This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

Joseph Migliucci’s parents wanted more for their young son than the family restaurant business. So they gave him the hardest jobs, like cleaning the floors and washing dishes.

“Finally I put him behind the range and thought, ‘This will kill him. He’s going to hate it,’” his father, Mario Migliucci, said in an article by The New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne in 1976. “Not a bit. And now he’s good at everything. Terrific bartender, good host, the works.”

Joseph Migliucci stayed on at the restaurant, Mario’s, for nearly a half century more, maintaining its tradition as a red-sauce cornerstone of the Bronx’s Little Italy on Arthur Avenue in the Belmont section.