Casadoro Opens in Newington: Family Friendly Italian from The Doro Team

The DORO Restaurant Group has covered French brasserie fare, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern and upscale northern Italian cuisine with its three West Hartford Center restaurants. For its newest concept, the group has planted a flag in a new town, with a southern Italian red-sauce menu friendly to families.

Casadoro, from the owners of Treva, Àvert Brasserie and Zohara, soft-opened at 2929 Berlin Turnpike in Newington Wednesday night. The group also owns and operates the DORO Marketplace cafe locations in Wethersfield, West Hartford and Windsor Locks and Artisanal Burger Company in Manchester.

The new spot features casual Italian dishes, including pizzas, housemade pastas and its own takes on classics like chicken parmesan, lasagna and veal Milanese. Scott Miller, DORO’s chief operating officer and partner alongside CEO Dorjan Puka, said Casadoro’s cuisine is “a crowd-pleaser menu.”

“Treva is a date night restaurant, a business lunch place,” he said of DORO’s northern Italian eatery. “This is like its modern younger brother.”

Casadoro takes the place of a former Bertucci’s Restaurant, which closed in late 2022 as the Italian chain filed for bankruptcy. The modern space has indoor seating for nearly 300 guests, a large open kitchen with a Marra Forni pizza oven and an expansive bar in the center of the main dining room. Brick walls feature brightly-colored Italian art-deco style posters and handpainted designs and logos. A sizable outdoor patio will seat another 140 guests outside.

Executive chef Tommy Crawford’s menu starts off with stuzzi, or salty snacks like zucchini fritti, crispy pepperoni cups, gnoccho fritto and marinated olives, intended to be enjoyed with pre-dinner drinks. Piattini, a list of shareable plates, include fried calamari, meatballs with polenta, grilled littleneck clams, grilled artichoke and beef carpaccio.

The starters include a few regional Italian items, like burrata and ham served with rosemary tigelle, a savory flatbread by way of Emilia-Romagna that Miller likened to an English muffin. Frittatine, a Neapolitan street food, features fried squares of bucatini, pancetta and English peas bound by bechamel sauce and served with spicy vodka sauce. Casadoro also serves pane cotto, a traditional Italian dish made to use up stale bread with parmesan broth, cannellini beans, escarole, sausage and sweet fennel. 

Miller said Casadoro’s pizza is “neo-Neapolitan style,” baked in the Marra Forni at a blistering 800 degrees under the direction of Todd Solek, who Connecticut bread lovers may know as the talent behind the former Farm to Hearth bakery. 

“Todd is like a mad scientist when it comes to pizza. He’s been studying the different types of flour that we want to use in order to achieve this, the tomatoes…The program is just really intense and special,” Miller said.

The wood-fired pizzas are about 13 inches in size, he said, with composed recipes like the Parma, with prosciutto, mozzarella, quince, greens and goat cheese; the Funghi, with mushrooms, cipollini onions, garlic confit, mozzarella and scallions and the Sausage, with shaved potatoes, ‘nduja and roasted long hot peppers. Others include fresh shucked clams, eggplant with braised fennel and a hot honey-sweetened pepperoni pie with basil and mint.

The “fatta a mano” house pasta options include shapes like trottole, tonnarelli, rigatoni, orrecchiette and strozzopretti, with preparations like chicken pesto, bolognese, cacio e pepe and vodka with assorted proteins. A mushroom ragu with tagliatelle features truffle, wild mushrooms and porcini cream, while braised short rib is served with lumache, horseradish gremolata and wilted greens.

Guests looking for heartier plates can choose from piatti like chicken scarpariello, porchetta, NY strip, swordfish puttanesca and sea scallops, along with rolled pinwheel-style lasagna, chicken parmesan with vodka sauce and veal saltimbocca. Miller also mentioned a whole roasted eggplant dish, that’s peeled, pounded out, breaded and fried until crisp, then served with pomodoro sauce, stracciatella and torn basil.

“The whole eggplant is the one I’m most excited about,” he said. “We opened up Zohara with a whole (roasted) cauliflower, and everyone went nuts over it.”

Large-format plates like zuppa di pesce, ragu alla Napoletana and griglia mista di carne (with a variety of meats and sides) are intended to serve four or more guests. Miller said Casadoro is also the first DORO restaurant with a specific kids’ menu, noting options “for the lil’ ones” like cheese pizza, spaghetti and meatballs and baked mac and cheese.

DORO’s executive pastry chef James Arena crafted an Italian-influenced dessert menu for the new spot, with a unique cannoli pie served in a circular cannoli crust and a lemon cheesecake with ricotta dolce served in the shape of the citrus fruit, molded with bright yellow lemon white chocolate on a bed of graham cracker crumbs. A torta caprese features warm chocolate almond cake with vanilla bean gelato, almond praline, berries and rum.

The bar program, led by Derek Vitale, also flies the red, white and green flag, with an Italian-heavy wine list. A signature 2929 Martini is made with extra virgin olive oil-washed vodka, lemon oil and bitters, garnished with a prosciutto-stuffed cherry pepper. A Limonata is made with Malfy lemon gin, limoncello and prosecco, and the Speziato gets some heat from Calabrian chili-infused tequila, with ancho verde liqueur and passion fruit. 

The cocktail menu also features four different spritz varieties and three Negronis, including a bianco version sans Campari, another with mezcal and a chocolate-inspired recipe with creme de cacao and chocolate bitters. Miller said Casadoro will also spotlight its selection of amari, or traditional Italian herbal liqueurs.

DORO Restaurant Group also has plans for the next few years, with its upscale Mexican concept No Mames set to open in Wethersfield during the first quarter of 2025. Miller and Puka will also open a second location of Zohara in Glastonbury, along with a fourth outpost of its DORO Marketplace, on the town’s Main Street.

Casadoro 2929 Berlin Turnpike, Newington

@casadororistorante