Business Profile: Grace’s Table, White Plains
For weeks, Mahopac resident Joe Trama’s phone kept ringing with calls from his uncle, Frank. A perfect spot had become available, Frank told his nephew – a chef in Manhattan – to open up a new restaurant in Westchester. After initially resisting Trama decided he’d check out the place, he said, “to get my uncle off my back,” and made the trek last October. The location on Central Avenue was previously the site of Sergio at Gregory’s, a popular destination for many years.
“It was really my uncle who got me up here,” Trama remembers. “We looked at the restaurant and we loved it. We made a lot of changes, but we just fell in love with it from that point.”
The new restaurant, called Grace’s Table, officially opened for business on Thursday, as the owners were joined by local officials for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It’s named after owner Grace Balducci Doria, whose family also owns Grace’s Marketplace and Grace’s Trattoria – where Trama is the chef – on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (they also have a second marketplace in Long Island).
“We were looking for another location,” Doria explained. “We knew that this was a very successful restaurant in the past and we wanted it to be successful [again].”
Before joining forces with the Balducci – Doria family in 1997, Trama worked at The Quilted Giraffe in Manhattan, an upscale American eatery. At Grace’s Trattoria, Trama got the chance to master Italian cooking. Now, he’ll have another shot cooking American food with a Mediterranean fusion.
“I feel more comfortable doing this, actually,” Trama, a partner at Grace’s Table, said. “I mean, I’m an Italian, my mother is a great Italian cook, but I’d say there’s a lot more ingredients that I can put on the table versus being more confined in an Italian cuisine. You have your mozzarella cheese, parmigiano cheese, roasted peppers, tomato sauce. It’s a little restrictive for me and my personality.”
Doria said she’s excited to see what Trama can do with a whole new genre of cuisine.
“Because he’s so talented, and he exhausted the Italian menu in Manhattan,” she said. “He just wants to show his talent, and there’s so much more out there.”
Grace’s Table features a range of options for seafood lovers, including a pan seared halibut, a tuna tartare and a mussel stir fry. Other dishes include barbeque pork chops, duck confit quesadillas and curried fried rice with vegetables and tofu.
The Doria-Balducci family knew it had a chef up to the task, but equally important was creating a dining area that was, as Grace Doria put it, “warm and elegant, but not too foofoo.”
“We wanted it to be rustic, a very inviting atmosphere,” Grace’s daughter, Pina Doria, explained. “We’re all about comfort food, so we wanted the design to be about comfort.”
The result is two elegant levels of dining, upscale but short of swanky. Grace’s Table also features a wine list assembled by Trama himself and specialty cocktails including the “I’ll Take White Plains” (Wild Turkey, Dubonnet Rouge and Orange Liqueur).
Grace Doria, whose parents Louis and Maria Balducci opened Balducci’s food market in Greenwich Village when she was a year old, knows something about success in the industry. Her hope for her newest venture, she said as she hosted a cocktail party for the restaurant’s grand opening Thursday, is for it “to be a very, very, very big success, and to see it full like this every day. Because we have put our heart and soul into it, and I would like to see it welcomed.”
Grace’s Table is located at 324 Central Avenue in White Plains. For more information call (914) 428-2455 or visit www.graces-table.com.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.
