Building the Valley: New Kensington native teams with Strange Roots, Common Oven to offer downtown brew pub

Tony Vigilante isn’t a master beer brewer or a professional pizza chef.

But he sure loves a great pint to wash down a tasty pizza.

So when the New Kensington native saw the chance to share his penchant for brew and pie in the town where he lives and works, he found a way to make it happen.

Vigilante has collaborated with Strange Roots Experimental Ales to open the company’s third location in the building he owns at 977 Fifth Ave. Strange Roots also has breweries in Millvale and West Deer, where the beer is produced.

The pub’s food is cooked on-site by Common Oven Pizza Co., which occupies part of the building.

The Strange Roots brew pub, which opened in mid-October, is the fourth redevelopment project Vigilante, 50, and his wife Nicole, 49, have launched in New Kensington.

“My wife and I have always lived here,” said Vigilante, who works as the solicitor for the City of New Kensington and the New Kensington-Arnold School District and has a law office near the brew pub. “We’re trying to invest in the community.

“We want our three children to come back here someday to live and work.”

The couple’s first project was the renovation of two connected buildings along 10th Street between Fifth Avenue and Barnes Street.

One of the buildings is used by Steel Cup Coffee Roasters. The other one is for Trovo — Italian for “I find” — Nicole Vigilante’s vintage home décor shop.

In 2020, they bought the building at 924 Fourth Ave. and leased it to Taqueria El Pastorcito.

“We started seeing what we considered positive changes happening in New Kensington, so we when we bought and renovated those buildings, we looked for businesses we thought would be a good fit,” Vigilante said.

The Vigilantes said they are intent on being part of the efforts to rebuild the town’s fortunes and repair its image, which suffered greatly from the collapse of the region’s steel and heavy manufacturing industries.

“Granted, there’s a long way to go and I don’t want to overstate it, but I’ve been surprised, really, at how fast things have been happening here,” he said.

Vigilante said changing people’s perception is one of the keys to advancing the redevelopment of the city’s downtown.

“We really need everybody to begin reimagining what they expect downtown New Kensington to be,” he said. “A lot of people are still comparing what’s happening now to what was here before.

“But it’s never going to be like that again. It doesn’t mean it still can’t be something great. It can be. It will just be different,” he said.

While there’s no guarantee that a new business will succeed, Vigilante thinks entrepreneurs can improve their chances with some forethought and planning.

“People aren’t going to come here to eat, drink, shop or for entertainment if the businesses aren’t offering a quality product,” he said. “The coffee at Steel Cup is high quality. Taqueria has some of the best Mexican food outside of Mexico.”

The requirement that the products meet or exceed the expectations of customers is what led Vigilante to team up with Strange Roots and Common Oven.

“They put out a a very high-quality product,” he said. “It has to be that way for people to continue to support your business.”

Love at first sight

The Vigilantes said the decision to open a brew pub in the building instead of using it for another business was guided by their experience developing the 10th Street building for a coffee shop.

“We knew that a good coffee shop would be something to give people a reason to come downtown,” Nicole Vigilante said. “We thought that if we could give people a reason, they would also walk around and check out the other shops and businesses.”

So when a building with a spacious indoor area and an adjacent double lot became available, Vigilante saw it as an ideal location for a brew pub.

“People who appreciate fresh, high-quality craft beers support the places that serve them,” he said. “So I reached out to Strange Roots because I’d been to their other locations and knew they produced some really great beers. They have something for everyone.”

Seeking outside expertise was also the strategy for feeding the pub’s hungry guests.

“Getting into business is hard enough without having to deal with all the aspects of food preparation and production,” Vigilante said. “So we decided to leave it to the professionals.”

The rear of the brick building had a room with a cement floor and large garage doors that made it an ideal spot to install a wood-fired pizza oven.

“When I realized we could put in a pizza oven, that became our focus and we started looking around and reaching out to different people,” he said.

Gavin McCall, founder of Common Oven Pizza Co., expressed interest, Vigilante said, so he and his 17-year-old daughter, Mina, went for a taste test.

“I don’t know if it was a hallelujah moment or what, but the second we tasted Gavin’s pizza we knew we wanted to serve it at Strange Roots. He’s really talented and puts the time and effort into making a great pizza.”

McCall, 31, of East Liberty said he was looking to open his own pizzeria after years of working in other shops when he connected with Vigilante.

“I started with just using small portable ovens for pop-up events around the area and then upgraded to a trailer to transport a larger oven,” he said. “I wanted my own shop, but I really didn’t have the means to do it.”

McCall said he had no qualms about opening in New Kensington because whatever problems existed in the past were under his radar.

“I grew up in (East Liberty) and really had no opinion about New Kensington because I had no history there,” he said. “But I saw how things changed in East Liberty and Lawrenceville, and I could see the same things starting to happen in New Kensington.”

But what sold McCall more than anything was Vigilante, he said.

“After meeting him, I got the sense of what he was trying to do,” McCall said. “The fact that he is willing to make such a large investment in turning his community around made me feel very comfortable working with him.”

Building block for success

Efforts to draw people back into downtown New Kensington began to take a turn in 2021 with the launch of Fridays on Fifth, a monthly event sponsored by the New Kensington Recreation Commission that runs from spring through fall.

The city shuts off a section of Fifth Avenue to vehicle traffic for the event, which features an array of food trucks, live entertainment and shops that stay open later.

Vigilante volunteers to book the food trucks, and his wife promotes the event on social media. One of the first food trucks to sign on went on to Vigilante’s building for Taqueria El Pastorcito.

“The idea was to get people used to coming down here on a regular basis,” Nicole Vigilante said. “The hope is that people will realize that not only can they come downtown for an event, they can come down and meet a friend for coffee during the week or stop by to pick up some gourmet baklava. We want to help make coming downtown part of peoples’ routine.”

When remodeling the space for a brew pub, the Vigilantes took their cues from the existing Strange Roots locations. But they also added personal touches that mesh with their philosophy of creative reuse.

The heavy wood door to the walk-in cooler where the beer is stored in 30-liter containers that were filled at the brewery in West Deer was pulled from a barn in Punxsutawney that had a cooler inside.

The pub’s glossy wood bar counter was salvaged from a former bowling alley in Vandergrift. And a large wooden pew in the main seating areas came out of a church in Dormont.

The murals and Strange Roots logs that adorn the walls were painted by Nina Vigilante.

“We hired people to do some of the work, but we did a lot of it ourselves,” Nicole Vigilante said. “Family members were down here in the evening and on weekends helping us out. We put a lot of time and effort in over a year to get things ready.”