Stratford’s Dal Mare Pizzeria serves up homemade food in Lordship
STRATFORD — When Melissa Emanuel would go to restaurants, she would sometimes find the food disappointing. She remembers thinking she could do better.
“I always talked about having my own place. I always talk about how when you’re sitting there, ‘I could do better than this, I can make this better,’” Emanuel said.
She’s now putting her money where her mouth is, with the opening of Dal Mare Pizzeria on 346 Stratford Road. The restaurant, which she runs alongside one of her sons, Nick, has been open since Memorial Day and Emanuel said her food has been a hit with locals.
While this is the first time she’s opened a restaurant, Emanuel said she relied on her previous experience as a waitress and as a nurse when she first opened it. The town held a ribbon cutting on Tuesday.
One of her more popular menu items is named after the St. Margaret’s Shrine Catholic Church in Bridgeport. She said her family was involved for decades with the Feast of St. Anthony and the church meant a lot to them.
“Our pizza for the St. Margaret is one of the top sellers. And that’s the fresh tomato and mozzarella pie,” she said.
Other popular items, she said, are the homemade meatballs and the panini sandwiches. The restaurant’s Facebook page stated the restaurant food is made in-house and while many restaurants say their food is homemade, Emanuel means it.
She said she had to step out later in the day on Wednesday because she was running out of a popular menu item.
“I have to go home to make biscotti. I’m out of biscotti for the restaurants. That’s the big thing. The homemade biscotti, it flies out of here,” Emanuel said.
Mary Dean, Stratford’s economic and community development director, said Dal Mare Pizzeria is one of 10 restaurants that have opened in Stratford so far this year. The town helped, she said, by repaving the front parking area while Emanuel and her son renovated the exterior.
Mayor Laura Hoydick said she was already a fan before she stopped by for the ribbon cutting.
“I’ve eaten there before. I love their eggplant. That’s a personal favorite, but the pizza was delicious,” Hoydick said.
But the pizzeria doesn’t just offer up food. Emanuel said one of her employees enjoys singing and has even brought in a karaoke machine for his amusement. The pizzeria has since introduced karaoke nights as well.
It also has Facebook and Instagram accounts where followers can be graced with Emanuel’s food related puns.
Emanuel said she grew up with Italian food, being exposed to it and later on, making it herself.
“My grandmother is Italian and my mom cooked Italian so I’ve always been around Italian food. My whole life I’ve always cooked,” she said. “I have four kids so everything was always done at my house because I had so many kids and I have been cooking for the family for years. I love to cook.”
While cooking Italian cuisine came naturally to her, it was a winding road to becoming a restaurateur. She was a waitress at several eateries, from the former Costa Azzurra restaurant in Milford to Vazzy’s, before becoming an assistant nursing manager for the Connecticut Burn Center located at Bridgeport Hospital.
Emanuel was highly regarded by her coworkers. She ended up being awarded by the hospital in 2019 for treating patients and their families with compassion and care, sometimes, during the worst moments of their lives.
Emanuel said she made patients feel better, but she wanted to work somewhere where people would come in and leave happy. It turned out her son, Nick, wanted to open a restaurant and so she ended up quitting her job at the hospital to help him set it up. The duo soft launched their restaurant on Memorial Day and the two divide tasks, she said. She makes the Italian food. He makes the pizza, which she said, took some time to perfect.
She said he ended up practicing long before the restaurant even opened, enlisting a family friend who owned two pizzerias to teach him.
“He practiced for a full month before we even opened just making pizzas every day just getting it right, perfecting the crust,” she said.
The restaurant is turning out to be an entire family affair.
“I have my daughter, she’s a nurse at the hospital as well, I’m making her work on nights. My other son, he’s the EMT, for AMR and I’m making him work days. And my other son came in from Florida — he’s going to school in Florida. He came up to visit (and) I made him work. And my husband, I’m making him work too,” she said.
A restaurant is a far cry from being a nurse at a burn center, but Emanuel said being a nurse has been helpful.
“I was in a management position. So I was always trying to make (for) the patient and the family an experience for them. And I’m trying to recreate the experience here,” she said.
The restaurant has only been open for about two months, but Emanuel said she’s happy with the response so far.
“It makes my heart happy that people really really enjoy it. They like the food, they think it’s really good and we’re putting out a good product,” she said.