Village Host Pizza owner Evan Trommer photo by: Drew Purcell.
Lexington, KY – Near its four-year mark in business, Village Host Pizza owner Evan Trommer has decided to close the Old Vine restaurant that has proven to be a popular lunch spot so he can reopen under a different brand in hopes of capturing a dinner crowd too.
Business Lexington.
“We really need to build a stronger dinner, our lunch business was phenomenal but our dinner business was not strong enough,” Trommer told
Green signs were taped to the doors and tables of Village Host to start the week informing patrons of Trommer’s plans to close the restaurant after business on Saturday and reopen at a yet to be determined point in the spring.
“We’re not going to force ourselves into a timeline,” Trommer said when asked if he had a reopening date in mind.
“What we want to do is close our doors, catch our breath and just go back and do this thing with a really good vibe and everything thought out really well,” he said.
One thing he doesn’t expect to change is the presence of a salad bar that Trommer said was the most popular of the menu options for his lunch crowd. The minus to that, he said, was the salad bar also was the highest food cost of anything on the menu.
Upon the reopen, he will have menu options to combine with the salad bar, such as a slice of pizza, a departure from the current business model, he said.
“We’ll probably drop our pizza theme, although pizza still be a core part of the menu, but it will be a different pizza,” he said. Currently he’s found customers aren’t interested in a whole pizza, so as he reinvents the restaurant, which is currently a franchise of a San Francisco Bay Area restaurant, he’ll deviate from what customers have come to know about the restaurant.
One change will be beefing up the dinner menu. “A more knife and fork dinner menu is what we’re talking about right now,” he said adding that the restaurant would strive to be upscale casual so customers donning t-shirts and jeans would still be comfortable eating there, but not as casual as the menu currently is.
Trommer doesn’t foresee a major remodeling that underwent an extensive fit-up before opening, but he plans on pulling out the game room in the restaurant’s back corner as well as well the TVs on the dining side of the restaurant.
“We’re really popular in the evenings for games and things like that, we’ll change that around. We’ll probably have not so many TVs but you’ll still be able to see that at the bar. We’re hoping to have a nice healthy section in addition to the salad bar,” he said about the other planned changes adding that more private dining could also be added.