Memory Lane: Remembering the glories of Palm Beach's Petite Marmite

Whether it was the skylighted and orchid-filled “garden room,” the nearby hand-painted murals of Capri or the fine French and Italian cuisine, few who dined in Palm Beach at now-gone Petite Marmite ever forgot it.

Royals, ex-presidents and celebrities made appearances there, ushered to tables by a dinner-jacketed and bow-tied maître d’, but locals flocked to the place after its 1949 debut and soon craved the beef Wellington and coquilles St. Jacques.

In its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, it occupied much of an arcade off the 300 block of Worth Avenue and spanned nearly 20,000 square feet with several dining rooms served by what one observer dubbed a “veritable kitchen city.”

“Long after it closed (in the 1980s), people asked where they could still find it,” said John Maus, president of longtime Worth Avenue fine-apparel store Maus & Hoffman, located across the street from where the Petite Marmite’s bull-nosed red-and-white awning once beckoned.

“But that makes sense because the Petite Marmite was the place to dine and everyone knew it,” Maus told the Daily News. “Certain tables had phones and certain people had reservations in advance for an entire season …

“Locals loved it, as did famous people. I can still remember when Liberace was in town, he’d dine at Petite Marmite and arrive on Worth Avenue dressed just like he was going on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show.’”

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Stand where the Trillion apparel store is today at 315 Worth Ave. and you’re at the south end of what loyalists call Petite Marmite’s “magical” reach.

The cocktail lounge, dining rooms and extensive kitchen operation stretched northward along an arcade to where Bice restaurant now stands and formally was part of a Peruvian Avenue-flanking parking area.

It was all a second home, of sorts, for lifelong Palm Beacher Michael Pucillo.

The chairman and CEO of the Palm Beach Civic Association and former Town Council president worked summers at Petite Marmite from high school through law school.

After all, his late beloved parents — Chef Costanzo “Gus” and Geraldine “Gerri” Pucillo — founded the Petite Marmite.

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For 30-plus years, they operated it “with a high level of food and service you rarely see anymore,” Pucillo told the Daily News.

The restaurant began with a “For Rent” sign at 309 ½ Worth Ave. in 1948. Wanting to open a Palm Beach restaurant, Chef Gus and Gerri saw the sign and took the lease on the tearoom-sized space.

Shipments of kitchen equipment they ordered included a French earthenware pot called a marmite, and that inspired the name they chose for their restaurant, which they debuted the day before Thanksgiving in 1949.

Gus, a native of Capri, Italy, had worked as a chef at fine restaurants and hotels in Europe and was chef-saucier at New York’s Stork Club after coming to the United States right after World War II ended.

Gerri, well-liked and capable of anything she determined to do, handled the restaurant’s business and other affairs, working long hours as needed. “From the moment they started the restaurant, it was a labor of love,” Michael Pucillo said.

Within its first decade, the Petite Marmite’s charms, including “complete dinners” of haute cuisine starting at $2.50, spread quickly by word of mouth among the island’s 1950s dining-out set, studded with assorted Kennedys and Pulitzers and such regular visitors as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Before long, the Pucillos expanded the restaurant — again and again.

By the late 1960s, it featured five dining rooms (one for private functions) with Venetian chandeliers, brick archways, lattice-adorned walls, Florentine wrought iron, hand-painted murals of Capri, and orchids and greenery throughout.

“Dining there, you always felt like you were in a garden with the murals and flowers and lattice walls,” fourth-generation Palm Beacher Mimi McMakin, an interior designer, told the Daily News. “There was a service finesse where you were always made to feel special. Dad aways said it had the best food in town. My favorite dish was the crab fingers meunière with a heavenly mustard sauce.”

With Gus at the helm, chefs from Europe busily worked along cooking and sauce stations, prep bays and butcher, pasta and bake shops that extended throughout the sprawling culinary operation.

Duck Bigarade, scampi, house-made pastas, pompano Marguery, beef Wellington and filet of sole Veronique were among the many dishes in the restaurant’s culinary repertoire (much of it compiled in a 1970s cookbook).

As busy as the restaurant became, the Pucillos found time for friends, said native Palm Beacher David Reese, whose forefathers include three Palm Beach mayors. “After my wife and I were married (in 1967), I told Gus she wanted to learn to cook rice dishes and he came over to our house one day and gave her lessons, including on how to make risotto.”

The Petite Marmite annually earned five-star ratings by Mobil Travel Guide and praise from popular and now-gone Holiday magazine, whose editors wrote that nowhere was “such perfection as the golden-domed souffles at Petite Marmite's."

The New York Times called the restaurant “a gastronomic showplace.”

Meanwhile, from a separate Petite Marmite entrance off Peruvian Avenue, Chef Gus and his team offered low-cost meals to workers on the island. For less than a dollar, a merchant or a valet parker could enjoy a takeout pasta, say, or chef salad.

“That was so special,” said Palm Beach restaurateur Arlene Desiderio, who recalled how her late husband, Renato Desiderio, was a Petite Marmite maître d’ before opening his own Via Mizner restaurant in 1987. “That impressed Renato, so he did the same thing when he opened his restaurant.”

The Pucillos sold Petite Marmite in 1983 for a reported $2.4 million.

Gus died in 1986 following open-heart surgery. Gerri was a 71-year-old grandmother and popular town resident in 1996 when she was murdered by a pest-control worker who was convicted of robbing and strangling her in her Palm Beach home.

After the 1983 sale of the Petite Marmite, new ownership and management issues ensued and the restaurant closed for good in 1989.

That the restaurant is remembered today as one of the best to ever grace Palm Beach has everything to do with the Pucillos’ 1949-1983 stewardship, Maus said.

Michael Pucillo said, “It’s a testament to my parents.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach's Petite Marmite remembered as gastronomic standout