The Boulevard in Albany is not the offspring of Sam’s Italian American Restaurant. But it shares some of Sam’s DNA.
The menu reflects the Sam’s heritage, with items such as Clams a la Sam’s, chicken or eggplant Parm and, soon, Sam’s-style cannoli, made from the original recipes and under tutelage by the founding family and a returning chef who worked there for two decades. They sit comfortably alongside American fare from the other part of the new restaurant’s lineage, the Barge, or, more formally, the Riverfront Bar & Grill, which floated on the Hudson River at the Corning Preserve for more than 20 years until closing after the summer 2017 season.
Cheri West started working at the Barge in 1997, buying it 12 years later. She also owned Park View Pub, across from Washington Park at the beginning of New Scotland Avenue, from 2012 to 2017. The Barge’s seafood chowder is on the menu at The Boulevard, as are its salad with pecan-crusted chicken breast, bacon-cheeseburger with grilled onions and pesto chicken sandwich. When taken as a whole, and factoring in other dishes including the Parms, chicken Marsala, shrimp scampi, linguine with clam sauce, sirloin steak and lemon-dill salmon, the menu illustrates the tagline West chose for her first restaurant in eight years: “an American grille with a taste of Italy.”
She opened The Boulevard at the beginning of this month at 125 Southern Blvd., where Sam’s served Italian American favorites to an estimated 1.5 million people for just over 50 years, from April 1971 to June 2021. The restaurant opens at 3 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday and noon Sunday for now, with Friday and Saturday lunch starting in the coming weeks and, perhaps after football season, early dinner hours on Sunday. (Reservations: 518-451-9660.)
It’s a sports bar, with a dartboard, 11 TVs and team logos on the walls — “People keep asking me about teams that aren’t up there yet,” West said during a tour last week — but it’s also a neighborhood restaurant for families, complete with a children’s menu promising an “overflowing bowl of mac n cheese.”…