The first thing you might ask about the new restaurant just around the corner from Derby City Hall on Main Street is about the name, 500 Degrees.
“It’s the right temperature to cook a steak,” explained co-owner Ervina Seferi.
Steak and prime rib are among the choices of American cuisine on the menu at 500 Degrees, which opened on Oct. 8 at 181 Main Street, Derby, near the corner of Minerva Street.
Seferi, a naturalized American citizen from Albania, said chef James Takacs spices up his recipes by borrowing ideas from other ethnic cuisines, such as Spanish, French, Polish and Hungarian.
The new restaurant’s wait staff strives to give it a friendly, welcoming atmosphere, and Seferi said it offers a variety of Chilean and Argentinean wines, along with French and Californian wines also on the list.
Click here to check out the restaurant’s Facebook page.
The location has seen a number of restaurants come and go, including Fratelli’s and Chianti’s. Seferi said she and her business partner, Nick Ecker, owner of Charter Arms, the Shelton-based handgun manufacturer, often stopped in those establishments for business meetings.
When Chianti’s closed in April, they began making plans to open a new restaurant with Seferi in charge.
Seferi, who comes from a mountain town in Albania, originally came to the U.S. in 1998 at the age of 18 for an arranged marriage, a custom that is not uncommon in her home country.
“I was very young,” she said, adding that now she is a very Americanized woman and divorced from her first husband.
As a new immigrant, she worked as a waitress at Tartaglia’s and John J. Sullivan’s, learning much about the restaurant business. She eventually got a job at Charter Arms, starting off in customer service before moving up to accounts receivable and international sales.
Seferi said the Valley good restaurants, which is a tribute to its good business people who work hard. The still vibrant immigrant cultures add a dash of variety.
For the new restaurant, she said they wanted to offer diners something different, so they chose American cuisine, but with influences from other national cuisines.
The menu includes Takacs’s recipes for risotto, truffle mac and cheese, flat-bread pizza, prime rib and New York strip steak and ravioli. Desserts and dinner rolls are also produced on the premises.
“He’s very passionate about what he does,” Seferi said about her chef.
“I just want when people sit down to eat that they’re surprised that they get something that good in the center of Derby,” Takacs said.
500 Degrees is open for dinner daily, and since mid-November for a Sunday brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Takacs said customers who come for brunch could have fresh corned beef with roasted onions and peppers and fingerling potatoes, topped with their choice of two eggs. He recommended poached eggs.
“It comes to the table sizzling hot,” he said.