Latest news with #Sorella
Eater
18 hours ago
- Business
- Eater
Greek Group Balos Announces New Italian Restaurant Downtown
Skip to main content Current eater city: Washington, D.C. Plus, Carmine's marks 15-year milestone and more intel Jun 27, 2025, 9:08 PM UTC Downtown is getting a chic Italian spot from rapidly expanding Balos Restaurant Group. The upscale newcomer will be called Sorella, per a rep, and span nearly 10,000 square feet (1800 M Street NW). Landlord Columbia Property Trust, which is in the midst of renovating the 10-story office tower, confirms the 15-year restaurant lease on the ground floor. While the 'all-new concept' is in the 'very early stages,' the look and menu is going for 'Amalfi Coast' vibes. Co-owners Joe Ragonese, Tom Tsiplakos, and Stefanos Vouvoudakis are best known for Balos Estiatorio, the napkin-throwing Greek hot spot in nearby Dupont (and celebratory site of Washington Capitals NHL star Alex Ovechkin's record-breaking goal). Its New York-styled sibling Bar Angie, which debuted in April in the West End, will soon expand across state lines with the opening of the much-bigger Angie in Arlington, Virginia. Vouvoudakis and Tsiplakos are also behind NY-born For Five Coffee Roasters, which also fuels the restaurants' espresso martini programs. Sorella plans to debut in spring 2026, joining Pret A Manger and Slapfish at the base of the building. Penn Quarter's 750-seat Southern Italian staple Carmine's just turned 15, and to celebrate, chef Glenn Rolnick put a lighter, summery spin on its traditional lasagna. The all-veggie, 'pinwheel' platter feeds up to six and features spinach lasagna sheets from Rafetto's NYC. Carmine's will donate 20 percent of each $37.95 order sold to DC Central Kitchen. A who's-who of D.C. cut a 15-foot-long version this week to commemorate the big birthday. With 20,000 square feet and nine private dining rooms, Carmine's is considered the city's biggest restaurant (425 7th Street NW). Lasagna pinwheels feature sundried peppers, ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, roasted eggplant, basil, and plum tomato sauce. Chicatana, a breakout star in Columbia Heights' crowded taco scene, suffered extensive damage in the late hours of Wednesday night. Per DC Fire, a mechanical fire occurred in the kitchen (with no injuries reported), and the restaurant will remain closed until renovations are completed. The 3-year-old spot, which recently relocated to the nearby 14th Street NW space that formerly housed DC Corazon, caters to daring diners with generous use of ants and grasshoppers — a delicacy of its chef's native Guerrero. Due to its proximity, Italian standby Little's Coco's was also forced to close until Monday, June 30 'to deep clean for smoke.'
Chicago Tribune
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis to open Italian steakhouse at new Hollywood Casino location in Aurora
Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis, known for her Food Network shows, will open an Italian steakhouse called Sorella as part of the new Hollywood Casino resort under construction in Aurora. The casino is planned to open in 2026. The restaurant's menu is expected to include fresh pasta, steaks, Roman-style pizza and other Italian dishes, according to De Laurentiis. The restaurant will have outdoor seating and an open kitchen. This is the latest update to the casino project, which will move the Hollywood Casino from its current location in downtown Aurora to a site at Farnsworth Avenue and Bilter Road in Aurora, across the street from the Chicago Premium Outlets mall. The project broke ground in November 2023, and is expected to have 1,200 gaming positions, about 220 hotel rooms, a retail sportsbook, an outdoor entertainment area, a full-service spa, a roughly 12,000-square-foot event center with meeting areas and a number of bars and restaurants, according to past reporting. The casino site, which is part of the city's newly-announced APEX District, will contain Aurora's first four-star hotel, the largest structure built in the city in over 50 years, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin has previously said. The project is currently on schedule to open in the first half of 2026, vice president and general manager of Hollywood Casino-Aurora Greg Moore said on Wednesday. The casino's 1,000-car parking garage has been fully built, according to past reporting, and the hotel's glass exterior was recently completed, Moore said on Wednesday. Going forward, they're going to be working on interior construction, such as laying cables for the gaming systems, hotel doors, surveillance and valet systems, according to Moore. And when it came to having a high-end restaurant at the site, Moore said they were looking for something a little different from the steakhouse they have at the downtown location – and they wanted star power. 'We just landed on (De Laurentiis),' Moore said on Wednesday. 'That was our dream, that was the one we wanted to reach out to.' De Laurentiis will also be opening a restaurant, to be called Sorellina, at the Hollywood Casino Joliet. The restaurants in Aurora and Joliet will be the chef's first two locations in the Chicago area, according to a news release from Laughlin Constable, the advertising agency for the casino project, and Penn Entertainment. De Laurentiis already owns two restaurants in Las Vegas and one in Scottsdale, Arizona, the release said. She's also the author of 11 cookbooks. The Joliet restaurant is set to open first, near the end of 2025, alongside the Hollywood Casino location it's part of, Wednesday's release said. The Aurora restaurant is set to open in the first half of 2026. De Laurentiis said she had been involved in the project for about a year and half before the new restaurants were announced on Wednesday. At this point, the design for Sorella in Aurora is mostly finished, Moore said, and they're working on, for example, ensuring pipe fittings will fit the pizza ovens they plan to install. One of the special features of the Aurora restaurant will be the outdoor seating, De Laurentiis said, which she said required special city approval. 'Because we're part of a casino, outside seating to me is, like, a breath of fresh air,' De Laurentiis said on Wednesday. 'It's usually, you're stuck inside for a lot of it.' The projects in Aurora and Joliet also require some calculated design choices, De Laurentiis noted, that allow restaurant-goers to enter the restaurants without going through certain parts of the casinos. According to Illinois law, individuals under 21 years old are not allowed to be in parts of a casino where gambling occurs, so the restaurants need to be designed in a way that families and young people can easily access them without having to go through certain areas of the casinos. De Laurentiis said they prioritized having an entrance straight off the main parking lot at the Aurora location, for example. De Laurentiis said the menu for Sorella in Aurora is also expected to be more formal than Sorellina in Joliet – and a bit pricier. Sorella means 'big sister' in Italian, she explained, and Sorellina means 'little sister.' Main courses at the Joliet restaurant will range from about $22-$35, De Laurentiis said Wednesday, but they expect the price point to be slightly higher for Sorella in Aurora. Although the menu for the Aurora restaurant is not finalized yet, she has planned for dishes like Roman-style pizza appetizers, branzino and a Tuscan ribeye steak with a fried egg. They will also have fresh pastas – including hand-cut, stuffed pastas – in contrast to primarily dried pastas at the Joliet restaurant. The Joliet restaurant will focus more on pizzas and pastas and function as a more family-friendly spot, whereas the Aurora location is meant to be more of a special occasion restaurant, De Laurentiis said. But the goal is still to be accessible for residents, casino leadership said. 'The price points I actually expect to be very reasonable,' Moore said of Sorella. 'They'll probably be less than the average check currently in our Fairbanks Steakhouse.' De Laurentiis said people involved in the project polled community members about what kind of restaurant they wanted, and that informed the decision to create a more upscale restaurant. 'They have a lot of lower-end type of food experiences (in Aurora),' De Laurentiis said. 'They would love to have a fancier spot in their own area rather than having to travel to Chicago every time. I think that the traffic is something that is on everybody's mind. A lot of people commute, and they don't want to do the commute again to go to dinner.' Approachability and variety is a major goal of the new casino project in general, Moore said. He said he wants the new casino to feel like a 'choose your own adventure location,' with more amenities – like a hotel, spa and event center – than the current location in downtown Aurora. In addition to Sorella, the new casino will have a sports bar restaurant, an Asian restaurant and a 'social hall' with a number of different food vendors, Moore said on Wednesday. The casino already has over 400 staff members as of February, but is looking to hire for around 50 positions immediately, Moore said, noting that the casino is holding a job fair from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at Waubonsee Community College's Aurora Downtown Campus. They're estimating a final staffing of about 800 by the time the new casino site opens, including dealers as well as staff like security and hotel and restaurant employees. As for Sorella's progress, De Laurentiis said they are beginning to talk design details: colors, fabrics, chairs, the like. When she opens a restaurant, De Laurentiis said she typically spends time training the staff before it opens, and then checks in periodically once it debuts. She also has a say in the hiring of the cooking and management staff. That means she'll be spending a lot of time in Joliet and Aurora in the coming months – first at Sorellina in Joliet beginning in August, and then alternating between the two locations as Sorella in Aurora gets closer to opening. As these are her first two restaurants in the Chicago area, De Laurentiis said she's excited to be expanding to a place with a known restaurant scene. 'I've been involved in the food scene for about almost 25 years,' De Laurentiis said. 'And I've seen (Chicago) evolve from just deep dish pizza and steakhouses to all sorts of different regional Italian food, regional Asian food. I think the people of Chicago have really embraced food in a way.' And she values the chance to bring something like that to the suburbs. 'I think that there's … a lot of people who don't have access to always being able to come to Chicago for great food, so the ability for me to give it to them in the suburbs and make their lives a little easier … I think that's wonderful,' De Laurentiis said. 'Who doesn't want to have a really lovely food experience in their own neighborhood?'
Telegraph
06-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
George Ford: six things I've learned about business
I founded Kobe Coffee, an independent coffee shop, in 2019 with my older brother Joe, and now I also run an Italian restaurant, Sorella, with my wife Atdhetare. Both businesses are based in Uppermill, a lovely village in Saddleworth, near Oldham in Greater Manchester, where I grew up. Getting good advice Joe and I always dreamed of running our own coffee shop because we loved drinking coffee ourselves. We would say: 'We'd love a coffee shop of our own,' so in December 2019 we opened Kobe. My dad Mike, himself a former rugby player, has always been a massive influence on my life and career and he gave us advice on making the initial investment in Kobe and what to do with my money by investing it in different ways. But probably the most important advice came from my wife, Addy, a few years later and we went into business together. She was in the hospitality business and Joe and I already had the coffee shop when I met her. I then invested in the building next door, which had a little café in it, but it didn't quite work out for the owners. We had to find someone to come in and take the lease and it was actually Addy who brought her Italian restaurant in here. I was the landlord and she was the tenant basically. When I got back from playing for England at the World Cup in November 2019, her restaurant came in, and she has been the driving force behind everything since then. She's had a huge input on how we have redeveloped the building and grown it and she has been instrumental in having the vision for a coffee shop, the Italian and the Japanese restaurant within it as well. It's gone from me just having a coffee shop with my brother to something so much bigger. Time management Addy is so driven and understands what she's doing because of her experience within the hospitality industry. She is present at the businesses relentlessly – keeping on top of things and making sure everything is running smoothly. I'll come back from training and be straight in there too to see how things are going, so it's like having two jobs. On my days off from rugby, I'm here and if I have a game on a Saturday, then on the Sunday I will be working in the businesses. It's full on, especially with my rugby commitments for Sale and England, so time management is everything. We have tried to bring in people who can manage the place and take a bit of pressure off us so we don't have to be there all the time. That's the biggest thing in the past 12 months – bringing in a manager to the restaurant and coffee shop and knowing the day-to-day running is going to be smooth. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't here a lot, though, and sometimes it has crossed the line. Finding the balance is difficult, especially with our young daughter, Alarnia, being born in March 2024. But it's something we're working out as we go. Joe has a seven-year-old boy and coaches in Doncaster, which is a commute of more than an hour each way, so he has a similar challenge to balance his time between rugby, the businesses and his family. His wife works full-time as well, so there is a fair bit of planning and communication between us all to get everything organised. The Christmas period was especially crazy, as you can imagine, but we got through it. Family support is vital It's fantastic to have a strong family support network close by. I left here as a 16-year-old to move to Leicester Tigers and spent well over a decade away after my time at Bath before returning to Leicester for a second spell. Since joining Sale in 2022, I have been living in Saddleworth full-time again and it's amazing to be back – although I never thought I would be. My mum and dad live five minutes down the road and Joe lives five minutes the other way. Having my parents so close is absolutely invaluable because they help us with Alarnia and with the businesses. My mum does a lot of cooking and baking for the coffee shop and my dad is always in here helping out too. Kobe is a family business and Sorella is a family business with Addy and her family. It's what the families do outside the businesses which allows the businesses to work. Without that family support it would be really difficult. Employing excellent staff As a business owner, you have to be so diligent with getting the right people to come in and work in the business. The staff are a reflection of the owners – of us – so we want the business to reflect who we are as people, my wife and I. We've gone through a cycle where we had a lot of staff at one point and we learned that we could have got a lot better quality work and more consistency from them. What we have now, though, is a smaller group of people who work here but in terms of customer service, the staff are pretty incredible. I say that because the customers who come in get a better quality of service and want to come back. That is what it's all about as a business – people who have a great experience at the coffee shop or the Italian, want to return, and not only want to come back but bring friends or family with them as well. The better the experience we can give the customer through the quality of product – and quality of service as well – will hopefully bring people back in. We're in a pretty decent spot with that right now, although it's taken a while to get there, don't get me wrong. Meeting challenges head on Kobe opened in December 2019 and Covid struck in March 2020. We were just getting going and hadn't had long enough to build a regular clientele. But we had to think outside the box and, when we were allowed to open for takeaways, that's what we did. Joe and Addy and I were in here every day and do you remember when you could go for a walk and get a coffee but weren't allowed to go inside anywhere? So we did that for six to eight weeks and the whole pandemic was obviously challenging for all businesses but we adapted and got through it. There is always something, every day, that you have to deal with. If, say, a chef calls in sick then I will have to find someone else to do it. At first you panic, but the more experience you have, it teaches you to stay calm because there is always a solution. Relationships Much like in rugby, building strong relationships with people is vital. That includes staff and customers who come in to eat and drink here. What we have learned is that the better you treat people, the more respect you get back and that's similar to rugby with your team-mates and coaches. I have taken a lot of principles from rugby into business and vice versa as well. Funding Circle, business finance that backs you Funding Circle knows that, just as rugby players can't win matches by themselves, business owners can't succeed on their own. The online platform for business finance has backed more than 100,000 UK small businesses with more than £13 billion of funding – and counting.
