Tavern on the Trax Offers Spin on Traditional Favorites
By David Huck | Correspondent at January 30, 2024 | 9:30 am | Print
The town’s main hub of night life near the rail road station has reopened under a new owner and updated look as the Tavern on the Trax.
Local resident Craig Lentini is running the new restaurant, which is located at 845 Farmington Avenue. He describes the restaurant as a “gastro pub” that strives to offers a unique spin on favorites like burgers, steaks, pastas, wraps, and appetizers. There is also a late night “munchie menu” that starts after 9 p.m. and an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch buffet that runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“There’s pizza and nail salons and hair salons,” Lentini said of other businesses in town. “We’re trying to bump it up a little bit with the food.”
Lentini said he is trying to establish more of a restaurant with high quality food that can compare to places like the Plan B Burger Bar locations and Max Burger. He said that food-wise, his offerings can compete “100 percent” with the best gastropubs in the region.
To do that, he’s brought on head chef Jared Calderone, who worked at Feng Asian Bistro in downtown Hartford and trained under renowned chefs David Burke and Thomas Keller in New York City. He’s also worked alongside Emeril Legasse and other celebrity chefs. Some of his specialities are pasta dishes, like sausage rigatoni.
“We’re just trying to hit that niche of not super low end but not super high end,” Calderone said during a recent break from the kitchen. “We’re trying to be a middle of the road place that has really good craft food.”
Once Calderone starts attracting crowds, he says he wouldn’t mind cooking up his own masterpieces and surprising guests. “I feel that confident with what I’m doing here,” he said.
The restaurant opened in early November and town officials held a grand opening celebration earlier this month.
“We want this to be a place that’s comfortable where people come to after work,” Calderone said. “And have this be the place in Berlin.”
The tavern has 12 draft beer taps, one of which features a rotating local beer offering. As business grows, the selections will expand.
Lentini previously had a following at the Even Stephens diner, where he prepared seafood and prime rib dinners under the name Evens at Night. Lentini says it was one of the first establishments in the state to offer two restaurants in one location.
“Once I had a good following, I decided I wanted something a little bigger, something with a little more to offer, something with a little more ambience,” he said.
The business was long known as the Berlin Station Cafe and most recently Center Station Pub and Grill.
Lentini worked in construction for two decades but always had a longing to get into the restaurant business. A few years ago, he started cooking night at the diner and quickly started thinking about opening a place of his own. All he had to do was look a couple parcels down Farmington Avenue, to a bar with a storied history in town.
“It was one of the first bars that I actually went to when I was 21,” Lentini said in a recent interview. “Twenty-five years later, I own it.”
Visitors will have a hard time recalling the dark environment of its former self. The interior has a modern industrial feel and is brighter than it’s bar days. More light streams in and the floor has been redone, while new lighting has also been installed. There is train memorabilia, including a steel track dating to 1939 at the bar. Lentini says that besides paint, the place hadn’t been touched in more than 30 years. Lentini did most of the renovations work himself and estimates that if he had to pay someone to do the work it would have cost him upward of $100,000. He is renting the space with an option to buy the building.
In the spring, he has plans to update the exterior of the building and add a patio. Lentini says he will be working with the town’s facade program to hopefully become a recipient of funding for the project.
So far, Lentini says business is good. He says he has drawn customers ranging from families with young children, to those in their 20s, and people in their 60s coming for lunch. “We’re hitting all the age groups,” he said.
And with massive renovations set to take place at the nearby train station which will see an increase in rail passengers in 2016, Lentini says he only sees business increasing.
