The History of New Jersey Burger Restaurant White Mana Owner Mario Costa

On Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City, four lanes of traffic lurch under power lines, screeching and growling day and night, past a shuttered auto body shop covered in faded graffiti, a cargo truck repair facility, and a liquor store. It’s all cinder block structures until the corner of Manhattan Avenue, named Mario Costa Plaza. There, a white-paneled, circular building with a dotted red crown looks like it could light up and lift off into outer space — White Mana Diner.

The building was constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows to showcase how you could cook, serve, and plate burgers without moving your pivot foot. That was a year before McDonald’s first opened. Louis Bridges bought the building and transported it to its current location in 1946. It still retains its charm because longtime owner Mario Costa hasn’t changed much, least of all himself.

Costa began working there as a teenager in 1972, mopping between the ankles of powerful mobsters. By 1979, he owned the place. Today, the slick-haired, unlit cigar-chewing old Portuguese man owns just about everything on the block: There’s a row of five houses, one of which contains Ringside Gym — a no-frills boxing gym where champs have trained under Costa’s management — and Ringside Lounge, a Portuguese bar and restaurant where he keeps boxer Mike Tyson’s pigeon coops on the roof.

Still, Costa is not above swishing a wet mop over a spilled Pepsi. Folks from the surrounding housing projects and more than a few celebrities call him the Godfather because of the stabilizing effect his humble and consistent presence has had on their lives.

On a Friday in November, under the blue evening sky, I walked up the few stairs and opened the door of the Mana hoping to meet Costa. The smell of grilled onions hung in the air. Menu items like a Taylor ham sandwich were printed on sheets of paper taped to the back wall. One sheet indicated filming dates for Bob Dylan’s biopic A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet filmed a scene here, though the place was then disguised as a Chinese restaurant.

Two couples and a single man sat on stools at the circular Formica counter. All were silent but the cook. He stood before the central command station, a flattop griddle, smashing minced onions into burger patties with a metal spatula, and sliding them to the middle with a loud scrape. A phone rang and he hustled through a doorway in the back.

The cook returned and served burgers, three per paper plate. He said to a couple seated directly in front of the griddle, “That was Mario. He’s with Mike.” Turns out Costa was in Tyson’s dressing room before Tyson’s match with Jake Paul in Arlington, Texas.

I dug into my burgers. (Three plus fries and a soda cost $7.50.) The Mana moves so many that the burger buns are always absorbent, springy, and moist. The thinnest sheen settles over the top from the greasy air. Their patty is about an ounce (bigger than White Castle), and with American cheese, those onions, and cool, crunchy pickle slices, it only occupies a modest portion of the bun. Someone who worked hard since breakfast could manage nine.

I had six, and since I couldn’t meet Costa, I slurped the last corner of icy soda water from my paper cup and left to meet his godchildren. Across Tonnelle traffic, the two-story L-shaped concrete block building I had barely noticed before had come alive. A group of men stood between cars parked by the entrance, from one that thumped an indecipherable beat. A woman in high-laced boots, a cropped fur coat, and a low-cut blouse parted from the group as she walked toward the door. I jogged politely across the street and slid in behind her.

Inside Ringside, 50 Cent’s “In da Club” blared. A bartender with a bow in her hair carried a giant dildo candle and a sparkling cake to a group, chanting, “Go, shawty, it’s your birthday.” Two jumbo screens broadcasted opening bouts (apparently unbeknownst to Costa). I sat at the bar. The wall behind it was covered in Portuguese tile and boxing memorabilia. Through the pass, a stovetop burner flared as the cook flicked a shrimp in a wave of sauce into the air and back into his pan. A man to my right had a cocktail that looked like antifreeze in a 32-ounce quart container — it was called Liquid Marijuana. To my left, a woman slurped a plastic takeout container of the AK, which she described as a Sex on the Beach with a can of Red Bull. There was a menu of 40 personal punch bowls called “buckets.” I ordered a Henny Tea and chatted with regulars.

“I’ve been rolling with Mario since day one,” said Kevin Barnett, a forklift operator. “Once, he let me throw a big Pittsburgh Steelers tailgate from 11 a.m. until game time.”

A pro boxer named Mikey Lee said, “My sister got killed a few years ago. Mario was always a person to talk to, with a place to escape the drama. We have a father-son bond.”

“My family used to come after basketball games,” said another regular, Richard Williams. “When my brother died, Mario was at all my nephew’s basketball games.” A dozen more gave similar accounts.

It became clear that while the Mana is the historical center of the Costa complex, Ringside is the living room where generations of the Jersey City family feel at home.

The following Tuesday, I met Costa in a booth at the Mana. He arrived with his cigar and said, laughing, “I heard you had a great night.” He gave me the rundown he gives journalists: that the sliders got their name because of the action on the grill. It has nothing to do with size. There were once six White Mannas all around Jersey. However, only White Manna (owned separately) in Hackensack and the original (spelled “Mana” because of an uncorrected error) remain. A stocky retired pipefitter who goes by Jimmy the Juice and a woman named Bonnie Brummer (whose mom, Phyllis, used to work at the Mana as a car hop after her burlesque dancing shift nearby) joined us.

Costa ordered burgers but threw out the top buns and replaced them with a second bottom half. He was testing his theory that burgers are better served with two bottom halves of the bun since they are softer. He was right. The three old pals talked well-worn mob gossip about a hit that was once called in from the pay phone nearby and about who killed Jimmy Hoffa, all within earshot of a pair of smirking cops.

We sat at the booth until dark, and then I followed Costa on his beat from the Mana across Tonnelle down the block to the gym and then to Ringside Lounge. By continuously floating between businesses, he seems omnipresent. He’s never out of sight for longer than a bathroom break. In front of a row house, Costa slid around a boxwood and knocked on the window. The gym is in a first-floor studio apartment. A woman let us in. An older Puerto Rican man came down from a headstand inside the ring. Costa looked around at a few duck-taped heavy bags and said, “Mike says, ‘It ain’t LA Fitness, but I like a place where I can spit on the wall.’”

Costa started the gym in the mid-’80s to give local kids a free place to hang out. He has never made any money off boxers, but his reputation in boxing is larger than life. When Sylvester Stallone was filming the Rocky movies, he visited the gym to witness boxing culture; when the late Arturo Gatti needed a place to train in the early ’90s, he brought his whole family from Montreal. When Mike Tyson needed a place to escape (surrounding his criminal trial thirty years ago or one of his many eras in the limelight), he stayed in a hidden apartment, accessed by a fire escape behind the bar, and trained at Ringside. Over the years, Costa estimates he’s managed close to 10 world champions. Still, when Costa is spotted in Tyson’s entourage, in Vegas or elsewhere, and people ask who he is, he replies, “I’m a hamburger salesman.”

After the brief check-in at the gym, we moved down the street to the bar at Ringside Lounge. Costa ordered garlic chicken, garlic shrimp, and seafood paella. Then he poured equal parts red and white wine into each of the two glasses, mixed them with a straw, and we toasted. He had just been pheasant hunting upstate. He zipped to the kitchen and returned with two icy, unprocessed birds. “I simmer them in butter, garlic, and white wine,” he said. “Aren’t they pretty?” He held them higher. “These are the males. It’s like the Biggie Smalls lyric: ‘Dressed to impress, spark these bitches’ interest.’” I must have looked concerned. He added, “Don’t worry, I don’t sell these. Sometimes, I’ll send a plate home with kids.”

Costa grew up hunting out of necessity in a fishing village called Murtosa, Portugal, during the Salazar dictatorial regime. “England had Rolls-Royce, Italy had Ferrari, and Portugal had sardines — nothing.” His family moved to Newark’s Portuguese Ironbound neighborhood in 1967 when Costa was 12, just in time for the Newark riots, which lasted five days, leaving about 700 injured and 26 killed, most of them Black residents. In 1972, Costa’s family moved from Newark to Jersey City, and Costa took a job at the Mana. In 1979, the owner opened a flame broiler-fueled spot nearby called White Manor, theorizing that greasy flattops were losing favor, and offered Costa the Mana for $80,000. Costa had $30,000 saved, got $10,000 from his mother, and took out a $40,000 loan from a local Portuguese credit union.

“I’ve never spent money and never got into bad businesses,” he said. “The mob guys respected that. I heard one say, ‘Remember that kid who used to mop the floors? He owns the place now; he’s an earner.’”

By the ’80s, the Jersey City Heights neighborhood, once home to mostly European immigrants, was changing. Black and Latino families were moving in and working at the local factories. Costa embraced the changes and mentored young kids, sponsoring several who were getting involved with boxing. Others weren’t as welcoming.

“The owner of the Polish bar across the street would throw a glass in the garbage if a Black customer drank from it,” he said. That business failed, and the building owner sold it to Costa for $15,000 in 1982. Costa called it Ringside. He hired two boxers, Timothy Broady, who was Black, and Nino Gonzalez, who was Latino, to work the bar.

“Within a month,” Costa said, “everybody came — Black, Spanish, white. I had a jukebox in the corner, and everybody was happy, dancing, and singing. You can see, 42 years later, it’s still like that.”

The bar was getting packed again. There was chatter about local rapper Albee Al, who had just shot a music video there with Jadakiss and Benny The Butcher.

A middle-aged man came to say hello with his elderly mother and pick up two plastic bags of packaged food behind the bar. He was staying in one of Costa’s apartments, trying to get on his feet after a 15-year prison sentence. He showed us a recent video he took of boxing great Roberto Durán holding one of Tyson’s pigeons on the roof.

The pigeons are a living museum piece for boxing enthusiasts like the Mana is for food enthusiasts. It’s part of the lore. As the story goes, Tyson kept pigeons on his Brooklyn roof as a boy. One day, a bully killed one in front of him, and Tyson found rage and won his first street fight. When trainer Cus D’Amato and his wife Camille Ewald adopted Tyson, they let him keep his beloved birds at their home in Catskill, New York, and when Ewald died in 2001, Tyson asked Costa to house them.

Our shrimp arrived in a clay dish on the bar, swimming in garlic sauce spiked with paprika and Louisiana hot sauce. Served with buttered toast for dipping, they are delightful as a bar snack, especially with Costa’s recommended red and white house wine mix. The garlic chicken arrived in a thick brown sauce (unlike traditional pollo al ajillo), and then an unwieldy paella in a steel pot, overflowing with crab legs, scallops, mussels, and shrimp, mostly obscuring the rice below. I agreed with the recommendations I’d received at Ringside: The shrimp is the move. After finishing the bowl, I realized Costa had left out two plates for sharing. He laughed, slapped my shoulder, and motioned with his head for me to follow him. We walked through a door behind the bar, then through another door, and onto a fire escape. I followed him up the ladder and onto the roof.

Costa stood beside a pigeon coop labeled “Tyson’s Corner” in the dark, wearing a black Members Only jacket, holding his cigar and watching traffic whiz past the glowing White Mana across the street. He turned to look at the pigeons that were bobbing and strutting behind chicken wire.

“One spring, Mike showed up here in a T-shirt, flip-flops, no phone, no money,” he said. “He asked me to open the gates so he could see the birds. We sat in lawn chairs watching them for three or four hours, and he fell asleep. When he woke, he raised his arms and shouted, ‘I’m rich!’ He was broke after so many people had taken advantage of him, but I understood: He had peace.”

Costa is rich in his own way. He never married or built a family, always focusing on his businesses. “They don’t call me the Godfather for nothing,” he says. “I’m Godfather to eight people here. You could give me a 2-million-dollar house in the suburbs, but I’d never leave what I have here in Jersey City.”