Cafe Giulia Opens, Again

Robert Willis is a restless fellow with blue eyes, breezy manners and a knack for reinventing himself. He has been an architect, a photographer, a racer at Lime Rock and a chef. (Yes. A chef in the kind of New York restaurant where customers pay real money for low lights, sausage made of lobster, a whole course in a single teaspoon and the kind of cosseting few people encounter anywhere else in life.) The trick is to know science. And love art. Making food, he says, merges the two. In 2009, Willis, now 59, opened Cafe Giulia — named for the boxy little Alfa Romeo Giulia he races at Lime Rock, a vehicle with less drag than a Porsche, Wikipedia says, but you would not know it to look at it. Then, recently, he closed Cafe Giulia. Too big, he said. Too formal. Too expensive. Too hard. Now he is opening Cafe Giulia again, this time a bit north along Route 44 on Main Street in a tidy spot last occupied by Agapanthus, a gift and housewares shop that, in spite of its smart beige serenity, did not make it. “This is where I wanted to open a restaurant from the beginning,” Willis says. “But it did not work out.” It’s worked out now. Cafe Giulia the second, with its open kitchen, gleamy, 10-burner stove, plate glass front and slick, lime-green light shades can serve 36 diners and will open next week, June 12. “Simple Italian Food” it says in graceful script up front. Local meat and produce, housemade pasta, linguini with clams (“One of my favorite dishes of all time” he says), grilled vegetables, good wine — it’s all on the menu inside. “I always cooked,” Willis says, starting with a Betty Crocker cookbook for kids at age 5. That’s how he learned to spoon hot butter over the yolks of frying eggs to cook the tops without flipping them. As an adult he taught himself (with a little help from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”) to wrap food in pastry, en croute, and coax fats and acids into silky sauces. “Eventually, I found out I was more interested in cooking than architecture.” So he volunteered to chop and slice at a restaurant he liked a lot, David Waltuck’s Chanterelle in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. “I really enjoyed it. I liked the kitchen atmosphere. It was crude, it was fun.” He signed up for Peter Kump’s cooking school at night, keeping his day job, graduated, quit remodeling houses in Westchester and went to work fulltime at Chanterelle, and, later, Bobby Flay’s Bolo, then opening his own restautant, Vaux Bistro, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, a successful spot which he sold before moving to Lakeville in 2002. “I always loved restaurants,” he says. “Wonderful places, theatrical and homely.” That’s the plan for this next Cafe Giulia. Cafe Giulia is at 329 Main St. in Lakeville. It will open for dinner June 12 and will be serving Thursday through Monday, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Willis says he plans to open Cafe Giulia for lunch shortly. For reservations, call 860-435-9765.