The full-service Italian restaurant The Vineyard Di Norma, located at 605 Fiot St. in Fountain Hill, is scheduled to close on December 24. The Prosseda family took over the beloved Italian restaurant, which was formerly known as The Vineyard Restaurant, in September 2021. They chose to better customize the business after a little over a year of operation, renaming it Vineyard Di Norma after the Italian town of Norma, where the Prossedas are from, while still honoring the brand that local customers have come to know and love.
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The family posted a notice on the restaurant's Facebook page about its impending closure. The informal fine-dining restaurant was sold to Matt and Cindy Prosseda in 2021 when Pietro and Maria DiMatteo, the former owners of the Vineyard, retired after 31 years. Rachael and Luke Prosseda, the siblings' children, had always dreamed of running an Italian restaurant. Rachael and Luke Prosseda, who were raised in Wellsboro, Tioga County, felt the Lehigh Valley to be a friendly place to launch their business.
Rachael's husband, a Liberty High School alumnus, introduced the couple to the area while she was a Bloomsburg University student. It has now been eight years since the siblings moved to Bethlehem. Luke, the chief chef at The Vineyard Di Norma, attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. In addition to continuing the DiMatteos' custom of slaughtering on-site, he makes pastas, sauces, and other dishes from scratch with the assistance of his culinary crew.
Appetizers like burrata and broccoli rabe, chicken or veal dishes like Marsala, piccata, and Roman saltimbocca, and seafood dishes like shrimp "scampi-ed" and spaghetti with lump crab flesh, roasted peppers, and basil, mixed with oil and garlic, are all part of his menu concept. Along with a strong love and appreciation for food and family, many of the dishes on the menu have been handed down through the centuries. Rachael manages front-of-house operations, Matt and Cindy are usually available to help when required, whether in the dining room or behind the scenes, and Luke creates the menu and cooks the food. Rachael stated on Thursday that financial considerations played a significant role in the family's decision to close the restaurant. It was getting increasingly difficult to maintain the building and business. The owners of former Vineyard Di Norma will not go down without a fight. They are confident that we will see them again in the near future.
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