At the end of 2019, Nick and Elena Gagliardi drove up from a family visit to look at an empty storefront at 23 Main Street. It had a view of Lake Winnipesaukee and sat a short walk from the town docks. When Elena lifted a corner of the old carpet, she found tiles underneath that reminded her of home in Arezzo. They signed the lease and opened Gusto Italian Café.
Six years later, that single storefront has turned into four addresses spread across two towns, and the pattern of how it happened tells you more about Center Harbor's Main Street than any single grand opening would. A restaurant that grows once is a nice story. One that keeps growing, in a village with almost no spare commercial space to grow into, is a pattern worth understanding if you actually live here.
The Café That Started With a Feeling
Nick runs the kitchen and Elena runs the front of the house, and the menu they built leaned hard into where Elena is from rather than what a typical lake-town breakfast spot usually serves. Local coverage at the time noted the café was banking on Elena's native Arezzo cooking finding an audience in a New Hampshire lake town, a bet that paid off. Nick later put it simply when asked why they'd chosen the harder path instead of an easier life back in Colorado skiing and rafting: "We always pick the way most difficult."
It worked well enough, fast enough, that local reporters started noticing a pattern. With Osteria Poggio nearby and Piccolo Italian Market just over the line in Moultonborough, one Laconia Daily Sun writer described Center Harbor as becoming Lake Winnipesaukee's own Little Italy.
Four Expansions in Six Years
What followed the café's opening wasn't one big leap but a string of smaller ones, each one stretching the business a little further than the last:
- A juice and smoothie bar, overflow seating, and a second-floor event space added to the original building
- A pizza truck and a market stocked with prepared foods and specialty goods
- In fall 2023, the New Hampshire Lodging and Restaurant Association named Gusto's owners Restaurateur of the Year
- Around the same time, the Gagliardis took over a "laboratory" space in a Moultonborough strip mall, less than a mile away, in a spot that used to be Piccolo Market, to handle recipe development and baking
- By 2025, the Market outgrew its shared footprint and moved toward its own standalone storefront
Today the café operates at 23 Main Street, open for breakfast and lunch most days with dinner service added Wednesday through Saturday. The Market now runs out of its own address on Plymouth Street, with separate hours and its own phone line. Four addresses, two towns, one family that started with a carpet and a feeling in an empty storefront.
Elena summed up the intent behind all of it in an interview after the Restaurateur of the Year award: "Center Harbor will be a destination for Italian food."
The Taphouse Across the Street, and the Other One Down the Block
Somewhere in that same stretch of years, the Gagliardis opened Gusto's Taphouse directly across the street from the original café, serving pasta, pizza, and salads alongside a fuller bar menu. It runs across two floors, and more than one review has mentioned the same growing pain: on busy nights, the kitchen has had to trim its menu because it's supplying both levels of the Taphouse and the café's own dinner service out of the same kitchen at once. That's not a complaint about the food. It's a useful piece of information if you're planning a Friday dinner there during the busy stretch of the season, because the menu you see online may be shorter by the time you sit down.
Here's the part that trips up anyone searching online for a table: Center Harbor also has a completely unrelated restaurant called simply The Taphouse, at 18 Main Street, with its own website and no connection to the Gusto family. It runs comfort food and a wide craft beer list, with some of the better lake views on the street. Two businesses with nearly the same name, on the same block, owned by different people. Worth knowing before you call for a reservation.
The Rest of the Table
The Gusto cluster is the biggest story on Main Street, but it's not the only reason Center Harbor eats well for a village its size:
- Canoe Restaurant and Tavern, on Whittier Highway, has run under chef and owner Scott Ouellette for more than 23 years, with a lakeside dining room and a downstairs lounge for private parties
- The Mug Restaurant has become the after-golf stop for people coming off Waukewan, known for its draft selection and a chicken garlic parm rollup regulars order without checking the menu
- Center Harbor Diner handles breakfast and lunch within walking distance of the town docks, clean enough that one reviewer compared it to their mom's kitchen. Its mailing address technically lands across the line in Moultonborough, another reminder of how loosely these Lakes Region borders run
- Bellies-n-Butts and Rubbin' Butts BBQ cover the quick-bite and barbecue end of things
What Else Is On the Calendar Before the Season Turns
Main Street's food scene isn't the only thing worth tracking this fall. The town kicked off its 250th anniversary calendar on July 4th with the Town Band's concert at the Bandstand, and the celebrations haven't wrapped up with the holiday. The Board of Selectmen is scheduled to issue a formal proclamation on September 9th marking 250 years since Congress settled on the name "United States of America," a smaller and more specific milestone than the Fourth but one the town is marking with its own ceremony.
Two other dates belong on the calendar if you're local. The State Primary runs from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on September 8th. And if you're on the water, the town has confirmed the boat launch, town docks, and town beach will close temporarily on Sunday, September 6th, at 3 and 4 p.m. It's a small operational detail, but the kind that ruins an afternoon if you plan a boat trip around it without knowing.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this shows up in a market report. There's no listing that captures a family turning one storefront into four addresses across two towns over six years, or a Board of Selectmen still adding events to a 250th anniversary calendar in September. But if you're trying to read whether a place this small still has momentum, the six-year version of the Gusto story tells you more than any single opening could. Center Harbor's whole commercial core is short enough that you can watch a business grow one storefront at a time, in real time, on your own walk to dinner.
If watching your corner of Center Harbor change like this has you curious what your own place here is actually worth this season, HomesByAnaRealtor puts together an instant home valuation any time you want a real number instead of a guess.
