A Kendal restaurant is returning to its roots after its owners admitted a change they made last year did not work as well as they had hoped.
Nick Ward and Giuseppe Sepe have reverted back to their original vision for Sapore, on 21A Stramongate, as a restaurant serving authentic Italian food.
The duo first opened Sapore in October 2021 and closed the venue for three months last January for kitchen refurbishments.
It then reopened with a small-plate, tapas-style Mediterranean menu – but the pair said the change saw a dip in interest from locals.
They also said they felt that cost of living pressures had also played a part in trade dipping.
Nick said: “I think that local people always think of the premises as an Italian restaurant because of its long previous history as Paula Gianni’s and then Little Italy.
“We now realise that the tapas-style offering was not the direction we should have gone in.”
To mark the relaunch, Giuseppe and Nick have introduced a ‘happy hours’ deal, at the request of customers who remembered a similar scheme when Paulo Gianni’s operated at the site.
Giuseppe said: “We want people to think of us once again as an Italian restaurant like the site has been for so many years in the past, rather than a tapas restaurant.”
A drinks happy hour is also held each day from 5pm to 6pm.
Items on the menu include everything from spaghetti carbonara with pancetta and guanciale, egg yolk, black pepper and 24-month aged parmesan, ravioli al granchio, with home-made ricotta and crab ravioli, king prawns, cherry tomatoes, chives and pink peppercorn and langoustine and more.
Meat for the menu is sourced locally from Cornvale Fine Foods of Melling, while fish comes from Hodgson Fish of Hartlepool. Italian ingredients are sourced from G&O, a specialist food importer.
The duo also run Urban Food House in Bowness and Hooked, a seafood restaurant in Windermere.
Nick, originally from Poulton-le-Fylde, spent ten years in the hospitality industry in London and managed restaurants in Manchester and South Lakeland before he and Giuseppe bought Urban Food House nearly six years ago.
Giuseppe grew up in Naples and worked in high-end hotels and restaurants in Italy and Switzerland for several years before moving to the Lake District and working in hospitality in Windermere and Ambleside. The pair met around eight years ago.
