Aldo's Aiming for July Reopening

Aldo’s, a decades old fixture in Wyckoff dining, will reopen this month after a move to a new location suspended its business for more than a year.

The Italian restaurant first opened on Franklin Ave. in 1983, and since then owner Aldo Cascio has also opened a wine bar, Pane e Vino, and the Brick House, where he is a part owner.

Both Aldo’s and Pane e Vino have been closed since June of 2012, as Cascio worked on moving the restaurant around the corner to the former site of the Wyckoff Bakery, a new location that will also integrate the wine bar.

The move, just a tenth of a mile around the corner to Wyckoff Ave., was anything but smooth.

When Cascio announced the move in Feb. 2012, concerns were raised that the 170-seat restaurant would exceed the parking capacity of the surrounding area, causing congestion.

Leading the cause against the move before the planning board was Cascio’s then-landlord and former business partner, Henry McNamara, who hired a planning expert to present evidence to the board on the parking issues he believed would arise at the new location.

At the time, Cascio dismissed McNamara’s opposition as stemming from a personal interest in keeping him as a tenant, but Wyckoff police chief Benjamin Fox also expressed in a letter his concerns about parking congestion and pedestrian safety issues he said the move would present.

In the end, the board approved the move, paving the way for a year of renovations to convert the former bakery’s inside to an elegant interior that would be familiar to patrons of the Brick House.

“Everything had to be renovated,” Cascio said. “Every piece of wire, plumbing, floors. You end up with an empty shell.”

Though he previously told Patch that issues with his landlord had a role in the move, in an interview last week Cascio said simply that the effort to reconstruct the restaurant from scratch stemmed only from the opportunity to combine the two businesses in a fresh location.

“It was time for a change, and I like [the new] location better,” he said. “It’s going to be newer, and the menu’s going to have a few changes.”

The most significant changes, he said, will be the addition of pizza to the menu and the availability of alcohol with the combination of Pane e Vino.

And for Cascio, who for much of his career as a restaraunteur operated three separate businesses within Wyckoff, the move of just a few hundred feet makes sense.

“I love Wyckoff. I’ve been here 30 years,” he said. “It’s very attractive to me, it’s been good all these years and the people are nice. I just want to welcome my customers back, old and new.”