PEORIA MAGAZINE August 2022

O N E L A S T T H I N G

HIS FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH? A BOILING POT OF SPAGHETTI In Pasta Town – Toluca – everybody loves ‘Ray Mac’ at Mona’s

BY PHIL LUCIANO

A fter more than a half-century in the kitchen at Mona’s Italian Restaurant in Toluca, Ray McAl l ister of fers his secret recipe. Not for cooking, but for living. Long living . In his 86th year, McAllister – well known around town as Ray Mac – still works four days a week making pasta at Mona’s. He enjoys his job, in part out of gratitude. He says decades of hustling around the kitchen have kept his body andmind spry. His fountain of youth is a boiling pot of spaghetti. “It keeps me going,” he gushed after finishing a Friday shift. “It really does.” He also has kept Mona’s going, not just with 54 years of hard work but also in keeping the kitchen upbeat and mentoring teen workers. Plus, even outside work, he is a good-natured ambassador for his employer. In Toluca, everybody loves Ray Mac. “He has been the core of quality (and) consistency, and helped us built this

But it didn’t become a ghost town, in large part thanks to a pair of restaurants. Mona’s opened in 1933, and Capponi’s followed a few doors down the next year. For more than 50 years, they’ve been owned by the Bernardi family, which also birthed a pasta factory. All told, in a town still holding tight at 1,400 residents, those businesses boast hundreds of workers. The eateries are beloved, locally as well as throughout central Illinois. Any evening at either place, you might find a couple celebrating their 40th, 50th or 60th anniversary – at the same table where they had their first date. One employee has witnessedmost of that history first-hand: Ray McAllister. A Streator native, hemet andmarried a Toluca girl. So, Ray and Juanita McAllister moved to her hometown, where they raised six kids. In 1968, he was asked to try his hand in the kitchen at Mona’s, which was short on cooks. With no restaurant experience, McAllister said he’d take the job on a trial basis. Fifty-plus years

grand reputation,” said Mona’s owner Tony Bernardi. And Mona’s fortunes long have been important to Toluca, where for generations much of the economy has been driven by pasta. Toluca boomed in the early 1900s as a mining town. But the last coal mine dried up in 1924, and the population nosedived from 6,000 to less 1,400. Mona’s Italian Restaurant has been a dining favorite in Toluca since 1933. (TODD PILON)

94 AUGUST 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE