Hartford-area chef and restaurateur Rob Maffucci has launched a new venture in Berlin.
Vito’s Pizza, located at 1863 Berlin Turnpike, had a “soft opening” last week in advance of its official debut on Tuesday. The eatery, which offers pizza, fresh pasta and other Italian classics, is takeout only — a response, Maffucci said, to new waves of the coronavirus that have hammered the restaurant industry for close to two years.
Since the spring of 2020, he noted, restaurants have gone into a cycle, opening their indoor areas when COVID-19 infection rates seem to lull and then moving to takeout-only when the situation gets worse. Limiting operations to takeout from the start will avoid that back-and-forth, he hopes, and allow him to run the restaurant with a smaller staff.
“I saw takeout as the only option,” Maffucci said Thursday. “With labor costs, the limited pool of labor, the cost of goods and COVID, restaurant owners are getting squeezed in every direction. So the only way to go, for now, is takeout.”
Maffucci previously ran V’s Trattoria on Trumbull Street in downtown Hartford. The restaurant initially thrived, but the start of the pandemic in 2020 exacted a heavy toll on business.
“I had to close up and walk away,” he said. “Unlike many other cities, with Hartford, the people who had been commuting in all these years just did not come back.”
After a brief sabbatical, Maffucci decided to return to the restaurant business, but with a model he believes can hold up to the twists and turns of COVID-19.
So far, the response has been enthusiastic.
“We quietly opened last week, and there was a firestorm of activity,” he said. “We were overwhelmed. It was quite remarkable.”
Vito’s is also offering catering, and starting in May Maffucci plans to debut a food truck, known as V’s Rolling Stone, which will offer wood fire-baked pizza at an outdoor space in Portland by the Connecticut River.
