By CHARLES FERRUZZA
Café Trio, officially turns four years old this month — if you don’t count the several months that Chris Youngers and Tai Nguyen spent operating their midtown restaurant as Pappagallo, the previous tenant at 3535 Broadway which Youngers and Nguyen bought out in 2003.
But instead of celebrating that birthday with a bang, the young bistro owners are in a frenzy of orchestrating their move to a bigger venue.
They’re taking over the location at 4558 Main once occupied by Venue and, more recently, Jimmy Frantze’s Frondizi’s. Frantze left the space a year ago when lease negotiations with the building’s owner, American Century Real Estate, fell through. Frantze wasn’t happy about giving up the location, but he’s currently focused on his namesake restaurant, J.J.’s at 910 West 48th Street.
If all goes according to plan, Café Trio will move — lock, stock and baby grand piano — in October. A few fans of the intimate dining room at the current location have complained about the move, but Youngers says he and his business partners needed the bigger kitchen, outdoor deck and private dining room if they were going to expand their fortunes. Recently, serious air conditioning problems at 3535 Broadway just confirmed that they had made the right decision to move to a newer building.
Although Youngers had announced that they might keep the Broadway location open as a tapas-and-martini bar, he’s having second thoughts. “We really need to focus all of our energies on our new location,” he says.
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