My colleague from Canada and I were in Fort Wayne last year for some trainings at our large account there. He's a vegetarian and I try to be mindful of that when we're together. But since we've worked with one another pretty closely for over a year now, I've found that many restaurants have vegetarian options in their menus - especially Italian restaurants. He told me one time that he eats quite a bit of pasta when he's at home because it's quick to make and you can add vegetables to it pretty easily. I was in the mood for Italian food and he heartily agreed. We ended up going to Salvatori's on the far west side of Fort Wayne.
If you're a regular reader of Road Tips, you know that I don't like to go to national chains, but I will try regional chains if they're concentrated in one area. And that's the case with Salvatori's. It turned out that there are now six Salvatori's in northeast Indiana with the first one started in the Fort Wayne suburb of New Haven in 2006.
Sam Leto III came from a family who introduced pizza and other Italian dishes to Fort Wayne when his Italian immigrant grandfather opened Leto's Pizza in the mid-60's. Sam Leto III's father Salvatori, Jr. - also known as Sam, Jr. - became a Fort Wayne policeman working his way up to deputy chief of the force. While law enforcement was his life, Sam, Jr. still harbored a dream of having his own pizza place after he retired. That dream came true in 1984 as he opened Sam's Place not long after he retired from the force. However, an illness forced him to sell the business in 1985 and in the spring of 1986 Sam Leto, Jr. passed away.
Sam Leto III got into the restaurant business on his own when he opened the Mid City Grill in downtown Fort Wayne. But he wanted to pay homage to his father and grandfather as he had a stack of family recipes that were handed down from his Italian ancestors. In November of 2006, Leto opened Salvatori's on the far east side of Fort Wayne in New Haven. A second location on the southwest side of Fort Wayne opened in July of 2012.
Sam Leto III and his wife Angelina continued to run the two locations of Salvatori's until they sold the restaurant to Panos Bourounis and Alex Valdez in December of 2018. Bourounis was already a restaurateur owning the popular Cosmos House of Pancakes in Fort Wayne for over 20 years. Valdez had stints working in Italian restaurants during his career.
Under Bourounis and Valdez, Salvatori's has expanded to six locations - a 3rd location opened in the town of Auburn, IN just north of Fort Wayne during the height of the pandemic in 2020. The 4th Salvatori's - this one on the north side of Fort Wayne - opened in March of 2021; and the 5th location opened on the far northeast side of Fort Wayne in April of 2022. And in May of last year, the 6th Salvatori's opened in Warsaw, IN about 40 miles west of Fort Wayne. Prior to the opening of the Warsaw location, Jeremy McClain joined Bourounis and Valdez as a partner.
It was about a 10 minute drive from our hotel to the Salvatori's on West Illinois Road. (see map) Salvatori's calls this their Southwest Fort Wayne location, but - to me - if I look at the location on a map, it's more due west from downtown Fort Wayne than southwest. Since it's located in a strip mall, there's plenty of parking for Salvatori's, a Mexican restaurant next to Salvatori's, and the other businesses in the mall.
Going inside Salvatori's, we found a large dining area up front. It featured a vaulted ceiling with faux barn board walls with tables and booths throughout the dining area. It wasn't busy when we got in there around 7 p.m., so we were able to be seated right away. The hostess took us to a table toward the front of the dining area near the windows that looked out into the parking lot.
Usually, a restaurant has the bar area up front. But Salvatori's bar is just past the main dining room. The lounge area had a small dark wood bar with a faux-tin ceiling giving it a 19th century feel. It must not have been a popular spot as I went past the bar twice and never saw a bartender, nor did I see anyone seated in the lounge area.
Our server that evening was a young lady by the name of Chelsea. While we checked out the menu, she asked us if we needed anything to drink. We both ordered Peroni beers to start out and I ended up getting a glass of the Silver Palm cabernet to go with my dinner.
The menu featured mainly pasta dishes, both tossed and baked. Nowhere on the menu were steaks or chicken entrees as I see at a number of Italian restaurants. They did have a chicken parm on the menu and you could add chicken or shrimp to some pasta entrees, but that was it. Salvatori's also had sandwiches including a caprese chicken sandwich, an Italian beef sandwich, and the Maria - pepperoni, ground Italian sausage, salami, and ham topped with a marinara sauce with a mozzarella cheese. Salvatori's didn't have pizza on the menu, but they did have calzones. And they also had Italian baked rolls with a choice of barbecue chicken, Italian sausage, ground beef or Italian beef with green peppers and onions.
The appetizer part of the menu featured mozzarella-filled breadsticks, mussels in a marinara sauce, a shrimp scampi appetizer with a marinara/cream sauce, and something they called a "3-meat Cuscino" - Italian sausage, meatball, and pepperoni with marinara and mozzarella baked into what looks like a cushion of pizza dough. (Cuscino translates from Italian to English as "cushion".)
My colleague was sort of hungry and he wanted an order of the garlic cheese bread. There were three pieces of the garlic bread - and I thought it was a little expensive for what he got ($8.29). And it looked more like it was part of a cheese pizza rather than bread with cheese and garlic on it. . Marinara sauce came on the side. My colleague offered me a piece and I took the smaller of the 3 slices. And I have to say that it was very, very good. It was loaded with garlic, the crust was chewy, and the cheese pulled away from the crust like a pizza.
They have a number of salads on the menu including a blackened salmon caesar salad. I started out with a regular house salad consisting of a blend of romaine and iceberg lettuce, chopped carrots, red onions and tomatoes topped with shredded mozzarella and a house-made vinaigrette dressing. The salad was fine, nothing special, but a nice start to my meal.
My colleague was fighting the onset of a cold and he asked Chelsea if the cook could prepare a pasta primavera with loads of raw garlic. He's into homeopathic remedies for illnesses and studies have shown that raw or an aged garlic extract can help fight colds. And man, did it ever smell like garlic! The pasta primavera was tossed with sauteed vegetables over a bed of ziti tube pasta. He said the pasta primavera was excellent.
I thought about the linguine with clams in a garlic butter sauce, but I ended up getting the beef-filled ravioli. I always seem to get ravioli when I go to Italian restaurants - I know. But I like meat-filled pasta, but my wife doesn't. We make Italian at home a lot, but we don't have ravioli or tortellini filled with beef or Italian sausage because my wife doesn't care for it. That's why I get it when I go out for Italian food most times.
But there was something a little strange with this beef-filled ravioli - they tasted sort of doughy, like they hadn't been cooked long enough. It wasn't rubbery like it had been cooked too long, it had a distinct consistency of raw dough. The marinara sauce was sweet and had a bit of a zippy flavor. It was just disappointing that the ravioli pillows weren't up to snuff.
While my colleague thought his pasta primavera at Salvatori's was excellent, I wasn't too happy with my ravioli. The marinara sauce that they make in-house was very good, but they needed to cook the ravioli longer to get rid of the doughy taste and consistency. We certainly couldn't complain about the service Chelsea showed us that evening, she was accommodating for any request we had all through our meal. Salvatori's was comfortable, but also somewhat sort of cheesy with its decor. I have no idea if there are better Italian restaurants in Fort Wayne, but Salvatori's was just OK for what it was.
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