Two weeks before Burlington’s iconic Italian restaurant Bove’s Café is scheduled to close, its owners announced Monday that they will build a sauce production facility in Milton to help expand their national wholesale operation.
The Bove family has long augmented the downtown eatery that opened in 1941 by selling jars of their sauce in grocery stores across the country. For several years, the sauce has been made and packaged in a Youngstown, Ohio facility, owner Mark Bove said at a press conference Monday inside the Pearl Street restaurant.
“We are coming home … and thrilled to make the investment in the state where we started,” Bove said
The 15,000-square-foot facility in Milton, located on Route 7 a mile from Interstate 89, will open in 2016 and will employ “five to 10 people,” Bove said, most of whom currently work in the restaurant. Bove decline to say how much the Milton facility cost to build.
It will have a tasting room and will offer tours. The Bove family will continue to produce their frozen meatballs and lasagna in Shelburne, but could eventually move those operations to Milton, Bove said.
“This helps our Vermont brand. It helps show we have some history,” said Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, who attended the press conference.
Luis and Victoria Bove founded the restaurant, which once hosted President John F. Kennedy. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been a regular for decades.
The restaurant, as the family previously announced, will close December 23, and will be turned into a temporary headquarters for the family’s catering operation. That catering will eventually move to Milton.
Bove said the family has yet to decide what to do with the Pearl Street restaurant building in the long term, but hoped it will include some elements of “preservation.”
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Restaurants come and go in VT, like the weather. Boves is the exception and their presence on Pearl Street is likely most retro in the 802. Sorry to see it close, but wishing the best to Dick, Mark and Rick. I guess we’ll miss you, but we won’t!
It’s commendable that the family is “bringing it home.” Surely it will provide a boost to the local economy, especially since so many from Keurig and Global Foundaries have lost their jobs. I don’t know the owners, but clearly they have made choices to take care of their employees. Kudos to them!