The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Winsted welcomes The River Eatery as newest restaurant
WINSTED — A takeout customer couldn’t stop looking at a dessert display at the new River Eatery at 8 S. Main St. recently.
“I like the look of your chocolate cream pie,” he was overheard to say to the manager, Bea Lamanna. “You couldn’t tempt me with anything more than that right now. I like the way you make it.”
Homemade pies and other desserts are an important part of the menu at the restaurant that opened Sept. 19, said Maureen Pavlak, co-owner. with her boyfriend, Joseph Lamanna.
Other popular items include platters of fried fish, fried chicken and fish and chips, all served with coleslaw and fries.
“We have fresh fish,” Pavlak said. “We have specials of the day, which today is haddock. And then we do shrimp. We do calamari. We do scallops. Clam strip rolls and clam strip platters have been moving out of here like crazy.”
Pavlak hails from Shelton. She raised her family in Torrington and lived in Florida for about 15 years, where she and Joseph Lamanna opened a small restaurant near Daytona. They outgrew the space and found a bigger location, then added breakfast to the menu.
“I like to cook,” she said, “so I was adding some Greek food. And before I knew it, it was just kind of like breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days a week, and it became
kind of like a diner where we had everything.”
But she never felt comfortable in Florida, she said, even though her parents had followed her down there.
“My kids were in New York, and I wanted to come back. But when you make roots, you can’t just pick up. You buy a house, you buy a business, you’re there,” she said.
Her mother kept urging her, “Go back and be with your children,” she said, and so she did. “Then my parents both got sick, and I lost them. I lost my dad in October (2019), and then COVID hit.”
Even with so much going on in her personal life, she was itching to open a new restaurant. She bought a building in Winsted’s east end, on a bend in the road where the Mad River joins the Still River. It needed extensive renovations – the pipes had burst and the air conditioning needed upgrading – but she and a crew tackled it.
“We tiled, we painted, we wallpapered, and fixed the ceilings,” she said. “Most of the equipment is new.”
She has four line cooks and may be hiring more, she said. Four other employees work the counters.
Joseph Lamanna, who is manager Bea Lamanna’s brother-in-law, works there every day, Pavlak said.
Her first week was busy, she said. Friday and Saturday nights, she saw latenight high school baseball teams. Also on Saturday night, her point-of-sale system was unexpectedly activated, so she was getting orders from the cloud. She called the POS system to make sure she was getting paid. She was.
“And we’re like, where are these orders coming from?” she said. “I don’t know how the customers found out about it, but we were inundated Saturday night with Google orders.”
She studies the traffic flow on Route 44. “There’s always a lot of traffic here, and you’ve got to go Route 8, obviously, to go anywhere.”
Pavlak is confident that her location near the northern terminus of Route 8 is a good one. She also hopes people will realize she serves a premium brand of coffee.
“And we have great breakfast sandwiches,” she said. “You can kind of come in and get, you know, something quick. Gourmet coffee and a fresh sandwich on a hard roll.”
Burgers are also very popular, Pavlak said, as well as “a lot of clams, clam strips, clam rolls. We have footlong hot dogs, Hummel hot dogs, which is a premium product.”
The open dining area seats at least 25 guests, who order at the counter and relax at a table until their name is called. Takeout customers also pick up orders at the counter, near that tempting dessert case.
The River Eatery is open seven days a week 7 a.m.-9 p.m. For more information, including a full menu, call 860-238-4126) or go to www.facebook.com/casualsetting.