Firenze transforms into family-friendly establishment

WORLAND – When Firenze Italian Steakhouse owner Todd Scheuerman decided to shut the restaurant down not too long ago the community mourned the passing of yet another business. Little did the community know that the establishment would undergo a transformation and reopen as Firenze Bar and Grill run by former Firenze Italian Steakhouse Executive Chef Charlene Sherman.

The opportunity to lease the building and reopen the restaurant using her own vision was offered to her the day that Scheuerman decided to close the original restaurant. "I would never have considered leasing and reopening if he hadn't offered. He's been super supportive and extremely helpful on everything so it's worked out amazingly. I did look at the possibility of any of the other restaurants but this one kind of fit more toward what I wanted and I'm used to this and I love the staff," Sherman said. "We've added a couple more people but my kitchen staff is all the same, they know my recipes and they are really good to work with. We definitely brought back the majority of the original staff," she added.

Firenze Bar and Grill opened Monday with a new menu, new décor and with a new laid back, fun and easy going atmosphere. The normal hours for the business are 5 – 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday but Sherman opened on a Monday for a special reason. "We did a special Monday opening because of the date [7-17-17]. We wanted the 7-17-17, it's a palindrome so it's the same forward as backwards and it's also, we have the three sevens in there, so it's the three lucky sevens," Sherman said.

Trying to get away from the Italian Steak House cuisine Sherman revamped the menu where people get more bang for their buck. "We have completely redone the menu, so it's a lot more family-friendly. A lot of people saw us before as more like a special occasion, more like an event place to go to eat and what we are trying to do is become more of a regular, family-friendly establishment. The stuff we were doing before was beautiful, the plating and things that we could do was really nice and we've tried to keep some of that in play with the menu now, but we wanted to work on elevated plating, so it's not necessarily something that you could get at a diner but it's definitely more casual comfort food. So we were looking for more of an elevated comfort food, we want to be the kind of place where people come regularly," Sherman said.

Sherman stated that while changing the menu she went over the reviews of the original restaurant to figure out what the community complained about. She found that people were complaining about the value and the implied value and what they were getting for their money. "I tried to keep a lot of the recipes that I knew people really enjoyed, like the prime [rib], we wanted to make sure that that was a staple that we offered. When I was generating the new menu and coming up with the concept and where I wanted to go with it as a restaurant I reread all of the reviews to figure out what it was people liked, what it was that they didn't. Around here people want to know that they are getting what they paid for, it makes sense. These people are working for their money and you want to make sure that it is being utilized the best that it can," she said.

"One of the things we did was, everything comes with fries. If you want a baked potato you can get one, and these are over a pound for the baked potatoes, we want to make sure that we are feeding people. With the fries, there is always a complementary refill on them so if you get a burger and fries and you get done with your fries, we do the garlic parm fries, we will bring you out another basket. You can always take them home, we want to make sure that everyone is leaving happy," Sherman said. "That's one of those things where if you get fries, everybody at the table is going to eat your fries, you can never order fries and not have someone steal some," she added.

The dessert size has also increased so that people can share them if they wish without only getting one bite each. "We are trying to make the desserts so that they are really big, sharable items, because a lot of times you don't want to get desserts for each individual person, that's too much. So these are coming out big and shareable," Sherman stated.

The menu mainly consists of a children's menu, salads, burgers, fries and flatbeds. "We do still have one steak on the menu and we will still run specials. We are going to have our prime rib Fridays and Saturdays, a lot of people really liked the prime and I wanted to make sure that we keep that as a staple and the only pasta that we offer now is a bacon mac and cheese," Sherman said. "The pesto and the chicken parm, we had worked so hard on the recipes to come up with them when it was the Italian steakhouse and we wanted to make sure that we could retain it but we didn't want to go in the way of pastas. I wanted to move completely away from that so we kind of reimagined it as a sandwich. The pesto I think we did four revisions on our pesto recipe until we found one that's a concentrated pesto and we do it with a little bit of cream, it really mellows out some of the salt and the grease because I hate when you get a bowl of pesto and it's just grease," she added.

To tone down the fancy reputation of the original restaurant, Sherman got rid of the old button down uniforms. She stated that people who came to the original restaurant looked at it as an expensive place reserved for special occasions and that you had to be dressed up. She said that she wanted to move away from that reputation so she and her 8- year-old daughter, who if you ask her will state that she was the designer, designed a T-shirt for the staff to wear along with jeans. "That way it's a little bit more casual, everyone wears jeans and T-shirts, the whole staff. We want to be able to get that crowd in here, you get done at the baseball field and you want to get a burger, come on in, wear your flip flops, you are welcome."

Sherman also extended the bar side of things offering a variety of wines and beers, pitchers of beer, including domestic beers and has future plans, if she can capture some of the bar business in town, of offering games on the patio. "In the future we plan to, if we can get some of that bar business and some of that fun crowd in here, we want to get some cornhole boards for the patio and do like those giant Jengas. We have a couple different games that we are going to be doing within the next few weeks at the bar, like a tic-tac-toe with your bartender on boards, things like that so you don't have to come in here with a big group. If you just want to get a burger by yourself, there's something you can do, there are always games on and someone behind the bar that will listen to your stories and play tic-tac-toe with you," Sherman said.

The décor in the restaurant is different as well, with pictures of old west notorieties such as Doc Holiday, Worland in its younger years, posters by Bob Coronato and a resident buffalo named the Beerfalo watching over the bar. "We went with a different décor because we moved in a total different direction, we wanted to embrace Wyoming and really kind of go to that old west and give homage to the building itself, the town and the state," Sherman said.

Sherman stated that in the future, she may decide to extend the hours and be open for lunch but right now she wants to stay small. "If we start to notice people coming in later and wanting to stay longer we will extend hours or if we capture some of that bar business we might extend the bar hours but for right now we wanted to start smaller and focus on just doing a really great job at that, instead of trying to jump in doing lunches and dinners and a bunch of stuff. We want to really nail it on one section and then try to branch out from there."

"The town has been amazing about supporting us and wanting to keep the business on main street. It's kind of crazy the amount of support that this town generates for businesses."