Photo by by Liza WinklerIn a vacant purple building in Old Town Spring, former East Coast residents Joe and Maria Macri combined their years of restaurant experience and lifelong love of fine dining to launch the bistro of their dreams in August 2013.
In the past year, Joe, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and Maria have filtered through seven different seasonal and special menus at The Black Sheep Bistro to keep dishes fresh. The menu features high-end brunch, lunch and dinner items that range from salads and roasted chicken to filet mignon and pan-roasted wild king salmon.
"The only thing we don't make [from scratch] is the bread—we just don't have the facility for that," Joe said. "Everything else is butchered on-site, prepped on-site and everything is cooked to order. Our thought process is always the client and [his] experience."
Growing up in New York in an Italian family, Joe had his first taste of the food industry at age 14 while working at a pizzeria. Tapping into her Greek roots, Maria, a former hair salon owner, learned to cook by watching her father work as a chef in New Jersey for more than 40 years.
