MILWAUKEE — The Calderone Club has some long-standing history in the city of Milwaukee. The first restaurant was opened back in 1979 by Antonio Fazzari. His son Gino is now carrying on the family tradition in downtown Milwaukee.
"We come back from Italy in the mid-seventies," he says. "My dad opened up the Calderone Club on the east side - Bartlett and Bradford - close to the UWM Campus, and I grew up, and I lived right above that restaurant. That was the start of the Calderone Club."
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Like so many others, Gino's restaurant is losing a lot of business because of the pandemic.
"We're down to thirteen percent of our sales, because of the Bucks, because of the concerts at the Fiserv Forum," Fazzari says. "Visit Milwaukee does a great job booking conventions for our city, (but) we don't have any conventions, the hotels are empty, so we have very little traffic. It's devastating for restaurants downtown, and some will not recover from this."