Photo courtesy of Tonino's.

January 13, 1987 is not just another date to Anthony Improta. Rather, it holds a special place in his heart. It is the day which he opened one of Hamden’s most well-known local college hangouts—Tonino’s Pizzeria.

Improta came to America with his parents in 1972 at the age of 11.  He says he learned everything he knows from his Italian parents, once well-versed in the restaurant business. It is these skills and strong family values which Improta has infused within his own business.

One lesson Improta says he will never forget concerns quality.  Improta believes he has a different philosophy when it comes to running his business stressing that he will “never compromise” when it comes to his food.

Everything at Tonino’s is made to order, a characteristic Improta believes makes his pizzeria stand out among the rest.  When it comes to Domino’s and Primo, they use discounts with the hope that their marked-down prices will attract potential customers. However, Improta adamantly disagrees.

“People will be coming back because they enjoy the food, not just because they are trying to save a buck,” he said. As such, Improta makes sure to use the best materials when dealing with his food.

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Improta’s pizzeria is his life—from ten o’clock in the morning, he single-handedly operates everything from the counters, food prep, and cooking.

He is also a full time father and husband.

“The restaurant business is not going to make me a millionaire but I am able to provide a good life for my family and that’s what is important to me,” Improta said.

Tonino’s has been around for nearly twenty-four years and has created many relationships around the Hamden area—though none is greater than the one Improta’s restaurant has made with Quinnipiac University.  Improta even hires Quinnipiac students to work part-time throughout the year.

With the support he receives from administrators, Improta says he looks forward to adding another twenty-four years to their relationship.

Over the years Improta has become very fond of the university and has been able to see the school grow alongside Tonino’s.

Thanks to a road project connecting Mount Carmel Ave. and West Woods Road, Tonino’s saw a change of scenery for the first time in 22 years.  Tonino’s is now much more visible to passerby and with the addition of a fresh sign, potential customers are always coming in looking to try something new.

Thanks to this new complex, 25 parking spots are available for Tonino’s customers.  Improta even added seating inside and outside for the spring weather bringing customers closer to establishment.  Improta has put up pictures of his home country, Italy, and of his family throughout the pizzeria so customers don’t have to go far for that authentic Mediterranean escape.

Click here to take a look around the Tonino’s kitchen.

Opened in early May 2004, Skappo Italian Wine Bar is a fairly recent addition to the historic area of downtown New Haven. Though a relatively new business, Anna’s restaurant boasts more history than meets the eye.

A native of Assisi, Italy, Anna opened up Skappo as a way to pay tribute to her father after his death. Currently, the family-owned restaurant is operated out of a small kitchen tucked in the back of the establishment.

While she tends to the more managerial side of the restaurant, Anna’s three children, Marc, Michael, and Yvette, work alongside her overseeing particular parts of the menu. The eldest, Marc handles the cooking of the meat while Michael chooses various selections of wine for the wine menu. The only daughter, Yvette, is in charge of the desserts—of which she is inventing new seasonal assortments.

Photo courtesy of Mark Mirko.

Saturday mornings at Skappo offer the family a unique opportunity to share a bit of their beloved heritage with locals. Through breakfast in addition to culture and language classes, Signora Anna and her family create a warm Italian environment which appeals to Italians and non-Italians alike.

Breakfast and language classes with Signora Anna are held every Saturday morning from 9:30-11 am. Admission is five dollars (which includes breakfast).

It’s a crisp fall afternoon in downtown New Haven where Yaley, Xinyuan Wu waits in a line almost 20 people deep.

“My friends say it’s the best cupcake they’ve ever had,” she said. “They told me I had to try one.”

Nearby, a first-time customer is waiting with a friend. She confides that she is afraid to try a cupcake. “I’m afraid I might get addicted and want one every day,” she said.

While another customer, an employee in the area, remarks that it is her third time trying to track down this truck. She says each time she finds it, her bus comes before she can try a treat. With only two people ahead of her, her bus comes again. Begrudgingly, she walks towards the vehicle, disappointment evident on her face.

So what’s all the fuss about? New Haven’s most recent bragging right: the Cupcake Truck.

The atmosphere around the truck was truly abuzz with expectation during my first visit. Even the oldest of customers wait with an eagerness, which can only be found in small children.

The mini mobile bakery is the brainchild of Todd and Marsha Rowe. Situated in the back of a 1970 Grumman Olson delivery truck, the couple has single-handedly become the latest focus of the local gossip.

Originally, embarking on an adventure to start their own bed and breakfast, financial limitations withheld the dream. Instead, they fell upon the idea of a mobile bakery. And it is certainly beginning to pay off.

Lines nearly 10, 20, 30 people deep can be found lining sidewalks and snaking around street corners, all made up of customers waiting in anticipation to sample one of the truck’s decadent creations.

With unique flavors including sweet potato pecan, lemon meringue and salted caramel, it’s no wonder why people are excited. What makes the small business even more unique is the personalization aspect. It is up to the individual to choose the flavor, frosting(s) and quirky toppings such as organic flowers or edible gold.

The Cupcake Truck operates in New Haven four days a week Tuesday through Friday. For more information, go to www.followthatcupcake.com or visit their blog, Fooddriven.blogspot.com, to see the trucks daily schedule and route.

Passerby walk in and out of local breakfast nooks in New York City.

It’s official–the people have spoken!

Restaurants and the Recession on Dipity.

Surprisingly enough, the rise of these post-Glutenbergian babies only exploded onto the blogosphere a few years ago. With the growing interest in social networking and the developing need to express oneself via the Internet, widgets were a thing of the future aimed to deliver a mini version of a specific piece of content outside that original parent site. site. A classic early widget is the Flickr badge, which allowed users to show a preview of their photos. Clicking on the badge would lead users to that person’s profile page.

So what is so compelling about widgets for local Mom and Pop restaurants? Engaging customers, of course! Widgets, being typically interesting and playful, offer a way for companies to target users with their content. The same information presented inside the widget instead of on a plain web page is likely to be more interesting to the user and prompt further exploration, thus leading to more page views.

So why not try it?

An all to common experience for the average American, the whole act of buying fast food has become a routine, a social custom as American as a “small, rectangular, hand-held, frozen, and reheated applie pie” (Fast Food Nation.) 

For the last ten decades or so, fast food has infiltrated every corner of the nation. From it’s start as a modest hamburger and hot dog joint in southern California, fast food chains are a thing of the present; a growing necessity to accomodate our fast and stressful lifestyles.

“In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined” (Source).

So how it that Americans can afford not to purchase fast food when it all seems so readily available–and for a fraction of the cost of most local food? According to a recent article published in the Nation’s Restaurant News, 2009 was a brutal year for American chains with some of the largest in the country falling 0.8 percent in sales. What’s more, the site exposed recent consumer research (carried out at last week’s UCLA Extension Restaurant Industry Conference) supports an even harder recovery for chains in 2010.

What could this mean for the future of the restaurant business?

You had to see this coming. What with @Oprah (Winfrey) and @ConanOBrien discovering it, with Ashton “@aplusk” Kutcher challenging CNN to a duel over who’d reach a million followers first. According to comScore, nearly 75,000,000 people visited Twitter.com this past January worldwide, this number representing some 1,100% growth in a single year. Not too shabby.

In the United States alone, Twitter.com received some 23,500,000 visitors putting the US market at around one-third of the entire Twitter user base, according to Compete.

Numbers that impressive mean the site is more than just the net’s latest craze — it means the service has become an inescapable cultural phenomenon, for better or worse.

“I’m obsessed,” said senior Sam Rupert. “Twitter is, like epic. I use it all the time.”

“It’s the future of the multimedia community, the new focus for journalists and bloggers, college students and celebrities,” said senior Victoria Reitano. “[Twitter] is just another way to get your thoughts across—instantly.”

According to Twitter today some 50 million tweets are sent a day. While impressive, what does that really mean? Well, tweets in 2009 grew some 1,400%. Traffic to Twitter.com grew around 1,100%, and total sent Tweets went up 1,400%.

Media credit: thenextweb.com

But what’s even more compelling about those January statistics? They don’t include all sorts of interaction with the micro-blogging site, such as the number of people who use Twitter on mobile phones or via third-party applications that send and receive Tweets.

Of course Twitter’s real impact is almost impossible to gauge (other than anecdotally) as it quickly permeates the outer skin of mainstream society. What’s more, people come up with inventive ways to use it as something more than a soapbox, suggestion box and/ or complaint center.

Forget the spellbinding power of Oprah — and the massive influx of traffic she drives. We’ve long passed the moment when numbers alone tell us nearly enough.

Cooks from all over the world are publishing recipes 140 characters at a time as ferries telegraph their comings and goings. Journalists use it to advertise articles, and guilt-ridden souls confess deep-seeded fears anonymously. Musicians-famous and non– turn it into a music discovery engine while politicians are announcing their candidacies and even tweeting from the House floor.

At this point, the number of unique visitors a month doesn’t tell you much. You need a cultural/technology sociological futurist to divulge its meaning. And hopefully one who can explain things in 140-character bites.

How long can it be before “Tweet” becomes the next official verb in the dictionary? Already thrown around as verbeage in everyday conversations, the act of tweeting has become so commonplace, an afterthought in what is but a gigabyte in our technologically savvy world.

Today, there is, seemingly, an abundance of social networking Web sites out there on the Internet all promising their many users that they can meet, greet and converse with millions of other likeminded people. Thanks to social networking titans like Myspace, Twitter and Facebook—there has never been an easier way to share aspects of your life or meet fresh faces online. Here are five reasons why social networking is the way to go for small businesses in 2010.

1. Many are totally free to use—unlike the days of AOL or CompuServe; you do not have to pay to use the awesome features of these social networking Web site.

2. You can share your pictures, life story and blogs with the public—close acquaintances or people you’ve never met.

3. Internet marketing strategies are needed to help ensure online success. The realm of social media marketing may appear to be an ambiguous field thus it is vital to use social media to get ahead of your competition.

4. This is a great way for businesses and brands to network and meet people who are interested in the content, advice and firsthand information you can provide.  

5. With more than billions of users worldwide, and constantly growing, you will be able to find just about anyone you know and also meet tons of other people in the process.

 But with hundreds of social media platforms out there in cyberspace, how can you know which is right for your business?  The truth of the matter is, it’s impossible to keep up with them all, though really there are very few that are not useful: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Myspace, the Ustreams and the Nings of the world.

[Zoom in to see several local and chain restaurants around the corner from Quinnipiac University!]

“Fast food is a symbol of the decline of civilization. It solidifies the journey we have made to separate ourselves from a connection to food and family, history and culture. It symbolizes all that is bad with the way food is viewed, what keeps us alive and provides our bodies with fuel we should not take so flip.”
Chef Jimmy Bradley [Source]

As Allie puts in her blog, “fast food is to the food industry what WalMart is to the retail industry.” Through pricey advertising, catchy slogans, and significantly lower prices, many are able to successfully blow their local competitors out of the water.

However, what’s especially interesting is the number of fast food chains compared to local eateries in more rural communities. Take Hamden for instance. There are a few Dunkin Donuts’ and McDonalds scattered up Whitney and Dixwell but it isn’t until you hit the center of town that you see Chili’s, Panera, TGI Fridays, and Starbucks. (Ironically, there is also a WalMart there too…)

Could it be that the center of town is the center of life and thus the perfect place for chains? With over 50,000,000 people who depend on fast food this certainly seems feasible. According to MyFit.com, that equates to more than $110 billion in  fast food sales in the US alone.