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ANSONIA – After 25 years of working at Derby staple Italian Pavilion, Emma Klobucishta is opening her own restaurant in Ansonia.
Emma’s Pavilion will open on 384 E. Main Street in Ansonia, the former location of Guy Peter’s Ristorante. Klobucishta said she hopes to open in September.
The two pavilions have no relation to each other – despite the similar names – and have different owners. The building on Pershing Drive was sold by longtime owner Mario Perone to Milford businessman David Salinas for $1.35 million in March.
Salinas got approval from the planning and zoning commission in January to open a retail marijuana dispensary – the first of its kind in Derby – before taking ownership of the building. As part of that approval, Italian Pavilion is getting downsized to about half of its former size.
Klobucishta said the downsizing motivated her to leave and open her own, separate restaurant.
“I had to leave. I had to move on,” Klobucishta said. She said she wanted more space than the old Pavilion will have when it reopens.
She said the new restaurant will have many of the same menu items that she and husband Tony have been preparing for decades. She said that other staff members who would have been laid off in the downsizing are joining her in Ansonia instead.
“These people worked with me for so many years, they’re like my family. The wait staff, the bus people, bartenders – it was very hard for me, to be honest. There would be nights that I would cry because I had to let them go, because there was no need for them,” Klobucishta said. “Now I’m very happy because they’re all going to come and work here, they’ll all have a job.”
Klobucishta said she had signed a ten-year contract with Perone in 2020 under which she took ownership of the Italian Pavilion business. However, after a family member fell ill last year, she had to back out of the contract to care for him. Perone then sold the building to Salinas after that contract ended.
Salinas said that Italian Pavilion isn’t going anywhere. He told The Valley Indy that the downsizing had been planned by the prior operator.
“The Italian Pavilion, which had always been owned by Mario Perone until the recent transaction, had been planning under its operator to downsize,” Salinas said. “It wasn’t downsizing because of the dispensary, it was downsizing because of the industry.”
He pointed to difficulties in the restaurant industry following the COVID-19 pandemic as motivation for the downsizing. He said he hopes the restaurant will reopen in its new, smaller form by the end of the month.
“Our goal is to reopen the Italian Pavilion as it was: same phone number, same website, same menu, and same recipes that started in 1970,” Salinas said.
Salinas added that the dispensary will begin hiring soon for an October opening. He said the floor plan he got approved in January was still accurate, and that he had recently applied for building permits from the city.
So, if all goes according to plan, there will be two Pavilions – Italian and Emma’s – in Derby and Ansonia in the coming month.
Ansonia city officials welcomed the Klobucishtas in a Facebook post on July 31. The post had garnered nearly 200 comments and over 50 shares as of Aug. 6.
Several commenters raised concerns about The Spot, a restaurant and lounge located next door to the new location. They worried about noise from The Spot seeping into Emma’s Pavilion. Klobucishta, however, said that she wasn’t worried. She said The Spot doesn’t have live music until after her planned business hours, and that she hasn’t been bothered by noise while painting the walls at the new location.
“I’ve been here, and I don’t even hear the music,” Klobucishta said.
Klobucishta said Emma’s Pavilion’s hours will be 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
