Bosnians flourish in the Park
Cecunjanin family feels at home in the
mountains
By Peter Crowley
It’s a multinational experience going
out for Italian food in Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, where chances
are your host will be a family from Montenegro or Bosnia, which
were once parts of Yugoslavia.
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Jasmina Cecunjanin,
a native of Montenegro, likes the small-town
friendliness of Saranac Lake. |
Photos by Pat Hendrick |
For more than a decade, the extended Cecunjanin
family has been settling into these two villages and carving out
a niche for themselves in the business community. Their hard work
is paying off.
Don’t think their place of birth makes their tortellini or
eggplant parmigiana any less authentic. These folks learned their
trade from Italian restaurateurs in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and
many grew up in restaurant-owning families in Yugoslavia.
But why here? Simple, they say. It feels like home.
Ere Cecunjanin, the owner of La Bella Ristorante in Saranac Lake,
says his home in Bosnia had mountains, lakes, cold winters, warm
summers, safe little villages, skiing, tourism—even a Winter
Olympics, in Sarajevo in 1984.
“It’s the best,” he says of Saranac Lake. “It’s
like what used to be Bosnia.”
At Corvo Italian Restaurant in downtown Saranac Lake, Jasmina (pronounced
“Yasmina”) Cecunjanin, who runs the place with her husband,
Lorenzo, agrees completely. “I’m coming from a town
[in Montenegro] almost exactly like Saranac Lake: mountains, fresh
air,” she says. “That’s why I’m really happy....I
really, really feel like I’m home.”
Currently, the Cecunjanins run six eateries here. A seventh, the
Red Fox in Saranac Lake, burned down more than a year ago and is
being rebuilt. On the hottest block of Lake Placid’s Main
Street, there’s Jimmy’s 21 Lakeside Restaurant, Ere’s
Pizza-Ristorante and Players’ Sports Bar. In Saranac Lake,
there’s La Bella, Corvo and Corvo’s offshoot downstairs,
the Berkeley Bar and Grill.
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Tahir Radancic is
rebuilding the Red Fox, which burned
over a year ago. |
Other Cecunjanins own restaurants in Malone
(Villa Fiore), Potsdam (Uka’s) and throughout Connecticut.
Aljo (pronounced “Ollie”) Cecunjanin is the family’s
pioneer here. He discovered the Adirondacks in 1992, when he bought
Jimmy’s 21. He and his family were the first Montenegrins
to move into the region. A smooth man of few words, Aljo de-
scribes Lake Placid as “good for kids.” He has four
children, three of them born in Saranac Lake.
Aljo came to the United States in 1984. After high school and army
service in Yugoslavia, he wasn’t sure what he was looking
for. When he visited relatives in New York City, however, he liked
what he saw. He filed the immigration papers and got a job working
at a fancy Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Even
though his family had been in the restaurant business, this was
his first full-time restaurant job. He quickly worked his way up
to chef.
After three years in New York, Aljo became co-owner of an Italian
restaurant in Bridgeport, Conn., and moved there. He didn’t
have the money to buy his half outright, but his Italian-American
partner gave him a loan and told him to pay it back out of his share
of the profits. That confidence in Aljo paid off, and the debt was
soon settled.
The same partner also owned Jimmy’s 21 at the time. After
five years in Connecticut, Lake Placid started to seem like a good
opportunity for Aljo, who was by then a husband (his wife is also
from Montenegro) and father.
“This restaurant wasn’t doing too good,” Aljo
says of Jimmy’s. “They were having trouble paying the
bills. So I came up to see what was going on. We made a deal, and
I bought it.”
That was 12 years ago. With Aljo well established here, many of
his U.S. cousins decided that a mountain village with the feel of
Montenegro or Bosnia was a better place to raise a family than Brooklyn
or Bridgeport.
“Safety is everything,” Jasmina says. “This is
a wonderful place and good people....I’m not scared about
the kids. I can let them go outside by themselves.”
The Montenegrins or Bosnians who came to the Adirondacks got jobs
with Aljo or with one of their other relatives. Aljo loaned money
to some who wanted to open their own places. “We all help
each other,” Aljo says.
“It doesn’t matter how far a cousin they are, we stay
together,” Jasmina says.
Nevertheless, they say, each business is entirely independent; there’s
no profit-sharing between Cecunjanin restaurants.
Jasmina, a Montenegrin, and her husband Lorenzo, a Bosnian, arrived
in New York from Bosnia in 1988. Even several years before socialist
Yugoslavia’s breakup and the bloodshed that would follow,
the religious and ethnic discrimination in Bosnia was too much for
them, she says. People with certain last names, like Cecunjanin,
had a hard time finding work.
“It’s a free country in America,” Jasmina says.
“If you want to [do] hard work, you can have a job anytime,
and no one bothers you.”
They lived first in Brooklyn and, like many eastern Europeans, found
work at Italian restaurants there. They hadn’t done that kind
of work before, so they started at the bottom.
“We just pushed ourselves to learn everything,” Jasmina
says. “All the Bosnian people [in New York] did that. You
would start washing the dishes, then making the food, then line
cook, then chef.”
In the winter of 1994, after brief sojourns in Connecticut and Albany,
Jasmina and Lorenzo followed his family north to Saranac Lake. Lorenzo’s
sister owned the Pontiac Club restaurant, where Corvo’s is
now. The couple worked there, eventually taking it over, renaming
it and transforming it. They worked long, hard hours and put the
money they saved in the bank. Jasmina regularly works from 8 a.m.
to midnight, she says.
Business has had its ups and downs but is steadily getting better
every year, Jasmina says, and the restaurant shows signs of growth.
Lorenzo spent much of last summer building a new addition to Corvo—an
upstairs balcony for scenic summer dining. He did all the carpentry
himself.
Ere, owner of La Bella, left Bosnia for the United States to visit
his sister on March 2, 1992, the day before a five-year civil war
broke out between Bosnians and Serbs. His wife and kids stayed home.
None of them had seen the conflict coming. His first sign of trouble
was a TV news broadcast he saw in Sarajevo the day before his flight
from Belgrade to New York City. Even then, though, he didn’t
think it would come to full-blown war. “Then I get here,”
he said. “It kept getting worse. I called home every day.”
Ere’s wife and children escaped to Montenegro a couple of
days before the conflict reached them, but not all his family members
were so lucky. As the fighting escalated, some of the family’s
homes and businesses were burned down. “I have a brother who
lost both his legs,” Ere said.
Ere was granted asylum in the United States. His wife and children
joined him the following year. They moved to Lake Placid to work
for Aljo, a cousin. Ere had grown up in the restaurant business
and had worked in his older brother’s place in Sarajevo during
the 1984 Winter Games.
About six years ago, he bought the restaurant that would become
La Bella. Business is “not bad,” he says. “Every
year it is picking up.”
There is another Ere Cecunjanin here: the Montenegrin-born owner
of Ere’s Pizza in Lake Placid. I caught up with him on a day
that he was exhausted and a trifle impatient with a reporter who
wants to interview him for a story on a successful family of immigrants.
“I’ve been here 20 years!” he says. “I’m
not an immigrant.”
Certainly not a recent one, anyway.
“What do you want?” he demands, sarcastically. “You
want to ask me about my Mafia connections? Is that it?”
“Not unless there are any,” I reply. After moving to
Saranac Lake in 1999, I heard whispers and jokes from local people
about “the Bosnian Mafia.” When I challenged these whisperers,
however, I quickly found they had only preconceived notions about
olive-skinned folks, marinara sauce and the criminal underworld.
It’s the same stereotype that’s dogged Italian-Americans
for a hundred years.
When I explain to Ere that I’ve already had friendly interviews
with several of his cousins, quite amiably, he starts to relax.
Back at Corvo’s, Jasmina says she’s heard the same kind
of Mafia talk. She surmises that some Americans mistake tight-knit
extended families for crime organizations. Here, she says, people
don’t associate much with family beyond first cousins. They
don’t understand how she can treat third or fourth cousins
as they would brothers and sisters.
Also, Jasmina says, people often get suspicious or jealous at the
sight of an immigrant driving a new car. The Cecunjanins who do
buy new cars, she says, do it the American way—on a monthly
payment plan.
“You can’t do that in Bosnia,” she says. “You
have to pay everything up front.”
These days, almost all the Cecunjanins are U.S. citizens, and most
now speak English well. Some, like Jasmina, took classes from local
literacy volunteers. Others had no formal instruction—“just
work, the street, TV, kids,” says Ere at La Bella. Most still
speak their native tongue among staff and family, but their kids
often respond in English.
In Corvo yet again, I finally ask Jasmina a question that’s
been bugging me since the beginning. Has she ever thought about
putting any Bosnian food on the menu?
Sometimes they get special requests for such dishes, she says, and
they honor them. They do the same with Bosnian coffee, a strong,
thick brew like that made in Turkey.
Then she says something I never would have expected. One day a year,
Corvo offers sarma, a Bosnian cabbage dish, as its special.
She can’t quite remember which day, though.
“What’s that one, that Irish holiday?” she asks
me.
“St. Patrick’s Day?” I suggest.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she says.
Ladies and gentlemen, the melting pot of American culture is alive
and well in the Adirondacks.
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