Chef, owner of Captain’s Galley dies at 54

Friday, Sept. 19, 1997 | 11:09 a.m.

When regular customers walked into the Captain's Galley restaurant, chef and owner Franco Ghigi would greet them with a beaming smile and offer to prepare special appetizers for them to sample.

"He took great joy in preparing new items and specials," said Toni Cooper, a waitress at the Captain's Galley, 455 S. Decatur Blvd., for the past eight years. "Franco called his restaurant one of the most well kept secrets in Las Vegas -- and he liked it that way."

It also is one of the town's finest Italian seafood eateries, and Ghigi worked hard -- 12 hours a day, six days a week for 18 years -- to make it that way.

Franco Ghigi, a rotund and robust Italian-born self-taught chef who decided to stay in Las Vegas after his car broke down as he was passing through in 1976, has died. He was 54.

Franco, who had been ill in recent years partly because of his weight -- more than 300 pounds on a 6 foot 2 frame -- checked into Valley Hospital Wednesday morning complaining he was feeling ill. He died 12 hours later, presumably from heart failure.

Services for the 21-year Las Vegas resident will be 11 a.m. Sunday at Desert Memorial.

Mary Ghigi, his wife of 22 years and business partner, will continue to operate the restaurant that she and Franco founded in 1979. She works there as the hostess/manager.

Franco's culinary skills, honed in the 1970s when he ran a U.S. Army officer's club in Germany, produced a number of tasty dishes that brought customers back often to the Galley.

Among his specialties were shrimp scampi, fish and chips, and ciopino, pronounced "chapino," which is Italian for "all of the sea." It is comprised of various fishes, shrimp and clams.

While some knew him simply as Franco, many customers called him "Captain." Few knew or could even pronounce his last name correctly (the "Gh" is hard as in "galley" and the second "g" is soft as in "ginger.")

Ghigi was born Aug. 8, 1943 in Rimini, Italy. He taught himself the culinary arts as a young man.

In the early 1970s, he went to Germany and opened an officer's club bar and restaurant. It was there in 1972 that Mary, the daughter of an American Navy officer, walked in one day looking for a job.

The romance blossomed and, in 1975, they came to the United States and married in Washington, D.C.

When their San Francisco-bound car broke down in Las Vegas a year later, they decided to try their luck here. Franco took a job as a bartender at the Stardust Hotel. Two years later, he opened his restaurant.

He later sold it and, for a short while, operated a Captain's Galley on Lake Mead Boulevard. Eventually, he took back the Decatur restaurant when the person who had bought it from him failed to make a go of it.

With dedication and sacrifice, Franco and Mary made it a Las Vegas success story.

Franco was a member of the Italian-American Club.

In addition to his wife, Ghigi is survived by a brother, Graziano Ghigi of Italy.