Gus' Italian Cafe & Sports Bar

	Gus’ Italian Café and Sports Bar Address: 1139-A Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville. Phone: 730-9620. Hours: Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to midnight; Friday and Saturday,  11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Prices: $$

By 7 o’clock on Friday night, the line is out the door at Gus’ Italian Café and Sports Bar, where regulars come for the neighborhood hospitality and newcomers come back for the honest meals.

The wait for a table in the dining room or a spot at the long bar in a separate room isn’t long, however, because Gus’ is a big place, seating 200 in two rooms. And that doesn’t count the guys milling around the bar, ball caps in place, watching a game on tube or eyeballing a half dozen women at a nearby table. At least it looks like half a dozen, through a cloud cover laid down by the many smokers.

It’s a place “where everybody knows your name,” and everybody who is anybody in Mechancisville is there except Gus, who sold his former restaurant, then at another location, to an employee, Scott Stout, in 1987. (Gus Bledsoe got out of the business for a few years, and then resurfaced running a pizza joint on the Southside.)

Stout moved the restaurant to its present location, in a L-shaped strip mall anchored by a Ukrop’s off Route 301, in 1991 and added the sports bar two years later. 

The food is straightforward—pasta, pizza, steak and seafood, often offered in combinations. The closest Gus’ gets to cutesy-pooh is a slice of lemon in the tap water. Otherwise, it’s a beer-from-the-bottle, ketchup-on-the-table kind of place. 

Our party of three shared three popular entrees: A heaping mound of spaghetti with two fat meatballs ($8.95) is drenched in a spicy marinara sauce; steak and cake ($15.95) is a 12-ounce rib eye, sizzling from the grill, sharing a large plate with two savory crab cakes, fried just enough to produce a light crusty exterior; and a baker’s dozen of lightly broiled sea scallops drifting in a sauce seasoned with herbs, garlic, lemon and butter.

Each meal included a plenty of home-made bread, seasoned with but not overpowered by that most indispensable ingredient of Italian kitchens—garlic--and a small salad. Unfortunately, the salads were not all created equal. The most generous one came brimming with cherry tomatoes, slices of cucumber and onions, shredded cheese and cold, crispy lettuce, and a sweet Italian dressing. I drew the short straw, however, with a salad that was pretty much naked except for the lettuce.

No review of Gus’ would be complete without a taste test of its pizza, which its passes with flying colors. Whether it is lunch-sized, six-ounce slice ($4) for cheese and a second topping (I chose pepperoni) or the bet-you-can’t-eat-it-all, dinner-sized “Gus’ special” ($18) that is loaded with everything imaginable—green peppers, onions, mushrooms, sausage, pepperoni, ham, ground beef, anchovies, black olives, jalapeno peppers and extra cheese—the crust is thick and chewy, and just this side of greasy.

Nancy and I began our lunch by sharing Gus’ sampler ($8), which showed off four of the more popular appetizers, each accompanied by a separate sauce or dressing—four pieces each of jumbo fried shrimp (cocktail or tartar sauce), buffalo wings (blue cheese), fried mozzarella (marinara) and potato skins (sour cream). 

While I munched my personal pizza, which was large enough after that appetizer that I took some home, Nancy enjoyed the soup of the day—potato—whose broth was enhanced with cheese and carrots ($2.50).

With its good food, efficient servers and pleasant atmosphere—red booths, vinyl table coverings and walls covered with celebrity photos and Norman Rockwell prints--Gus’ manages to bridge the generational gap. It is at once a date place, a sports bar and a family place, whose regulars appear to be mostly blue-collar or clerical workers, reflecting the neighborhood. But first-time visitors fit in easily. Gus’ has live music about once a month on Fridays—a lively mixed-race couple known as Wendy and Ray banged out solid rock ‘n roll the night of our visit---and there is karoke every Wednesday and Saturday night.

This review first appeared in Style Weekly.