phones, then hostessing, and today, she’s a daytime manager.
“She was born and raised here,” Marcos Jr. says, as the bleached-blonde Wolfe plays with numbers on the computer screen in the office, cigarette in hand.
“I feel like I’m part of the family,” Wolfe says.
Marcos Sr. chimes in, proud of his restaurant’s legacy.
“It’s like a family; it really is.”
Contact reporter Scott Dance at s.dance@dbk.umd.edu.
