All around the dinner table

In our bustling, on-the-go age, some Long Beach families still find the time to gather around the dinner table together — at least most nights.

Take Angelo Lomonte, a newspaper advertising salesman, and his wife Sabrina. They spend most nights together at the dinner table with their daughters, Mattea, 4, and Giada, 1, eating a complete meal of vegetables, meats and starches.

“The more interpersonal connections you make with your kids can have a dramatic affect,” Lomonte said about maintaining the seemingly bygone tradition of family dinners.

While his wife is a stay-at-home mother, Lomonte said he always makes the commitment to be home at dinner time. Both come from traditional Italian families, and in Lomonte’s home his parents held family dinners in high regard. “If it’s something that you grow up with, you want to carry it on with your children,” he said.

He sees it as a daily time to connect with family members and foster a strong relationship between parents and children.

Single mom Michelle Stewart believes her children, Frantz, 9, and Kira, 6, view their nightly meals together as a way of being closer in some way.

“It creates a circle for us,” she said. Stewart, who works from home as an administrative director, also values a healthy, home cooked meal made with natural and organic ingredients. Dinner often consists of vegetables, grains and proteins.

Like Lomonte, her upbringing helped meld her desire to have traditional family dinners, but for different reasons. “I didn’t have a lot of home cooked meals,” said Stewart. “We didn’t sit down and have family dinners.”

Stewart’s early years consisted in eating a lot of take-out meals, and that led her to crave eating healthier as an adult. But she doesn’t deny her children the sweets they love or a trip to Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s.

Stewart and Lomonte both admit that the ages of their children and the ability to have one parent at home encourages their lifestyle, but expect things will change as their kids become more involved in the world outside.

“I understand why so many people can’t [have family dinners] and I feel so lucky,” said Stewart, who can interrupt her work to put something in a crock pot or in the oven. Lomonte and his wife, who plans on going back to work once her children are in school full time, have already agreed that as their schedules become more hectic, family dinners will not be compromised. He said with planning and flexibility they should be able to continue eat together most nights of the week.

While both families have yet to encounter the challenges of scheduling dinner around sports activities and boyfriends, Jodi Lederer and Christina Santos often find themselves sitting at empty dinner tables.

“No matter what happened in the world, dinner was always on the table at six,” Lederer said of family meals when her children, Starr, 21 and Harley, 18, were teenagers. Despite their schedules, her children were always home for dinner even if it meant setting a plate for their friends.

Lederer, who was a bookkeeper then but is now a personal trainer, said her secret was strict planning and buying prepared meals like packaged salads or a rotisserie chicken. “I don’t do a lot of takeout,” she said, adding that after losing 80 pounds, healthy family dinners are extremely important to her.

Even when her children couldn’t be home to eat with the family, Lederer always made sure a plate was prepared and her kids never sat at the table alone once they returned from practice or work. “That’s just how you reconnect with your family,” she said.

With both her children away at college, she found herself adjusting to cooking for two as she continues to eat meals together with her husband Philip.

Santos also finds herself in the company of her husband at a once bustling dinner table. With two of her four children, ages 22 to 28, living on their own and the others busy with their own young adult lives, Santos makes it a point to have one meal with her entire family each weekend.

“Sunday is dinner day,” she said. “They all come home with their significant others and we sit down.” Like Lederer’s children, the Santos clan was always home for dinner even if it meant bringing friends along. Santos, the owner of local florist Santos Design, said the family always ate at the table, whether it was home-cooked meals on dishes or pizza on paper plates. Sometimes the family ate as late as 8 p.m.

Coming from a large family and living in a small home when she was growing up, dinner was done buffet style with everyone sitting where they could find a seat.

“Since they were small it was always important to me that we had to sit down,” she said. “It seems to me that when we sit down for dinner, we forget our surroundings and our focus is at the table.”

Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.