Almost two years after opening Enzo's Delicatessen, owner Joe Cardinale is on a new adventure — opening a Venetian-style wine bar next door to his specialty sandwich shop.
In the intimate space next door to Enzo's, Cardinale stood chatting with friends during a private soft opening event June 13. Italian wines adorned the floor-to-ceiling shelves sitting against the dark walls of the bar as Cardinale spoke about his new bar, Gran Sasso Wine Bar.
"There's nothing like this in the country. You know, there's Italian restaurants everywhere, but nobody is doing a Venetian style Bacaro because it's a very foreign concept," said Cardinale, said Cardinale, referencing the small Venetian bars that serve small glasses of wine and ciicchettos (small bites of food) known as bacaros.
The Italian Bacaro style of drinking and eating is what Cardinale hopes to create in the city's college nightlife district, after spending years working as a chef at various bars in the area.
Cardinale worked as head chef of Jake's Ripper's kitchen in the same college neighborhood that his sandwich shop now sits. He opened Enzo's in August 2020 and had originally planned to open Gran Sasso at the same time, but the pandemic pushed plans back.
The wine bar will feature exclusively Italian wines and liquors and infamous Italian cocktails — specifically Negroni, an Italian cocktail made with gin, vermouth and Campari, as well as a variety of spritzes.
Cardinale's said his main focus is on the atmosphere of the spot and the drink offerings. In terms of cuisine the spot will have small plates mostly made up of small pieces of bread served with various paired toppings like Soppressata (an Italian dry salami) and sun dried tomatoes or Ricotta cheese topped with salmon.
"If you go to Venice, this is what it looks like," Cardinale said. "They make all this great food with stuff like fresh fish and meat and you get a glass of local wine in a tumbler, you know, and it's so cool and so casual. You eat, have a drink. You have two bites and you go on to the next (bar) and you have a spritz. That's kind of what we're trying to do here."
Gran Sasso Wine Bar joins a handful of wine bars that have opened in Columbia in recent years and will be one of the first to focus on Italian wine regions. Everything about the restaurant — from the photos that adorn the walls to the house wines that the spot will have on tap — Cardinale has done with the intention of creating a Venetian feel at a price that Columbia can afford.
Glasses of wine will range from around $8 to $15 and bottles will be anywhere from $30 to $70. Cocktails will hover around the same price.
"We really want this to be affordable. You know, it's not a steakhouse and it's not a dive bar. It's going to be kind of in the middle," said Lara Deily, who is the restaurant's bar manager and moved from Washington, D.C. at the beginning of the year to help Cardinale run the spot.
The Italian wine bar is years in the making for Cardinale, who began his restaurant career washing dishes in eighth grade at a restaurant in New York. He came to Columbia for college and after leaving for a few years made his way back. Cardinale found his rhythm as a chef working at Jake's, a popular college bar in Five Points which was often hailed as impressive bar food in the city.
He started doing sandwich pop-ups in the neighborhood and that eventually became a full-fledged restaurant with Enzo's.
"Most of the kids that worked for me (at Jake's) were from the Northeast, and they just wanted like a good sandwich and like chicken cutlets and meatballs, so we would just make it for ourselves," Cardinale said. "And then like the other employees of Jake's wanted them and then customers saw it so we started doing like late night pop ups for Enzo's and it kind of took off and we made it our own thing."
Cardinale hopes to keep Gran Sasso as approachable as Enzo's and Ripper's Kitchen at Jake's. The wine bar doesn't have a sommelier and he wants it to be a "casual watering hole" where people can drink wine without it being stuffy, a goal that other wine bar owners in the area have also emphasized.
The restaurant is set to open after July 4 weekend and will be open four or five nights a week, but Cardinale emphasized it would be open on Sunday and Monday because he wants to have a spot to get good drinks on days that are notoriously libation-scarce in Columbia.
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