Strong Hearts Cafe Owner Announces New WNY Location Strong Hearts Cafe Owner Announces New WNY Location

Co-owner dishes on the new location.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — “We did our research on other places in Upstate New York, and we really fell in love with Buffalo,” Joel Capolongo said.

Strong Hearts Cafe is a vegan restaurant that offers sandwiches, desserts and salads. The co-founder and co-owner, Capolongo recently announced the 14-year-old cafe is expanding outside of Syracuse for the first time.

“The community seemed to be very welcoming and open, and they wanted us to be there,” Capolongo said. “And there’s just a lot of opportunity in Buffalo. It’s the second largest city in the state, and we felt it was very underserved in the vegan market.”

Capolongo and his business partner, Nicholas Ryan, are planning to keep the menu items the same, until they are ready to start exploring items that will be exclusive to the Buffalo location.

“I think we’re going to do a Buffalo Bleu Chicken Sandwich, which is like a Buffalo wing type of chicken sandwich with bleu cheese dressing, which I guess is very popular out there that we don’t do here,” Capolongo said. “But by and large it’ll be very, very similar things that we do here.”

They plan to open the Buffalo location in June, and will be one of the restaurants featured at the Syracuse and Western New York VegFests, festivals that exclusively offer plant-based food options, coming later this year.

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Colette Jones

Colette Jones is a multimedia journalist at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. They will graduate from the Broadcast & Digital Journalism program in May 2022.

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