Where Albania Meets Morningside Heights
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An unlikely union between a chef from upper Manhattan and a couple who emigrated from Eastern Europe is creating a culinary success story in Manhattan Valley.
Situated on Columbus Avenue between 106th and 107th streets, near pizza parlors and taco joints, the upscale Voza has quickly become a neighborhood favorite. Local residents, many of them professionals who moved to the area for its relatively low rents, pack the tiny, 210-square-foot restaurant six nights a week — Voza is closed on Sundays — to dine on Chef Sharn Jenkins’s eclectic, Western European-style menu that is served up at prices hard to find south of 100th Street. While the food at Voza is sumptuous — the pork chop with roasted potatoes and vegetables ($21) is a winner, as is the marinated rack of lamb served with roasted corn and potatoes ($25) — it is the ambiance that makes for a unique dining experience.
Formerly a clothing store called the Fitting Room, Voza’s owners, the Albanian husband-and-wife pair Niko Gjoklaj and Monika Krajni, and Mr. Jenkins — transformed the unremarkable store-front into an intimate setting featuring Old World woodwork that makes the restaurant feel more like Burgundy than uptown Manhattan.
Last year, Mr. Jenkins, a graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, left a position managing Bayard’s, the restaurant at the famed India House in the financial district, and was looking to open his own restaurant in Manhattan Valley. Though he had spent the past decade in the front of the house, managing the restaurant at the Regency Hotel for part of that time, Mr. Jenkins wanted to get back into the kitchen. “I wasn’t going to hire an executive chef to do what I can do,” he said.
As Mr. Jenkins was searching for the right space, he was introduced, fortuitously, to Mr. Gjoklaj, a contractor and craftsman who had worked in the past for Mr. Jenkins’s sister. “I was looking to open a restaurant by myself,” Mr. Jenkins said. “I used him to do an estimate on the place, when he said, ‘We can help each other.'”
Mr. Gjoklaj, who moved to New York with his wife, Ms. Krajni, about six years ago, had become a contractor here in order to supplement his acting career. Having worked on the interiors of several restaurants, Mr. Gjoklaj convinced Mr. Jenkins to take him on as a partner.
“He said, ‘I can do the construction, you can do the food.'” Mr. Jenkins recalled. After deciding on the space, the new partners went to work. Using wooden beams Mr. Gjoklaj had discovered on a sidewalk near the restaurant, he turned the space into a little piece of Europe. The transformation took the partners only about a month to complete. During that period, Ms. Krajni took the reins on designing the dining room.
While Messrs. Jenkins and Gjoklaj both credit Ms. Krajni, who worked for a designer while living in both France and Germany, with creating Voza’s cozy atmosphere, she is quick to defer the praise, a common theme when speaking with the three proprietors about their restaurant. “We all work together,” Ms. Krajni said. “We’re open and that’s maybe why it came out like this.”
The seats in Voza’s dining room and newly opened outdoor patio are filled on most nights, but many of the regulars don’t seem to mind a short wait while enjoying a glass of wine. (Voza is currently BYOB, but Mr. Jenkins said their liquor license will arrive any day now, and that he has already picked an eclectic wine list.)
With the success of Voza, the three partners are set on opening a new restaurant, and they are eyeing more established neighborhoods, such as Wall Street, Midtown, or the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Mr. Jenkins said.