New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
A recipe for success
Father-son duo opens D’Orlando’s Pizza
BRANFORD — Michael D’Orlando took the greatest risk of his life in October.
He walked away from a lucrative job as a banker in Manhattan to open a restaurant at a time when the pandemic was beginning a resurgence and the economy was stagnating. Not to mention a skyrocketing unemployment rate that was shrinking wallets up and down the Shoreline.
“It could have been a recipe for disaster,” said the congenial D’Orlando, 49, as he relaxed in the cozy, mellow-lit dining room of D’Orlando’s Pizza Restaurant on Jefferson Road just off Route 1 on a recent afternoon.
It’s been quite the opposite, it seems, and that’s because there were a few factors working in his favor.
One was simple.
“It’s always been my dream to have my own restaurant,” he said.
During the summer, he heard the owners at DeLucia’s were selling. The restaurant is near the border of East Haven and Branford. D’Orlando, an East Haven native, moved to Damascus Road in Branford at 14. With five younger brothers, “we ran out of bedrooms,” he said.
“I had deep ties to both towns. It seemed meant to be,” D’Orlando said.
Another factor was pizza, which the restaurant would feature.
“It’s pandemic-proof,” he said. “No matter what’s going on with the economy, people always will buy pizza no matter what.”
He learned that from the third consideration in the equation: his son Mike, or Mikey, as he’s known, who happens to be the pizza chef at D’Orlando’s.
To hear D’Orlando tell it, this was not a legacy hire; no nepotism was at play. Mike D’Orlando, 30, honed his pizza-making chops at Pepe’s and Sally’s in New Haven, and Capotorto’s in East Haven. From each, he said, “I took a little and made it my own.”
The result is a Neapolitan pizza with a thick-edged, charred crust; a sauce of tomatoes bursting with freshness; a rich and creamy mozzarella; and toppings that range from broccoli rabe and sausage to mashed potato to the Branford Point, with calamari, shrimp, clams and scallops.
“Out of this world,” said Branford’s Shelly Johnson. “It’s like nothing else around here.”
It’s not just the pizza.
“We didn’t want to open just another pizza place with eggplant parm, chicken parm and pizza,” Mike
Jr. said. “We wanted to do something that would set us apart.”
That’s where Nonnie’s Spaghetti and Pepperoni comes in. It’s served in red sauce created by Mike Jr. that’s reportedly drawing patrons back again and again.
Nonnie is Pasqualina Imperato, Michael’s grandmother and Mike’s great grandmother. Her family settled in East Haven after her father emigrated from a small town just outside Naples.
“We grew up very Italian, with my nonnie living with us,” Michael Sr. said. “Her sister and brother lived next door, and her father lived two doors down from us.”
He recalled their giant garden. “My great-grandfather would have a brown paper bag, a grocery bag, and he would pick all the eggplants, the tomatoes, garlic, broccoli, and then come over every Sunday like he was shopping for us from the garden,” he said. “And Nonnie, she’d use all that to make everything.”
“Sunday dinner was a
big deal growing up,” Mike Jr. recalled. “There were always people cooking sauce and meatballs and grinding pasta in the kitchen, and my dad, with all his brothers, there were always a lot of people around the table.”
Their restaurant, Michael Sr. said, “is all about replicating what we both grew up on, just the freshness and the simplicity of the ingredients.”
And also, evidently, the family atmosphere. “We like to talk to everyone who comes in, just so we can recreate that comfort, like we’re sharing food with them,” Michael Sr. said. “And a lot of our staff is family and cousins. My mother Rosemary comes in here every week and breads the chicken cutlets, 80 pounds of chicken cutlets.”
It goes beyond family. When a diner heard they were looking for a regular chef, she told them about her son. She showed Mike Jr. his picture. It was Matt
Welles, his East Haven High classmate, who’d gone on to train at Johnson & Wales University.
The connections don’t end there. Both father and son have ties to the Branford and East Haven police
departments.
“We ask them what they need and we send it over,” Mike Jr. said. That afternoon, someone was picking up 40 pizzas for health care workers at the Fair Haven Health District. From the
beginning, the restaurant has offered 20 percent discounts to first responders, military, and members of police and fire departments.
“That’s one of the coolest things to come out of this,” said Michael Sr. “Before, when I was commuting to work at 4:30 a.m., I couldn’t do anything. Now we have a real way to support our community. The other cool thing is, I’m getting so much support from other restaurant owners in town and along the Shoreline. We all want each other to succeed.”
The best part, though, is that third factor. It’s the one that made the risk easy to embrace.
“Mikey is the best investment I ever made,” said the former banker.
D’Orlando’s Pizza is located at 1 Jefferson Road. For more information, visit https://dorlandospizza.com or call 203-483-5232. Free delivery to Branford and East Haven. Outdoor patio for dining.