Thursday, 18 July 2019 13:28

Panza's Settles into South Broadway, Plans to Renovate Saratoga Lake Location

Panza’s Restaurant, the family- owned restaurant based on Saratoga Lake, has relocated to South Broadway for the time being as the original building is rebuilt. The new location opened during the first week of this past May, and restaurant co-owner Michael Panza said that business has been great.

“People have been calling weeks in advance to get reservations,” he said. “The place fills up every night, it’s been pretty incredible.”

He added that the reason for the location change was because the restaurant was over 80 years old, and so the building was as well. “So the plan was to knock down the building on Saratoga Lake and rebuild it from scratch, the 82-year-old building,” he said. “Rebuild the whole thing to a state-of-the-art banquet facility, rooftop lounge, restaurant and a boutique hotel, so that it became a destination site.”

He said that the reason for the update was because while people will still use banquet halls for weddings and parties, people are increasingly wanting “destination weddings,” where they go somewhere interesting, rather than a traditional venue. Updating the original Panza’s location would help it become more of a destination.

He continued by saying that the plan was supposed to take around two years to complete. As a result, they decided to lease another space so that they had a place “for our customers to go and our staff to work so that we didn’t have to lose all of our great people while this project was underway.”

He added that the new location currently has approximately 60 full time employees, around twice as many as the original location.

Since moving, Panza said that “all of our regulars have been in,” and that while some regulars cannot come as often due to Panza’s previously being their neighborhood bar, others that could previously only come once or twice a week can now come more often due to the relocation, and that on top of the regulars “we have a whole lot of new people, so it’s like a whole different animal.”

The leased location is the current one on South Broadway, where Tradewinds used to be. Panza said that he and his brother Tony, owner and chef of the new location, used to go to Tradewinds when they were young, and that “it was one of the most sought out restaurants in New York State, people came from all over to come to this restaurant because there was nothing like it at the time.”

He added, “So to be here is very exciting, and we definitely did a lot of work on bringing the place up to date but still maintaining the dignity and the essence of what this place was.”

At the new location, they serve several hundred guests per night in several different areas: the main dining hall, the grotto, the cove and the lounge.

For the dining hall, as Panza put it, “at a prime time I think it’s imperative that you make a dinner reservation.” However the grotto, next to the bar, is always first come, first serve style seating.

The cove is next to the grotto with dimmer lighting. Panza said that it “is one of my favorite spots to sit in, it does wind around a bit, it’s a little quieter and a little bit more secluded then the main dining area, it’s like a cellar kind of atmosphere.”

Finally, there is the lounge. Panza said that due to being a professional singer most of his life, “one of the things that I wanted to create here was a New York City-style piano bar,” which led to the Panza Lounge, upstairs from the other rooms.

“What we do is we have entertainment, at least through Labor Day, seven nights a week,” he said. “I perform myself, but not every night. Just a wide variety of acts from classic piano bar to jazz, R&B. We’ve been doing very successful Sinatra Sundays every week, which has been a huge draw.”

For the future of Panza’s, Panza said that it was largely dependent on how the original location’s reconstruction goes.

If renovations on the Saratoga Lake location continue to be held up, then they will turn the building into apartments. In that case, Panza said that they would consider either extending their stay at the South Broadway location or purchasing it outright.

For more information, call Panza’s Restaurant at 518-584-6882.

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