Aldo's Pizzeria

Aldo's has been making pizza on Lincoln Highway in Rochelle, by the family's own count, since 1979, which in the restaurant trade is several lifetimes. Aldo Iorio's name is on the sign and the family's on the business, which grew into a two room arrangement: the pizzeria and family dining room on one side and the Red Brick Pub alongside it. In a town of nine and a half thousand, a restaurant that holds on for more than four decades stops being just a business and becomes part of how the place describes itself, the answer a local gives when asked where to eat before the visitor has finished the question. The setting has its own logic. Lincoln Highway is Rochelle's main street and has been carrying through traffic since 1913, when the transcontinental route was first marked through the town, and the block Aldo's sits on is a couple of minutes' walk from the 1918 Standard Oil filling station at the highway's ninety degree turn. Feeding travellers is one of the oldest trades on that road. A family pizzeria around the corner from the filling station Rochelle calls the first on the Lincoln Highway in Illinois is, in its quiet way, the same business the highway has always supported: somewhere for people moving through flat corn country to stop, eat something hot, and go on.