Rosy, the New Restaurant From Cordelia, Reminds Chef Vinnie Cimino Why He Loves to Cook

Just three days before the friends-and-family preview of Cordelia in 2022, on the Fourth of July, chef Vinnie Cimino was still trying to remain calm, tinkering with the presentation and flavor profiles of three dishes. Opening a restaurant, no matter how turnkey, isn’t just concocting a menu. It’s permitting and building and fixing and hiring and training and promoting and pivoting. He’d worked about 100 days in a row, before serving a single customer.

“Take the day off,” his partner, Andrew Watts, told him, recognizing the signs of burnout. 

Reluctantly, Cimino took his advice. Well, for the most part. At a family-friend’s cookout, the gravitational pull of the host’s roasting lamb found the chef standing over a live fire. His friend Garrett was in the weeds, so Cimino got to work. They cooked bread over hot stones and veggies in the coals and raided the pantry to create makeshift condiments. They chopped veggies and pieces of lamb on a folding table beside the fire and handed bites to anyone who walked by. 

“So my day off was spent cooking, just somewhere else,” Cimino says. “It was just very instinctual cooking.”

But the technique and the joys of cooking for fun and family reminded him of his favorite moments as a chef, especially Outstanding in the Field, the outdoor dinner that he hosts at Thaxton’s Organic Garlic, where he once cooked a whole cow by burying it with coals in the earth. He left feeling rejuvenated, confident that he would get those dishes ready to taste and to open what would become Cleveland’s best new restaurant and the catalyst to Cimino’s finalist spot in the James Beard Awards.

“It brought me back to why I love doing it so much and that I know what I’m doing,” he says. “You always have, not just one, but many moments of imposter syndrome. But this was like, in this one moment, I really needed to get out of my own head.

“I finished those dishes the next day.”

He never forgot that spark of inspiration. After two years of success at Cordelia, Watts and Cimino were ready to expand, but they hadn’t settled on a concept. The partners looked at spaces, but nothing was quite right — until they found the cozy, 1,400-square-foot space on Church Avenue. Formerly home to Alea, named one of Cleveland’s Best Restaurants by this magazine multiple times, the space not only sat in a perfectly trendy neighborhood, Ohio City’s Hingetown, but also was also equipped with a live-fire grill. Cimino instantly thought back to that moment of reinvigoration.

“It was kind of like a no-brainer,” says Cimino.

Today, on Feb. 26, Cimino and Watts open their second restaurant, Rosy, a modern take on European, old-world cuisine where the open-fire grill takes center stage. The bistro space features 50 seats, including communal tables, high tops and bar seats, from which you can feel the heat of the grill and see the fire illuminating the room. Forgoing a printed menu, the day’s dishes are chalk-written above the exposed cooking area, and following Cordelia’s hyper-seasonal, farm-to-table approach, those panels are pulled when the kitchen inevitably runs out of specials. 

Cooking on a fire is a thrilling challenge for the chef. Every day, the hot spots are different. The chefs are constantly moving and adjusting the fire, ensuring the embers don’t burn out — “or else you’re screwed,” the chef says.

“Fire is a living, breathing thing,” Cimino says. “It’s such a carnal, rudimentary way of cooking. You kind of go home smelling like a campfire every single night, in the best way.” 

Despite being equipped with a live-fire grill, the space took a lot of build-out. Cimino and Watts took a hands-on approach with the design. Colorful tiles, which transition the brutalist cinderblock walls into the warm wood banquette seating, were hand-picked out of a tile graveyard in Seneca, Ohio. The kitchen and prep areas were expanded. The grill was revived from a dilapidated state. Shred and Co. installed the Douglas fir wood kitchen counter, banquettes and soft, rounded seating. The Cleveland company, owned by Carl Ziek and Scott Larson, also added specializations like the glass blocks on the front of the building and soft serve machine built into the wall for the restaurant’s signature after-dinner sweet treat, vanilla ice cream topped with olive oil and sea salt.

The dish you’ll see all over Instagram is the Salata Plate, with house-made focaccia bread surrounded by seven dips, such as spiced eggplant, Bagna Cauda (a creamy Italian dip made from garlic and anchovies), house-made cheese and ajvar (a Balkan condiment similar to hummus but made with roasted red pepper and eggplant). Pljukanci, a Croatian hand-rolled pasta, gets an interesting twist by hitting the grill before mixing with smoked cheese crema, lemon zest and pecorino sardonic. Cotechino, a house-made sausage, hangs over the grill each night to absorb its smoke, and pickled walleye cheeks are among the uncooked options. 

Beyond the fun of cooking, Cimino and Watts do see the opportunity to open new restaurants as an extension of their mission at Cordelia, which remains the mothership. The East Fourth restaurant has already served as a great training ground for the city’s next great chefs, just as Greenhouse Tavern did for Cimino and many other talented chefs in the city. Most of the servers and cooks started at Cordelia. Cimino says him and Watts will open more concepts in the future to create more opportunities for hospitality professionals. 

During an intense week of previews in mid-February, those members of the Cordelia community served their new dishes with pride to the friends and family who have supported them over the years. The nights, illuminated by the flames of the grill, felt like a “backyard European barbecue” — or the Midwestern one on Independence Day that reminded Cimino of his “why.”

“Rosy to us is just an opportunity to give back and an opportunity to be just so grateful for being able to cook and be surrounded by the fire and around our friends,” Cimino says. “Our appreciation for the opportunities that we have, for this next chapter, for being able to do what we love every single day.”