The co-owner of the Burlington group that runs Pizzeria Verità, Trattoria Delia and Sotto Enoteca will open an Italian café and market a couple blocks away from those restaurants. Leslie McCrorey Wells said she hopes to launch Alimentari in the former Café Saint Paul spot at 196 St. Paul Street by the end of November.
Wells, 64, said her new business will offer a mix of Italian and local food and drink, including beer, wine and espresso. It will sell fresh salads, panini sandwiches, Roman-style pizza, fresh and frozen to-go meals, and ingredients. The latter will include menu staples from the group’s restaurants, such as Trattoria Delia’s Nonna’s meatballs, sourdough bread and herb butter; and Pizzeria Verità’s frozen pizzas and gluten-free pizza dough.
“Everything will be really fresh and made in house,” Wells said, noting that the café space has a full kitchen, to which she will likely move the group’s fresh mozzarella production. There will be limited indoor seating plus patio seats through the fall.
Many market products, such as Italian and Vermont meats and cheeses, will cross over from the restaurants, too, Wells said. Alimentari will stock the branded retail products the group already distributes to stores: Trattoria Delia tomato sauce and Pizzeria Verità hot honey.
Wells expects clientele to include Champlain College students who live in the college-owned building, plus locals and tourists. She said Alimentari will complement the group’s trio of nearby restaurants.
“I love going into Eataly, where you have all these options to get wonderful food in different ways,” Wells said, referring to the chain of Italian food halls with retail counters and restaurants. “We’ll open up an opportunity to get people in the neighborhood, or folks who are walking by during the day when our restaurants aren’t open. It rounds out what we’re doing.”
