The Pita Spot/Mezza reopens as Vivian’s
The Mediterranean place at 45 Williams Ave. has gone through its share of re-branding and renovations over the past decade. But remaining consistent are the Lebanese staples loyal customers have come to love, and the smiling face of owner Vivian Torregrossa.
After being closed for three months, Torregrossa and her brothers — Tony and Eddie Hokayem — reopened Mezza as Vivian’s Mediterranean Market on Sept. 10.
While this is the second time the owners have renamed the establishment — it started as The Pita Spot — it is the first time the concept is a market rather than a restaurant. Indoor seating has shrunk from 40 to eight, while refrigerators of grab-and-go containers of food line the sides.
Torregrossa said their bestsellers are baba ganoush, tabouli, hummus, falafel, collard greens, Lebanese-style moussaka, and moudardara with caramelized onion.
Torregrossa has also embraced her first love, Italian cooking, with options like fettuccini Alfredo, rigatoni Bolognese and pasta fagioli.
Some dishes are still made to order. After all, they couldn’t get rid of the lala chicken, their signature dish.
Torregrossa said the change from restaurant to market came from a desire to spend more time with family, though she said wistfully of the restaurant, “It was beautiful and we miss it . ... We used to visit everyone at the tables, and we made a lot of wonderful friends.”
Torregrossa and her brothers originally intended The Pita Spot to be a takeout place, but during construction people kept saying they couldn’t wait to come there for dinner.
Their attitude was “Why not?” and so when The Pita Spot opened in July 2009 it opened as a sit-down spot.
But people felt the name didn’t fit. The Day in 2009 said the name “can’t even begin to capture the riches of the menu,” while the New York Times in 2015 called The Pita Spot “inaptly named” — though both reviews were glowing.
In 2016, they changed the name to Mezza “to better represent the great menu and food that we serve,” the eatery wrote in a Facebook post.
Torregrossa recalls being “blown away” by the large variety of mezza — side dishes and meats — when she visited her native Lebanon in 2004. It was the first time she had been there since immigrating to the U.S. in 1973, at age 13.
Following the deaths of the siblings’ sister and mother a few years ago, they re-evaluated “the lack of quality time we were having as a family,” Torregrossa said. She noted she typically left the restaurant late at night and hardly ever had dinner at home with her husband.
So the family decided to return to their original idea as a place for takeout, which meant tearing out the benches, installing refrigerated cases, and painting, to better complement the stainless steel, Tony said.
Torregrossa knows that renaming a place is a risk, hence why her name was included, since customers know her by name.
The past few weeks have been exhausting and full of learning curves, but she said they’re “starting to find our groove.”