The Tasty Yolk’s new storefront opens Wednesday
STRATFORD — The Tasty Yolk’s creative sandwiches are coming to a new neighborhood. Owners Eric Felitto and Mike Bertanza will open the breakfast sandwich concept’ s second storefront in Stratford Wednesday.
The new restaurant opens at 7 a.m. at 3530 Main Street. Felitto and Bertanza announced the new opening on Facebook last week. “Chef/Owner Eric & his wife Allie are residents of Stratford and couldn’t be happier to open a new location in the town they call home!” they wrote.
The owners also operate three food carts in Bridgeport, Southport and Fairfield, and a fourth dedicated to parties and events. Their first Tasty Yolk storefront, in Bridgeport’s Black Rock neighborhood, opened in October 2019.
The partners built the Stratford restaurant “soup to nuts, from the bottom up,” Felitto said Tuesday. He said they were “tapped out” in the Black Rock location with limited space, and they’re looking forward to having a larger kitchen with more room for equipment and preparation.
“We have a 48-inch griddle [there] and one fryer that gets jammed up really well,” he said. “At [the Stratford] location, we’re lucky to have a 72-inch flattop and two fryers. Being able to handle the public should be drastically different in terms of volume.”
“We’re still able to hit 400 people at the store in the morning on the weekends, with the limited space we have in Black Rock, so I’d really like to see how much service we can do in one day,” he said.
The business partners opened the first Tasty Yolk cart in 2016. A year later, the business was named one of the top 100 food trucks in the country by msn.com. Felitto, a career chef whose resume includes experience at Barteca Restaurant Group, Artisan in Southport, L’Escale in Greenwich and The Chelsea in Fairfield, won an episode of “Chopped” in late 2018, which helped further raise the business’s profile.
The menu offers over-the-top egg sandwiches, like the “Tasty” with craft chorizo and cheddar, the “Banker” with brisket, Swiss and spicy aioli; and hefty breakfast burritos. An October special, “The Local Yolkol,” features two eggs, kolbasz sausage from Fairfield’s European Meat Market and Two Roads beer cheese on a pretzel bun.
But Bertanza said the Pig, a classic construction with bacon, egg and American cheese, is the biggest seller. “Everything else, people have to step out of their comfort zone,” he said. “Most people have never put brisket on an egg sandwich. But then there are a lot of adventurous people who want to try chorizo instead of sausage.”
Some specials end up becoming full-time items. Bertanza said they noticed a slump in sales after the New Year, when people were likely to follow resolutions, so Felitto designed “The Slenderizer,” with eggs, spinach, mushrooms and Swiss in a spinach wrap.
The Black Rock storefront also offers a menu of specialty sandwiches: a Tasty Cubano with roasted pork shoulder, a Crispy Mother Clucker with buttermilk fried chicken and Korean BBQ sauce, and burritos and wraps with grilled chicken, braised pulled pork or panko-fried mahi mahi. Stratford will carry the same menu, Felitto said, but the new store won’t offer dinner hours until mid-November.
Bertanza and Felitto said they’re excited to expand the business further. Bertanza, who graduated from the University of Miami, laughs about a time where he asked for a “bacon, egg and cheese” at a South Florida diner and got that literal item: two eggs on a plate with melted cheese, bacon on the side.
“It’s definitely a Northeast sandwich,” he said. “We grabbed the food truck concept from the West, but hopefully we can bring bacon, egg and cheeses as far as we can take them.”
The Stratford restaurant will be open Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.