Since coming to Virginia in the late 1970’s, the Buffa family has been committed to providing high-quality dining experiences to patrons in The Best PART of Virginia! Tony Buffa, the family patriarch, actually decided to stay in the area after making a visit to his childhood friend Cesare, proprietor of Cesare’s Ristorante in Chesterfield. The two local restaurateurs grew up in the same town in Sicily.
Their first restaurant was named Brothers Pizza, after Tony and his brother, but is now Sal’s Pizza. After another location was opened in Blackstone, Virginia, they came back and opened the Brothers Pizza location on Cox Road in Dinwiddie, and then Giuseppe’s a few miles away, owned by Tony’s brother. “We were born in Petersburg. It’s our home,” says Sal Buffa, Tony’s son, who remembers scampering around the original Brothers location as a child. Sal and his brother have inherited the management of the restaurants from their father and uncle. “We try and do a lot to give back to our community.”
Next, Sal opened Riptides, a trendy seafood restaurant in Chesterfield. The latest family venture, Joe’s Steak and Seafood in Dinwiddie, has already become a runaway hit with locals and tourists alike: their juicy steaks, fresh oysters, and succulent desserts are the talk of the county. When asked about the family’s propensity for becoming restaurateurs, Sal smiles and says, “It’s kind of fate, you know? We all grew up in the restaurants. I started working at Brothers when I was 13, and I was managing a restaurant when I was 19 or 20. I just always wanted to be like my dad.”
In total, the Buffa family has owned ten restaurants, as well as two food wholesalers called Sebastiano Farm Produce and the Buffa Italian Bakery, which freshly bakes bread for over five hundred restaurants. Their most recent venture is the Cedar Heart Market, which is also on Cox Road. This full-service travel center also includes a small dining counter called the Chef’s Grille and prepares to-go lunches with as much care and attention to detail as any of the Buffas’ other enterprises.
All of the Buffa establishments epitomize high-quality food, friendly and competent service, and, of course, family values and the utmost dedication to their labor of love: serving their customers. If you visit any one of their fine restaurants, you too can feel like a member of the Buffa family.