DOWNSIZING
Restaurateur pares holdings to one location
Steve Calvaneso, once among the Buffalo area’s most successful restaurant operators, has pared his portfolio to a single location, shedding restaurants in Clarence and in downtown Buffalo.
The veteran restaurateur closed his Calvaneso’s Cosmopolitan Grille, at 5185 Transit Road, in Clarence, late last month.
He also is finalizing a deal to sell his City Grill, at 268 Main St. in downtown Buffalo. The restaurant, which remains open, is being acquired by SJR Culinary Ventures, a local restaurant company that also is in the process of developing an eatery along the Erie Canal in North Tonawanda.
Calvaneso — whose Ultimate Restaurants group once controlled four popular local restaurants, a catering business and a men’s apparel store — will continue to own and operate the Bacchus Wine Bar and Restaurant, 56 W. Chippewa St.
His Exquisite Catering operation, headquartered at Babeville, the former Asbury Methodist Church at 341 Delaware Ave., also remains in business.
Earlier this fall, the onetime Buffalo mayoral candidate shuttered the Ultimate Men’s Shop on Delaware Avenue. In 2005, Calvaneso closed his Ya Ya Bayou Brewhouse bar and restaurant, which had a three-year run in the Market Arcade in the Theater District.
Calvaneso did not return telephone calls seeking comment Friday, but the message on an answering machine at the shuttered Cosmopolitan Grille stated that the business had been sold, and would reopen with a new concept. The message also thanked callers for a decade of patronage.
A restaurant veteran, Calvaneso, 48, got his start as a teenager washing dishes at the old Turgeon’s Sign of the Steer, on Main Street in North Buffalo. By age 21, he was co-manager of a bar, and at 27, he opened Hooligan’s, a casual bar/restaurant with locations in Amherst and Buffalo.
“It started in my blood when I was 15,” he said in a 2002 Buffalo News interview.
His passion for the restaurant business led him to experiment with a range of casual, exotic and high-end concepts over the years.
“There’s no fun in sameness,” Calvaneso said in that interview.
His enthusiasm for fine wines also made his restaurants a hit with area wine enthusiasts.
An ardent Buffalo booster, he frequently defended his decision to expand his downtown business base through a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when a number of restaurants went dark.
Opening Hooligan’s at the 268 Main St. site in 1993, he successfully bucked the trend of downtown restaurants failing.
In 2000, Calvaneso bought out a business partner and changed Hooligan’s to City Grill. Over the next three years he made additional downtown investments with Ya Ya, Bacchus and Ultimate Men’s Shop.
Scott and Virginia Rossi of SJR Culinary Ventures are expected to take ownership of City Grill early next week, with no interruption of business.
