Angelo Mazzone didn’t want to turn Glen Sanders Mansion into apartments.
“It was the birthplace of everything,” he said last week during a phone chat while vacationing in Italy. In 1988, Mazzone was in his late 20s when he bought what was then a 330-year-old estate on the banks of the Mohawk River in Scotia. Over the decades, he grew Mazzone Hospitality into the region’s largest catering company and also opened multiple restaurants, among them 677 Prime in Albany, Aperitivo Bistro in Schenectady and Tala American Bistro in Latham. At its peak, Mazzone Hospitality had 1,000 employees and was doing 1,500 events a year, according to Mazzone’s nephew Sean Willcoxon, who started working for the company as a teenager and over 26 years rose to become vice president of catering. He now co-owns Blessings Family Restaurant in Colonie and Tinney’s Tavern in the Saratoga County hamlet of Middle Grove.
At the heart of Mazzone Hospitality, always, was the mansion, hosting hundreds of events annually, from Little League dinners to the most extravagant weddings. Willcoxon recalls eight-wedding weekends in the mansion’s multiple spaces, when guests from an afternoon event would be leaving as attendees arrived for evening nuptials. Until new headquarters opened in Clifton Park in 2014, the mansion’s kitchens were also the base for innumerable off-site catering jobs. Mazzone became wealthy. The company’s success attracted the interest of Restaurant Associates, a subsidiary of Compass Group, the world’s largest food-service company, which is said to serve 5.5 billion meals a year around the globe. In 2017, Mazzone sold his ownership interest in the catering and business-dining wings of his company to Restaurant Associates, which leased the mansion from him as an event venue…