Bistro Mediterranean & Tapas Bar comes to Milford
MILFORD — He may be the boss’s son, but Alex Carreño is getting no breaks at Milford’s newest restaurant.
When Bistro Mediterranean & Tapas Bar opens on Tuesday, the 21-year-old business student at CT State Community College will bus and wait tables and help waiters haul food trays to diners as a runner just like any other restaurant beginner, said his father, Leo Carreño. The hours will be long, but Alex Carreño says he loves both the work and his father.
“He pushes you to be the best. He teaches you how to be direct with people and how to run a business,” Alex Carreño said of his father. “He can be challenging, but he wants it so that you learn every phase of working at a restaurant.”
The South Americanand Italian-fare restaurant is the fourth in the Carreño family’s chain of eateries. It is moving into what was once Il Capriccio Ristorante at 1015 Bridgeport Ave., which closed last August after 11 months.
Leo Carreño and his brother, Gabriel, opened the third in the restaurant chain in Norwalk in 2015. That followed the Bistro Mediterranean outlet in Westbrook that opened 11 years ago, three years after the original launched in East Haven.
The Carreños are very much a restaurant family. The 42-year-old Leo Carreño came to the U.S. in 2000 from Guayaquil, Ecuador, where his parents ran a small restaurant. Leo Carreño and his wife, Melba Lopez, oversee the East Haven and Westbrook locations; Gabriel Carreño owns the Norwalk location. Leo and Melba’s younger son, Sergio, works in East Haven as a host and runner, Carreño said.
Their third son, Alonso, is a bit young for the business at age 7.
“It is our family business and we do it with our passion,” Leo Carreño said. “We do it as work, but we always do it with class, from inside ourselves.”
Like his brother, Leo Carreño worked his way up the chain of command at several Connecticut restaurants, starting in Meson Galicia in Norwalk soon after arriving in the U.S. He worked as a busboy there and moved in 2005 to another Spanishstyle restaurant, Mediterranean Grill in Wilton. Other jobs followed.
Watching his children grow and find their niche in the restaurant business is part of the fun of the job. Carreño said he can cook well, and has done it, but he said his passion is working out in the front of the house, sharing the dining experience with his customers. His brother, Gabriel, is a chef, Carreño said.
The Milford restaurant will generally follow the business model set in East Haven, with the same sort of menu, featuring salads, pasta, chicken, beef and seafood dishes as well as tapas, all with a distinctive Mediterranean flavor. After finding success in the first three family restaurants, Carreño said he isn’t too worried about getting the newest effort off the ground.
“If you don’t try, you never know. To live is to try, and a lot of people say that we would make it here, but who knows? If you fail, you just do it again,” Carreño said. “It’s not my first time. I could just keep going (with East Haven and Westbrook) but now I am here and I want to do this, and we’ll see how it goes.”