Popular downtown Hartford Italian restaurant and wine bar Salute will open a second location in Rocky Hill, which owners plan to debut this summer.
Salute’s Hartford location, which closed for four months at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic last spring but is currently open every day, will remain the restaurant’s flagship location, Managing Partner Andrew Rizzo said.
The new 4,200-square-foot Rocky Hill location will be at 377 Cromwell Ave., which was the former home to the Pazzo Cafe.
Rizzo said he and his partners, including Jimmy Cosgrove, for years had talked about opening a second Salute (and even considered buying the former Pazzo Cafe location about three years ago), but never pulled the trigger. COVID-19 changed Salute’s calculus in a counterintuitive way.
“Business in Hartford was just so good… that we didn’t feel the need that we really had to [open a second location],” Rizzo said. “There was always a Wolf Pack game or a Bushnell show going on.”
But since COVID-19 led to an emptying of offices in downtown Hartford, Salute and other restaurants in the center city have experienced significant declines. Salute’s revenues dropped 58% in 2020 from the previous year, Rizzo said. The restaurant received a total of $684,000 in Paycheck Protection Program funds, which has enabled the owners to keep Salute’s approximately 40 employees on staff.
Rizzo and his partners aren’t yet clear on when the Rocky Hill location will open, but are shooting for June or July in hopes that by then the COVID-19 vaccine will have caused transmission rates to fall enough for restaurants to operate at or near 100% capacity.
The restaurant will need to hire about 40 people to staff the new location, Rizzo said, adding that while Salute isn’t back to being profitable, business in a new-normal environment is stabilizing.
“We should be OK,” Rizzo said. “Are we making anything? No. But we’re sustaining.”
