Sara Frasca says she’ll have no regrets closing Trasca & Co Eatery, instead viewing it as the end of 11 years of a job well done.
Feeling a need to reduce her work hours and facing a decision whether to sacrifice the restaurant versus her business consultancy, Point NorthEast, Frasca said she opted to focus on the latter, which is more lucrative.
“This was truly a passion-filled labor of love,” she said of the restaurant at 155 Tourside Drive in the Sawgrass Village shopping center in Ponte Vedra Beach.
“I think in order to do it the way that I want it done, I had to recognize it was time to let it go.”
Trasca & Co Eatery says on it website it is closing April 13 along with the connected Ponte Vedra Tap Room, which Frasca opened in 2022.
A third-generation restaurateur, Frasca said a desire to spend more time with her family contributed to her decision to close the restaurant. She said she also wanted to devote more attention to Point NorthEast, which works with companies with earnings between $5 million and $50 million to help with employee retention, increasing sales and building a better workplace culture.
NorthEast’s name is a reference to line charts showing growth trajectories pointing up and to the right, which would be northeast on map.
“A lot of our law firm owners are running a law firm. They’re not running a business. Our architectural firm owners are amazing architects, but what they’ve never had is anyone help them through how to hire and retain great talent, how to use data to make good decisions for their business, how to build a financial model that allows them to prosper,” said Frasca, who employs a staff of 15 remote workers in the consultancy.
“It is incredibly important to me to help business leaders in a way that it is not just reliant on us. It’s a sustainable program that we’re putting in where everything we’re doing helps them and it’s able to be done by their team. They’re not becoming reliant on us. We’re just like training wheels. We come in, we help them, and then we can leave at some point, and their business is better.”
Frasca said she worked in corporate marketing in her home state of Minnesota before moving to Ponte Vedra Beach with her former husband, who had taken a job with the Ponte Vedra-based PGA Tour. She has remarried and has a blended family of three daughters and two sons, ages 13 to 19.
She opened the restaurant in 2015, initially wanting to call it Frasca & Co but discovering the name already was trademarked by a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado.
The Trasca & Co menu featured pizza, soup, salads and wraps, including some by Frasca’s grandparents, who opened a restaurant in 1974 in Colorado.
Frasca said that after operating both businesses, she realized she wasn’t giving either her full attention and that it was unsustainable to lead both. She rejected offers to sell the restaurant, saying, “I just couldn’t come to terms with someone else being at the helm.”
“What if they didn’t do things the way that I wanted it done?” she said. “What if they didn’t serve people? What if they weren’t nice or got cranky and didn’t love up on the guests the way we did? I wouldn’t feel good about that.”
Frasca plans to sell the restaurant’s equipment on Facebook Marketplace and has scheduled an in-person sale from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily from April 14 through April 16.
She and her family also invite the public to a party starting 5 p.m. April 11 to mark the restaurant’s closure.
“This was a bucket list item for me,” she said.
“This was something I needed to do for myself and for my soul. I did it. I feel I did it successfully and to the best of my ability. And now it has run its course for me.”