This Haunted Texas Restaurant Serves Homemade Pasta and Ghost Stories Too Good to Ignore

A good ghost story has never once ruined my appetite. If anything, it sharpens it.

Give me a plate of something rich and homemade, a dim room with a little history soaked into the walls, and a rumor that the place is not entirely empty after closing. You will not have to ask me twice.

That is the exact promise waiting on Gateway Boulevard in El Paso, way out in far West Texas. The smell of slow-simmered marinara reaches the parking lot before you ever touch the door.

This building has a past. The kitchen has a following. And for more than twenty years the two have been quietly feeding each other.

Here is why this family-run Italian spot keeps landing on “most haunted in Texas” lists without ever loosening its grip on the food. Below, we get into the dishes, the singing, the sealed-off room behind the wall, and the resident spirits the staff have simply learned to live with.

The Food That Keeps the Living Coming Back

Let us start with the reason anyone returns for a second visit, ghosts or no ghosts. The food is made from scratch, every day.

It all traces back to one person: the grandmother of owner Gary Monteleone, a native of Reggio Calabria on the very toe of Italy. Those recipes crossed an ocean and never got watered down.

The lasagna is the headliner, and it earns the billing. Layer after layer of fresh pasta, a house meat sauce that has been quietly bubbling since morning, and enough melted mozzarella to pull one long string clean across the table.

It arrives in a portion built for a Texas appetite, edges crisped where the cheese met the pan. This is the plate the regulars talk about long after the ghosts.

You can taste that nobody here cut a single corner. This is cooking that assumes you have all evening, because you should.

Then there are the Monteleone rolls, the thing regulars order without so much as glancing at the menu. Homemade dough is wrapped around sausage or spinach, closer to a stuffed calzone than a dinner roll, and honestly big enough to be a meal if you let it be one.

The Italian wedding soup has its own quiet fan club too. “Italian wedding soup was awesome,” wrote one recent diner named Nathan, and a four-and-a-half-star average across hundreds of reviews suggests he is very far from alone.

Round the table out with fettuccine alfredo in a rich garlic cream, a baked rigatoni that arrives bubbling, chicken parmigiana, and a spaghetti that tastes like somebody’s Sunday. The sauces and the dough are made in-house, which is exactly why none of it tastes like anywhere else.

Start with the bruschetta while you decide. Toasted bread, bright tomato, good olive oil, and a little garlic is the kind of simple opener that tells you the kitchen respects its ingredients.

Save room anyway, because dessert is made fresh each day by the owner’s own mother. Most plates land somewhere in the $10 to $20 range, which for this much hands-in-the-flour cooking is a quiet steal.

When the Pizza Comes With a Song

Order a pizza in this dining room and you get a full performance with it. On the busy nights a server plants herself beside your table and belts out an entire song as the pie lands.

The whole room tends to stop and grin along. It is the kind of tradition you cannot fake and will not forget.

First-timers look startled, then delighted, and by the end of the night they are the ones filming it when the next pizza floats past. “Sang happy birthday to me,” one guest reported, still clearly thrilled about the whole thing.

The pizza more than earns the fanfare. Hand-stretched dough, sauce from that same family recipe, and a sixteen-inch pie that comfortably feeds a whole table with a slice or two left to fight over later.

Pro tip: order the pizza early in the meal. The song is half the reason to be here on a Friday, and you want the room full when it happens, not thinning out toward closing time.

A Speakeasy You Can Spot From the Highway

You will recognize the place long before you reach the front door. The building wears the cab of an actual eighteen-wheeler and a giant mobster’s face, both aimed square at Interstate 10.

The whole thing reads like a movie set that wandered off the lot and decided to stay. That look is no accident.

Gary Monteleone worked as a set designer before he ever plated a meal, and the restaurant leans hard into a Chicago gangster theme. Think speakeasy shadow, low red light, and cheerful Prohibition-era swagger.

Step inside and the rooms feel like a supper club that keeps a few secrets. There is a two-sided layout, a moody back entrance regulars love to warn newcomers about, and mobster portraits watching you eat your rigatoni.

It helps the mood that Concordia Cemetery, one of the oldest and most storied burial grounds in the Southwest, sits just up the road. None of that lowers the atmosphere. It only turns the whole evening up a notch.

The Room Behind the Wall

Now for the history, because this building carries more of it than most. Gary and Laura Monteleone opened the restaurant back in 2001.

For the first stretch it was simply a well-loved Italian kitchen with a good story or two floating around it. Then the story changed, all at once.

It happened the day they expanded into the century-old building right next door. As Gary chipped through the old plaster, he uncovered a room that had been sealed off and forgotten.

What was tucked inside is the reason people still lower their voices to tell it. There were prayer cards. A small Virgin Mary figurine.

And a 1922 charter belonging to the Texas Spiritualist Association, alongside a plaque marking a spiritualist circle from the early 1920s. The space next door, it turned out, had once been a spiritualist church.

Did you know? Spiritualist congregations of that era gathered specifically to contact the departed, holding séances and healing services in rooms exactly like this one. Finding that behind your own dining room wall is a genuinely wild thing.

It also reframed every odd little noise the staff had ever shrugged off. A creak is just a creak until you learn who used to gather on the other side of the plaster.

That Virgin Mary figurine became a legend of its own. Staff say she had a habit of turning to face the wall on her own.

Each time they set her right, she would somehow drift back around again. Set designer or not, that is not a thing Gary built on purpose, and it is not a thing anyone has fully explained since.

The Spirits the Staff Have Learned to Live With

After the wall came down, the quiet activity got a good deal louder. Employees and regulars have been swapping stories for over a decade now.

They talk about bottle caps that spin on their own, small objects that move when no one is near, and footsteps crossing rooms that should be empty. The list only grows at closing time.

Regulars describe a young female spirit who reads as curious rather than frightening, and a second, more mischievous presence the staff treat almost like a coworker who never clocks out. Nobody here sounds scared when they tell it. They sound fond.

The reputation went fully national in 2013, when the Syfy series Paranormal Witness gave the restaurant an entire episode titled “Dining with the Dead.” Not bad for an Italian kitchen off the interstate that mostly wants to sell you lasagna.

That same year the family brought in a psychic to cleanse the space, and by most accounts things calmed down afterward, though never quite all the way. A little residual mischief, everyone seems to agree, is simply part of the deal now.

What I love about all of it is how lightly this place carries the legend. The ghosts are the charm, not the pitch. The lasagna still comes out steaming, the song still gets sung, and the spooky part is a bonus you are free to take or leave.

More Than a Meal, It Is a Whole Evening

Plenty of restaurants feed you and send you on your way. This one wants you to settle in and stay a while.

Between the live music, the singing servers, and a room styled like an old-movie hideaway, dinner turns into an event you plan the weekend around. Families come for birthdays and anniversaries and treat it like theater with a pasta course.

There is something wonderfully Texan about the whole mix. It has big flavors and an even bigger personality, and it welcomes a first-timer from across the state as warmly as the regular who never left.

You will likely leave planning your next visit before you have finished this one. That is the mark of a place that gets the experience right, not just the recipes.

Tips for Planning Your Visit

This is a weekend-only kitchen, so plan around it. The restaurant serves Thursday through Saturday evenings and closes the rest of the week.

That means a hopeful Tuesday drive-by will only leave you hungry and staring at a dark truck cab. Set your sights on the back half of the week instead.

Fridays bring live music and the fullest house, so that is your night for the entire show. If you would rather actually hear yourself over the wedding soup, aim for a Thursday, when the room runs a touch calmer and tables come a little easier.

Reservations are the smart move, especially anywhere near Halloween, when a haunted Italian restaurant becomes precisely the reservation all of El Paso suddenly wants. Call ahead, and while you have someone on the line, double-check the current hours, since a small family spot keeps its own schedule.

Come a little hungry and a little curious. You are not here for a quick bite, you are here for the whole experience, and that experience is best when you give it a couple of unhurried hours.

How to Get There

Where: Monteleone’s Ristorante, 3023 Gateway Blvd W, El Paso, TX 79903. Reach the restaurant at (915) 801-4089 to book a table or confirm the evening’s hours.

You will find it in central El Paso, riding right alongside Interstate 10, with that unmistakable truck cab and mobster face marking the spot. If you are coming from out of town, it makes an easy first stop on a West Texas road trip.

Come Hungry, Stay for the Stories

Some restaurants sell you a meal. This one hands you dinner, a floor show, a history lesson, and a ghost story all at once.

And it still sends you home full for about the price of a good pasta night anywhere else. That is a rare kind of value.

So point the car toward far West Texas, save real room for the rolls, and let them sing to your pizza. Whatever is lingering in these walls clearly has excellent taste, and after one visit, so will you.

Featured image: Margot’s Servant via Monteleone’s Italian Ristorante