A family affair: 50 years of Bosco’s Italian Restaurant

Sunlight streams in through the broad front windows of Bosco’s Italian Restaurant on a clear September day. The red and white checkered tablecloths of the dinner room are awash in late morning light. A faded color photo of Susan Bosco hugging her mom Nada, with a handwritten sticky note reading “In the beginning.” taped to its wooden frame, hangs by the entrance. The restaurant is empty, calm and bright — the opposing version of the candlelit, boisterous environs of the same room during dinner service. Bosco’s, like all restaurants, goes through a daily energy and ambience metamorphosis between opening and closing, but unlike many places, one woman has personally overseen her operation for half a century. That is Susan Bosco.

“I’m having a little semicolon this week,” Susan said. A perfectly worded pun, delivered in her sharp wit, referencing both the cancer operation she had a year ago, in which doctors removed half of her colon, and how that surgery’s side effects sporadically afflicts her renowned energy.

“I’ll be fine for a week and then all of a sudden I’m not. Yesterday was one of those days. I’m hoping today will be better.”

Susan has spent a lot of days, in fact a lot of years, at her family-run restaurant, located at 847 East A Street in Casper. Bosco’s as we know it today has been around for 50 years, but when it originally opened it was under a different name and Italian restaurants had not yet existed in town.

The Tip Top Cafe was founded in 1962 by Susan’s mother Nada Mason in the very same building Bosco’s occupies today. It was a classic Americana-style joint with a lunch counter lined with stools, a jukebox spinning tunes for 25 cents a song and a logo of a dapper fella in a tophat and cane on their sign. The menu was stacked with diner classics like homemade pies, omelet breakfast, sandwiches, grilled steaks, and fried shrimp plates.

Susan began working there as a teenager, watching her mom hand-make noodles and cinnamon rolls in the morning and warmly commiserating with the regulars throughout the day. As the years passed, Susan began applying her own inspired touch on the food by drawing from her father Al Erlitz’s Italian heritage and incorporating some of her beloved family dishes into the menu. Alongside hamburgers and their famed chicken noodle soup, customers were offered fettuccine alfredo, spaghetti marinara and lasagna as daily specials. Nada was skeptical about featuring Italian food, fearing the local clientele, largely unfamiliar with the cuisine, would be uninterested, even resistant.

Susan said, in the early 1970s, Casper’s international dining scene simply consisted of Chinese dishes at the New Moon Cafe on CY Avenue, Mexican fare from La Cocina on Collins Drive and Greek food at The Blue Ox out by Paradise Valley.

“It was all eggs and burgers,” Susan said, but her idea of sharing their Italian family recipes actually clicked with the public. “It took off like gangbusters.” Popular daily specials even earned permanent spots on Tip Top’s menu, a policy that remains active today at Bosco’s. Susan’s latest creation, a pear and cheese stuffed pasta with macadamia cream sauce, became an instant classic and is now a fixture on the menu.

The Tip Top Cafe transformed into Bosco’s Italian Restaurant over an 18-month period, with gradual renovations taking place on Sundays and Mondays when the diner was closed. While Nada continued to manage the food prep side by making the soups, noodles, and pies from scratch, Susan ran the kitchen, cooking every night and generally managing the new concept after its official opening on Jan 5, 1974. Susan remembered taking on that major transition with calm, or perhaps naïve, confidence.

“I just thought we’ll flow in and it’ll work or it won’t. And 50 years later I’m like, yeah, it worked.”

Susan balanced tradition with evolution. Tuesday’s chicken noodle soup was a menu favorite since the Tip Top Cafe days, and along with the Philly steak sandwich and the smothered green chili burrito, they carried over to the Bosco menu as references to the original business. Susan appreciates how much the customers have come to love, and expect, certain specials. She will even happily whip something up on the fly if a guest asks for it.

“Whatever they want, I’m going to do it. If I can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can.”

Recently, a customer asked Susan when she would be making her creamy asparagus soup again. Susan told the guest to pick the day and she’d have it ready. Similar circumstances led to today’s soup option.

“I had these guys from Gillette yesterday who wanted creamy tomato soup today, so I made it last night and we are having it today.”

That familial atmosphere that Susan has created over decades has naturally encouraged guests to enjoy her restaurant with the ease and pleasure of eating in their own home. Perhaps a fond flashback of a childhood holiday meal at your grandmother’s home crosses your mind as you step into Bosco’s from the snow and Susan greets you from across the dining room with a recognizing nod and warm grin. Twirling up a forkful of her fettuccine alfredo pasta with broccoli and sausage easily stirs up memories of past meals I have had with loved ones in this very room. It was a sublime realization when the thought of Bosco’s as being a precious part of my life and family history went from idea to reality.

Bosco’s prolonged success is anchored in Susan’s cooking and her curiosity. In the early years, she gleaned inspiration and learned to incorporate various ingredients and techniques from a chef mentor friend who owned an Italian restaurant along San Francisco’s wharf. Susan honed family recipes such as the veal parmesan into local classics, crafted famous favorites like her shrimp scampi, and developed personalized touches with the “create your own fettuccine” concept — an option that perfectly combines her passions for customer satisfaction and the loving act of cooking.

“I’m driven. I absolutely love it and the joy it brings people. It makes them happy. If they come in here and they are not happy, they will be when they leave, or else.”

Susan has dedicated her life to cooking and that commitment has only deepened with time. Her two days off a week are spent in her own kitchen. She serves her long-running, open-door-policy, family meal at her home every Monday at 6pm. Tuesdays are for making and delivering baked goods to those in need around town.

“God put me here to feed everything with a heartbeat. That’s how I feel.”

Susan also built a 50-year legacy on her famous kindness, which has drawn a quite diverse clientele, spanning from lifelong regulars recalling their first Bosco’s visit in their strollers; to Washington D.C. high rollers; to world famous rock and rollers.

Framed official portraits, with personalized inscriptions, from Wyoming political luminaries and Republican Presidents from the past three decades adorn a ceiling beam spanning the dining room. Susan recalled George W. Bush dined here twice while his father intended to visit but unexpected circumstances required his meal be picked up by the Secret Service. Jon Bon Jovi however enjoyed his plate of clams and red sauce in person while in town on tour in the 1980s. She recalls that visit with casual fondness, like it was her nephew passing through town.

“He still talks about it. He tells all his friends, ‘When you go to Casper, you’ve gotta go there.’ He tells them what he ate.”

Susan calls Bosco’s a “real family affair.” Her husband Rick Capasso has been a steady helping hand in the restaurant for 35 years. Her daughter Tamra worked with her in the kitchen in the past, while her son Jeremy continues to cook alongside her five days a week. And his son Braden even picks up Friday night shifts working the fettuccine station on the line. Four generations have worked under this same roof, creating a proudly family-run business. And Susan’s motherly affection naturally applies to her staff, many of whom maintain a close relationship long after they stop working for her.

“They’re all my kids. They call me Grammy.”

Susan respects her staff, and the service industry itself, which, in ideal circumstances, has a unique potential to blur the lines between work and life, colleague and compadre, friend and family.

“You really have to love it and it has to be in your heart, because if it’s not, you won’t make it.”

Bosco’s has faced and overcome numerous challenges over its five decades, from the vicious boom and bust cycles of the local economy and corporate competition from big box Italian concepts to the perpetual, myriad financial strains that restaurants endure. But consistency and commitment to her vision has been Bosco’s key to success, Susan said.

“I just always thought I’d be where I wanted to be. I knew what it was and what it was going to be and that was it. Take it or leave it.”

Knowing when and how to adapt has been vital too. As was the case during COVID. Susan followed the guidelines for healthy operating practices and remained open for takeout and delivery during the entire pandemic, allowing her to keep her staff employed and her customers fed.

“The phone never stopped ringing. You just have to make it work, however you have to have to make it work, and be that guy that can get it done.”

Two weeks after her surgery last fall, Susan was back at work, resuming her trusty position at the stove, looking over her shoulder from the kitchen with a sweet smile every time she heard the front door bell jingle with a new guest stepping inside. She’ll be standing back there again tonight.