The interior of BuonaSera, a new Italian eatery located on Saratoga Lake. Photo via the restaurant’s Facebook page.
MALTA — BuonaSera, a new Italian restaurant located on Saratoga Lake in Malta, opened its doors earlier this month. The eatery is housed in the former home of Nostalgia Ale House & Wine Bar.
The menu includes Italian favorites such as chicken parmesan, penne alla vodka, and spaghetti with clam sauce. Offerings also include shrimp aglio e olio, frutti di mare, grilled eggplant ragu, roasted chicken, beef carpaccio, and grilled ribeye.
BuonaSera, located at 113 Route 9P, is now open from 3 p.m. until 10 p.m. every day except Wednesday.
The storefront of Life is Good’s Saratoga Springs location on Broadway. Photo via the company’s Facebook page.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Life is good for John Nemjo, and not just because his businesses have sold more than 43,000 canoes and kayaks.
Earlier this month, Nemjo opened Life is Good on Broadway in Saratoga Springs, right next to his other store, Saratoga Outdoors. The Life is Good brand has been an enduring success for decades, and Nemjo attributes that success to the company’s positive, outdoorsy message.
“Saratoga has so many things that relate to the Life is Good deal. We have music. We have SPAC. We have horses,” Nemjo said. “We got the lake. We got the mountains. We got golf. We got tennis. We’ve got lots of things.”
Upstate New York’s access to the great outdoors is what made Nemjo’s stores successful, and it’s also what drew him to the area in the first place.
“I fell in love with the Adirondacks over a bunch of years and decided, hell I’ll move to Old Forge and open up a camping store,” Nemjo said.
When he opened his first Mountainman Outdoor Supply Company store in 1993, Nemjo had little money and even less experience running a business. But after three years of hard work, it became clear that Nemjo was on to something. Canoe and kayak sales began to skyrocket. His burgeoning empire grew to three stores located along the Moose River. Then in 2007, he purchased an old bank in downtown Old Forge and turned it into his first Life is Good location.
“That store took off right out of the box,” Nemjo said. “We were doing $5,000 a day in t-shirts right at the beginning. It was crazy.”
When Nemjo relocated to the Capital Region, he wanted to work a bit closer to home. So he began exploring the idea of opening a Life is Good store in Saratoga. At the time, the ski apparel company CB Sports carried Life is Good products in town. But when the CB location at 490 Broadway closed, Nemjo seized his opportunity. He took over the property and opened the first iteration of a dedicated Life is Good store in 2008.
Since then, Nemjo has steadily increased his presence on Broadway, purchasing neighboring stores when they closed up shop. Today, he owns four storefronts, including the new Life is Good location at 486 Broadway, which officially opened its doors on July 1.
“I think we’ve got the largest retail footprint on Broadway now,” Nemjo said. “I know my landlord’s making a lot of money from us.”
A screenshot of episode nine of “The Dealership,” a TikTok comedy series produced by Mohawk Chevrolet that’s generated millions of views.
BALLSTON SPA — A series of mockumentary-style TikTok videos produced by Mohawk Chevrolet in Ballston Spa have garnered millions of views, catapulting the car dealership’s digital team to national fame. And it all started with a thousand plastic ducks.
“We had an employee purchase like a thousand mini plastic ducks, and she was secretly putting them all around the dealership,” said Grace Kerber, a digital branding creator for Mohawk Auto Group. “We knew we had to make some sort of content with it.”
Kerber and her fellow creator Ben Bushen decided that the duck situation sounded like something that would happen on the NBC sitcom “The Office,” and so the Mohawk Chevrolet comedy series “The Dealership” was born.
The premiere episode was a hit, both on social media and with Mohawk’s staff. So Kerber and Bushen kept the series going. As of press time, they’d made nine episodes.
The videos quickly went viral, attracting the attention of national publications such as USA Today, Forbes, and the New York Post. The most popular video, episode five, has been viewed 2.8 million times.
The episodes are all improvised and star Kerber in the lead role. Bushen shoots, edits, and helps generate ideas for the series. The rest of the cast is made up of Mohawk Chevrolet employees, who are surprisingly funny for non-professional actors.
“We have a lot of big personalities,” Kerber said of her coworkers. “It’s not too hard to make something funny like this when you are surrounded by people who are so entertaining in their everyday life.”
Kerber said that social media is important to Mohawk’s work culture, so many of the dealership’s salespeople are eager and active participants in her series. “We never have trouble getting anybody to participate,” she said.
A new episode of “The Leadership” comes out every Tuesday on Mohawk Chevrolet’s TikTok page, @mohawkchevrolet, which has 126,000 followers and 1.1 million likes.
“We’ll keep making them as long as people want to watch them,” Kerber said. “We’re having a lot of fun with it.”
Image from Saratoga Hospital’s July 16 City Council Meeting presentation shows an aerial view of the office building (highlighted blue), which is located across from the hospital’s main campus.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Saratoga Hospital wants to build a new “Center for Successful Aging” near its main campus that would function as a one-stop shop for local seniors.
The hospital presented an application for a Planned Unit Development Amendment to the Saratoga Springs City Council on Tuesday evening that would allow them to demolish an existing 10,000-square-foot, one-story building on Myrtle Street across from the hospital’s main campus, and replace it with the new 60,000-square-foot, three-story office center.
“What I’m proposing this evening is more than an office building,” Saratoga Hospital CEO Jill VanKuren told the city council. “It’s a change in the way we do business.”
“Our community is aging. We have an influx of older people coming into Saratoga, coming into our community, and one of the things they’re looking for is fantastic healthcare,” VanKuren said. “The concept is bringing together the services that people would need to age in place under the same roof, close to the hospital, so that existing services…can be accessed more readily.”
The Center for Successful Aging would aim to address the needs of seniors with multiple medical conditions, geriatric syndromes, and social needs that are the results of aging. Seniors visiting the center would be able to have chronic and complex conditions cared for in one location. The building would include offices for primary care physicians, specialists, care coordinators, social workers, pharmacists, and dieticians.
“The ideal vision is you would come in one day with your family member, spend a few hours with us, get your appointments done, and walk out with a plan of care,” VanKuren said.
As part of its proposal before the city, the hospital is also hoping to open a daycare center for its staff members. Although there’s currently no concrete plan in place, the hospital has already had some preliminary conversations with potential partners such as the YMCA.
Because hospital workers have long shifts, work at night, and sometimes work only three days per week, it’s difficult for them to find childcare services. Creating a daycare center inside the hospital would likely help with staff recruitment and retention.
“When we do exit interviews, when people leave us, that’s one of the answers that they give, that they weren’t able to find daycare after they’ve had their children,” VanKuren told Saratoga TODAY. “They try to come back to work after maternity leave and they have a lot of difficulty finding that infant care or finding affordable care for their toddlers and preschool-aged children.”
Both the proposed daycare center and the Center for Successful Aging are works in progress, and the hospital is actively seeking community feedback.
“We really look forward to welcoming [the community] into this conversation and truly building something that meets the needs of our community now and into the future,” VanKuren said.
Photo of The Coat Room interior via the restaurant’s website.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Phinney Design Group received the Citation award from the American Institute of Architects of Eastern New York (AIAENY) for its work on The Coat Room, a speakeasy in downtown Saratoga Springs.
The Citation Award recognizes projects that demonstrate exceptional design, sustainability, and social impact. Phinney Design Group was selected from a competitive field of nominees and judged by a panel of industry professionals from AIAENY.
“This recognition is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our talented team, and it inspires us to continue pushing the boundaries of architectural design and sustainability,” said Michael Phinney, Founding Principal at Phinney Design Group, in a statement.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Roohan Realty announced last week that Peggy King has joined the team as a licensed real estate salesperson.
After a long career in the insurance industry, King is transitioning into the world of real estate. While spending 24 years working for State Farm, King garnered experience in customer relations, negotiation, and financial analysis.
Since becoming a Saratoga County resident 28 years ago, she has become very active in the local theater community.
Actress Amanda Seyfried poses with novelist Liz Moore at the Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs. Photo via Seyfried’s Instagram account.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Amanda Seyfried, an actress best known for her roles in “Mean Girls,” “Mamma Mia,” and “Dear John,” stopped by the Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs last week in support of novelist Liz Moore. Moore was in town promoting her latest book, “The God of the Woods.”
Earlier this year, it was announced that Seyfried would star in a Peacock series based on “Long Bright River,” one of Moore’s novels. “Long Bright River” is a suspense thriller set in Philadelphia about a female police officer who patrols a neighborhood impacted by the opioid crisis. Moore’s latest book, “The God of the Woods,” is about a teenager who goes missing at an Adirondacks summer camp.
Seyfried lives in the Catskills with her husband, actor Thomas Sadoski.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — After an extensive renovation project, the Italian food store and catering company Cardona’s Saratoga Market officially reopened earlier this week. The family-owned business has been serving the Capital Region since 1945.
The renovation project included the addition of a 1,400 square-foot, full-service kitchen. As a result, the Saratoga market is now able to feature ready-to-serve hot food items such as penne alla vodka, tortellini alfredo, chicken marsala, chicken meatballs, arancini, stuffed shells, and more.
To commemorate its reopening, Cardona’s held a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Mayor John Safford and Saratoga Live TV personality Richard Migliore, who handed out samples of “The Mig,” a sandwich named after him.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Captains Aida and Oscar Rolon have been appointed to the Salvation Army Saratoga Springs office, it was announced last week. Lieutenants Cassidy and Michael Dow, who served in Saratoga for the past two years, have been reassigned to Oswego.
“It is an honor to continue our journey and mission of serving others in these new roles,” said Captain Aida Rolon in a statement. “As the cost of living continues to have a bigger and bigger impact on families and individuals in Saratoga Springs already struggling to put food on the table, and a roof over their heads, we are eager to build upon our predecessors’ work and want to provide a strong foundation for the future.”
The Rolons have been with The Salvation Army for 15 years. Before coming to New York, they were stationed at The Salvation Army Guayama Ray and Joan Kroc Center in Puerto Rico. They grew up in Loiza, Puerto Rico and have two young adult children together.
