Diners on the Yonkers waterfront have another menu to sample with the recent opening of the Dolphin Restaurant-Bar-Lounge at 1 Van der Donck St. The 7,100-square-foot seafood restaurant brings new life to the vacant site of the former Pier View Restaurant, whose owners went bankrupt in March 2009.
Dolphin owner and former Manhattan chef and restaurateur Elio Rugova extensively renovated the restaurant interior and street façade this year after signing a 20-year lease with Collins Brothers Enterprises L.L.C., developer of the Hudson Park residential and retail complex that includes the restaurant property.
The lease had been held by Westside Hospitality Group, a Hell”™s Kitchen-based bar and restaurant company that planned with partners to reopen the space as The Gas Light Ale House. Those plans ended with the death of the company”™s founding president, Yonkers firefighter Patrick Joyce, in an October 2009 apartment building fire allegedly set by an arsonist.
The two-level Dolphin seats 170 customers indoors and 100 in its outdoor sidewalk dining area.
A Yonkers resident, Rugova operates the Dolphin with his four sons, Jimmy Rugova, restaurant manager, Skel, Agron and Drit, and chef David Hubert. The elder Rugova in the 1980s opened his first Dolphin seafood restaurant on Manhattan”™s East Side and ran the Lexington Avenue eatery for seven years.
Their Yonkers Downtown Waterfront Business Improvement District neighbors and city officials welcomed the Rugovas at a recent grand-opening ceremony. The Dolphin is the fourth new enterprise to open for business in downtown Yonkers since April, said Steven Sansone, downtown BID executive director.
Other new businesses are a Key Bank branch, Retro Fitness center and a pediatric dental practice, Kids Smile Pediatric Dentistry. Sansone said more businesses are expected to open downtown in the coming months.
