To say that restaurants in Fayetteville, North Carolina serve spaghetti is an insult to spaghetti.
The presumption that spaghetti noodles are so ho-hum that they’re only ever seen in the company of tomato-based meat sauce is rebutted by menus across town. At pizzerias, diners, and sandwich shops, patrons are offered their pick of spaghetti seven different ways. Are you in the mood for spaghetti with pepperoni slices? Perhaps you’d prefer spaghetti with mushrooms, armored by a thick layer of broiled and bronzed cheese.
At Captain Jerry’s Seafood on the outskirts of Fort Liberty, merely two spaghettis are available, but they’re both customizable with chicken, scallops, shrimp, and fried calamari.
Spaghetti is likeable, and spaghetti is cheap, but neither of those attributes is sufficient to explain a local enthusiasm so intense that even breakfast joints put ‘spaghetti’ on their pylon signs. Perplexed, I put the question to a server at Lindy’s, which opened as a drive-in in 1968. She responded as quickly as if I’d asked for a straw.
“It’s a Greek thing,” she explained.
Over the years, many cultures with distinguished noodle histories have laid claim to spaghetti. But spaghetti as most Americans know it isn’t Chinese, Persian, or Greek. (The version sweetened with cinnamon, allspice, and cloves that anchors a Cincinnati three-way is an entirely different dish from what’s served in Fayetteville, where onions and garlic are the main flavor suppliers.) An idealist might argue it’s universal, but let’s not pussyfoot: Spaghetti with red sauce is Italian.
And yet, the Lindy’s employee was exactly right. Ever since Pete Parrous started serving spaghetti at Luigi’s on Hay Street in 1956, the menu item has functioned as an emblem of Greek ownership in Cumberland County. Throughout Fayetteville, spaghetti is as much a symbol of Hellenic pride as a poster of Santorini or Greek flag coffee mug. That’s why Jerry Anagnostopoulos offers it at Captain Jerry’s, and why Pete and Anna Karteris listed it alongside hamburger steaks and hot cakes at Lindy’s.
To be sure, the patriotism embedded in a $6.99 lunch isn’t apparent to diners. Even Greek restaurateurs, who are apt to say they serve spaghetti because a cousin sold it at his place, or because customers requested it, don’t reflect on it much. That is, except for on the third Wednesday in November, when they band together to produce the event that Parrous created on behalf of his community: The World’s Largest Spaghetti Dinner.
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Prior to the 1950s, Fayetteville restaurants didn’t serve spaghetti. In the years after World War II, Greek-born restaurateur Bill Pappas relied on steak to lure eaters to Rainbo Room, which competed with the likes of Stacy’s Barbecue Stand, Broadway Oyster Bar, Arthur’s Sea Food Grill, and The Dipsy-Doodle. As late as 1953, a Catholic priest in nearby Dunn was able to waylay a surprise party honoree by saying (falsely!) he’d heard a spaghetti house had opened in Fayetteville.
Three years later, Pete Parrous made good on Father Francis McCarthy’s ruse. While Luigi’s wasn’t the first business to sell spaghetti in Fayetteville—according to city directories, that distinction belongs to a Shell station—Parrous’ place was the first restaurant within city limits to showcase a cuisine which had gone from suspect to staggeringly popular in the span of a few decades.
It’s unclear where Parrous, who immigrated in 1938, acquired his spaghetti chops. One legend holds that he borrowed his soon-to-be-famous sauce recipe from his mother, while another contends he picked it up from a guy in New Jersey. It seems likely that he prepared spaghetti while serving as cook on a U.S. Army base in Arizona: An official recipe manual from the time called for combining 10 pounds of spaghetti with 24 pounds of canned corned beef, one pound of American cheese, tomatoes, onions, flour, and fat.
In any case, like his many fellow Greek immigrants who ran restaurants—in some early twentieth-century U.S. cities, one of every three restaurants was Greek-owned—Parrous knew a successful menu item when he saw it. Upon learning that the local Greek Orthodox Church was short on cash after building a fellowship hall, he proposed they sell spaghetti. “It was the cheapest thing we could do,” Haymont Grill’s Pete Skenteris told a reporter in 2008.
Making money off noodles wasn’t Parrous’ brainchild. Dried spaghetti was common in the post-Civil War South, but it was typically fixed with ingredients paler than pasta, such as milk, eggs, and cream cheese. Then, in the 1920s, Heinz began canning spaghetti with tomato sauce, a pairing that home cooks imitated by buying boxes of spaghetti for 8 cents apiece, or $1.43 in 2024 dollars. During the Depression, spaghetti became a fixture of charitable fundraisers.
Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church sold close to 500 dinners at its first event in 1958. Organizers vowed to repeat the event the following year, spending the off-season talking up the slow-cooked onions in Parrous’ signature sauce.
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Parrous shut down Luigi’s soon thereafter because he was concerned that the neighborhood was tilting toward seedy, but kept serving spaghetti at restaurants including Deno’s Pizza Palace, Deno’s Spaghetti and Steak House, Deno’s Jr., and The Chicken Villa. Other church members simmered spaghetti sauce at their restaurants too. Spaghetti was so locally abundant that it seemed like residents would get their fill before the annual benefit.
Instead, all that spaghetti built up Fayetteville’s appetite for the dish. Originally, the church sold plates of spaghetti and meatballs, accompanied by a roll, salad, and drink.
“It started growing so rapidly, they couldn’t keep up,” said Tony Kotsopoulos, Parrous’ son-in-law and longtime event chair, ticking off adjustments with the appropriate gravitas. “They cut the salad out first. Then they cut the beverage. Then they cut the meatballs.”
By 1966, they got rid of the chairs, putting every meal in a takeout container. Assembling thousands of boxes was a job reserved for the congregation’s youngest members, who also divided hundreds of pounds of processed cheese into plastic portion cups.
None of the numbers daunted event planners. Not the two days spent boiling spaghetti, nor the dozens of calls that came into the church office every week of the year from locals confirming the next dinner date.
Around 2000, the church started referring to its spaghetti dinner as the biggest in the world. “Nobody has challenged that,” Kotsopoulos said.
Still, Kotsopoulos knows the biggest spaghetti dinner isn’t as big as it once was. Attendance peaked in 2013 with 13,000 meals sold and has been declining steadily since. The church still fields enormous orders from workplaces where church spaghetti is an autumn tradition—Cumberland County Detention Center this year picked up 750 boxes to feed both employees and people incarcerated there—but Kotsopoulos speculates driving to the church isn’t as enticing in the age of Uber Eats.
Furthermore, in the event’s glory days, most meal tickets were sold in advance by businessmen who proudly worked their contacts around town. “They’ve all passed,” Kotsopoulos said.
Twelve years ago, Kotsopoulos, 74, asked Jerry Anagnostopoulos, 40, to take over leadership of the spaghetti dinner. They were standing together when I tossed them a softball question about the dinner continuing forever; they glanced at each other before Anagnostopoulos said something about hard work and the goodness of God. Honestly, I was so taken aback by their reticence to provide the most predictable quote in any festival feature story that I didn’t get it down.
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When I went to the Fayetteville Public Library’s local history room to read up on past spaghetti dinners, the librarians reported they didn’t have anything in their clippings file about spaghetti. But they had three thick folders labeled with Parrous’ name. He and his wife, Ethel, were among four people killed in a 1993 shooting rampage at Luigi’s, which he had reopened at a new location in 1982.
“We have a moral obligation to continue with the dinner,” Kotsopoulos told a Fayetteville Observer columnist years after the massacre. “Not only for them but for the town and the people of Fayetteville.”
While the event has sometimes been characterized as Parrous’ legacy, that’s not precisely right. It’s spaghetti itself, rather than the quantities in which it’s prepared, that represents the contributions of Greek immigrants to the Sandhills region of North Carolina. It’s the taste for spaghetti that’s so deeply ingrained in Fayettevillians’ palates that they rarely pause to consider where it originated.
According to the kind librarians I consulted, all of whom appeared to be youngish millennials, there is no special municipal fondness for spaghetti. They shrugged when I pointed out that restaurants in other cities aren’t waging price wars over Wednesday night spaghetti specials. They were unmoved when I brought up the roadside signage. But when I mentioned the World’s Largest Spaghetti Dinner, which none of them had ever heard of, one of them lunged for the shared office calendar.
“I’m going to call in,” she warned her co-workers as she marked off the third Wednesday in November 2025.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her there’s no guarantee that Saints Constantine and Helen will host another edition of its world-beating spaghetti dinner and pastry sale. Parrous’ sauce, though, is still on the menu at what’s now known as Luigi’s Italian Chophouse and Bar, in deference to its ritzy evolution in the current century.
When the sauce is prepared in the church kitchen for the pick-up crowd, Kotsopoulos said, “we knock it out in an hour and half.” By contrast, it cooks at Luigi’s for three hours, giving the onions time to caramelize, and the tomatoes time to mellow.
It’s better, Kotsopoulos concedes. And it’s how Parrous intended it.
This story was originally published in The Food Section, a newsletter covering food and drink across the South. Hanna Raskin is editor and publisher of The Food Section. You can reach her at hanna@theassemblync.com.
Delicious article 😃
Now I know what I’ll have for lunch!