Midtown Kingston’s main arterial, Broadway, is turning into quite the culinary corridor and nightlife strip. Anchored at one end by, well, The Anchor (which is under contract, with the buyer’s rumored intention to continue running it as is), the street now boasts hip deli/bar/eatery Lunch Nightly, Mediterranean restaurant Masa Midtown, PAKT, Tubby’s, West Kill Brewing’s soon-coming satelite outpost, Tanma Ramen, and a second location for the hugely popular Ollie’s Pizza in High Falls is opening soon.
On March 23, the owners of Ollie’s purchased the building at 582 Broadway, which for years has housed Tony’s Pizzeria—Kingston’s first-ever pizzeria, opened in 1937. “It was a sort of combination of us being open to the next thing, feeling like we had momentum that we wanted to take advantage of, and also this really cool, historic space becoming available,” says co-owner Sophie Peltzer-Rollo. “It is in an amazing location surrounded by a lot of other great community businesses. It felt very serendipitous.”
The building includes three retail spaces and a three-bedroom apartment upstairs. The Tony’s space will be converted into a bistro-style restaurant helmed by chef Chris Bradley, who currently works at Ollie’s and whose culinary track record includes time at high-profile Manhattan eateries Gramercy Tavern and Cafe Boulud. The middle space will be turned into an Ollie’s Pizza slice shop, with the third space serving as a provisions shop and commissary kitchen for all the other businesses.
“We’ll sell prepared foods like charcuterie, rotisserie chicken, and fresh bread,” says Peltzer-Rollo. “In the commissary space, we’ll probably do whole-animal butchering for all of the meat products for our restaurants, which will help us with sustainability and minimizing waste. Probably we’ll have the dough for the pizzerias made there and potentially our cheese as well. The specifics are up in the air, but the idea is to create a really efficient model.”
Depending on the resulting production schedule for the different products coming out of the commissary kitchen, Peltzer-Rollo said the team is interested in finding a way to open up the space for rental. “It will really depend on availability, but it would be awesome to make that something that could be rented out or for community projects,” she said.
Right now, the Tony’s space has been stripped to the studs as the previous owner Dylan Kennedy cut out portions of the drywall to take the pizzeria’s signature Todd Samara mural with him. “I’m really happy he was able to take it,” Peltzer-Rollo says. “I know those murals were sentimental for a lot of people, so I’m glad they’re being preserved.”
Peltzer-Rollo estimates that renovations will take a minimum of six months, with the restaurants looking to open by late fall. “We may have to stagger,” she says. “There is still a lot of supply chain back up. Kitchen equipment and refrigeration are already backordered four to six months out.”
The space will be designed by Peltzer-Rollo’s husband and Ollie’s co-owner Innis Lawrence, a High Falls native with a background in high-end and antique lighting. “It’s still in the works,” Peltzer-Rollo says, “but it will be elegant and casual, same as Ollie’s. Refined but comfortable.”
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Ollie’s Slice Shop to Open Next Week in Midtown Kingston
This article appears in March 2022.
