What does it take for a restaurant to be considered a hidden gem? It must start with the part about being hidden, right?
And it must be a gem.
Louie’s by Chef Jason, the Robbinsville restaurant from Jason Dilts and Dominic Maglione, has certainly proved itself to be a gem. Dilts’ cooking has garnered raves wherever he has worked. At 31, he has already developed a loyal following among area gourmands.
Maglione is even younger, at 23. But he and his front-of-house staff have wasted little time in winning over regulars with their congenial hospitality. The gushing posts from freshly satisfied Louie’s diners on Facebook foodie groups just hit different compared to those for most restaurants.
But it’s the first part, the “hidden,” where Louie’s might not quite be up to the title.
Sure, it’s located in a small white building in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it plot on Route 130 that, for decades, was the home of Shrimp King, a seafood shop.
Still, Dilts and Maglione have done everything they can to turn their utilitarian space into the kind of destination many remember from the heyday of Trenton’s largely Italian-American Chambersburg neighborhood.
Walking into the dining room back then felt like stepping into someone’s home. Louie’s by Chef Jason clearly aims for a similar vibe. With each passing month, the BYOB feels less like a hidden gem, and more like one of Mercer County’s few true must-try dining experiences.
Dilts calls his food “redefined American cuisine.” It draws heavily on his time working in Italian-American restaurant kitchens and from growing up eating in the same Chambersburg restaurants that his restaurant now hearkens back to.
He has fond memories too of growing up eating Sunday dinners with his part-Italian-American family. He savors the tradition of gathering with loved ones at the dinner table for a comforting feast. Those memories inspire him to share his love of food and, where possible, impart that love through his cooking.
The Louie’s menu has a modern feel, mixing comfort classics like chicken parm and short rib macaroni and cheese with traditionally upscale dishes like Chilean sea bass, twin lobster tails and rack of lamb.
Dilts also puts a chef’s twist on familiar Italian classics. There’s cherry pepper-glazed calamari, poached pear sacchettoni with cranberries, and linguine with fermented black garlic and smoked pork belly. And Italian-style desserts like limoncello, tiramisu and cheesecake are house made.
In Maglione, Dilts has found a partner whose background complements his own. Like Dilts, Maglione comes from a family where food was always important.
Dominic Louis “Louie” Maglione grew up in Hamilton, but he also grew up working in dad Brian’s Lawrence pizzeria, Fedelo’s, on Lawrence Road.
When Brian was hospitalized with Covid-19 during the pandemic, it fell to Dominic, still a teen, to run the restaurant. Once Brian had recovered, he discovered that his son had enjoyed that taste of management and felt ready to break out on his own. The task then became to find the perfect opportunity for him to do so.
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Jason Dilts grew up in Robbinsville, but his chef’s journey began at DiMattia’s, in Allentown, when he was 14. There, the son of Ken and Mary Dilts started as a busboy and, given a chance, proved himself a capable cook.
He graduated from Robbinsville High in 2011, and continued to hone his skills in kitchens while attending Virginia Radford University. After college, he worked at FunniBonz BBQ, then LoLa Restaurant in Robbinsville, where he rose to the position of chef-partner with owner Mark Longo.
He left LoLa to work as head chef at Zinna’s Bistro in Cranbury and later, at the popular Revere Ristorante Italiano on River Road in Ewing. It was while he was at Revere that he first met Brian Maglione, who became one of Dilts’ best customers.
During the pandemic, Dilts had no choice but to learn how to work in a kitchen that was only making food for takeout. The experience was eye opening.
“People still wanted to support restaurants. We were busy. People were getting takeout food created the same way as eating there, except maybe we couldn’t have things like calamari on the menu, because it would never taste good by the time you got it home.”
He says that Revere did double the business on Mothers Day 2020 that it did the year before, when there was no pandemic. That kind of success inspired him to leave Revere to open his own restaurant, Chef Jason’s 1275, in the former Zinna’s space, with Zinna’s having moved to a new location.
He opened in October 2020 for take-out only. “My own ideas, my own new concept. All the pieces came together when I didn’t have to worry about anyone telling me what I was doing,” he says.
Chef Jason 1275 eventually opened its dining room when the state permitted it, and continued to thrive until closing abruptly in May 2022. Dilts wrote on Facebook that he had closed the restaurant because the landlord was selling the building. Once again he found himself between jobs.
It was not long before a new opportunity cropped up for Dilts — and it came from loyal customer Brian Maglione, who had a proposal to make.
“He called me up and said, ‘Jay, my son wants to run a restaurant. I think you guys would be perfect together,’” Dilts says.
The pair hit it off, and went about finding a location in which to open their new joint venture. They settled on the former Shrimp King and named it Louie’s by Chef Jason. After extensive interior renovations, they opened in December 2022 for lunch and dinner.
The lunch menu skews toward salads, like the shaved Brussels sprouts salad and the chicken Caesar salad, and sandwiches including the Louie Burger, the Italian chicken, the Just-in-Case-You’re-a-Vegatarian Wrap (that’s what it’s called) and a braised short rib sandwich.
Dinner service is split into first courses, mains and desserts, filled with popular dishes from Dilts’ previous stops, like pretzel-encrusted chicken and “boom boom chicken,” a combination of vodka rigatoni and chicken parm. There’s also a variety of old and new dishes like steak “Don,” pork osso bucco, shrimp fra diavolo and pumpkin ravioli.
Although some items on the menu may change seasonally, Dilts has learned that customers expect some dishes, like the Brussels sprouts salad and the pretzel encrusted chicken, to always be there.
“They say, ‘Don’t touch my boom boom chicken,’” Dilts says with a laugh.
Dilts also says he loves having a hands-on partner like Maglione.
“I did the silent partner thing with 1275. At the time, I thought it might be better to have a hands-on guy. Somebody to be the face of the restaurant, somebody to shake your hand and welcome you to the restaurant,” he says.
Which is not to say that Dilts is a stranger to his customers, not at all. Dilts makes it clear that he cherishes the relationships that he builds with regulars, and Maglione will usually tell him if there are familiar faces in the dining room to go out and greet.
Dilts was also a instrumental in creating Louie’s Chef’s Social events. On the first Monday of each month, Louie’s goes reservations only for the night. Guests sit at shared tables and eat a prix-fixe, five-to-seven course meal of seasonal cuisine, with the menu inspired by the ingredients that are available and what Dilts feels like making. (Guests with allergies and aversions are accommodated, of course.)
It’s a setting in which diners put their trust in Dilts to make them dishes they will enjoy. Dilts, in turn, joins them in the dining room each course to explain each dish and the inspiration behind the dish.
“Dom asked me if I was going to tell people what’s on the menu. I said, ‘No,’” Dilts says. “The whole idea was that I didn’t even know what I was cooking before that day. I go to the market, get fresh things, and I design a menu so that I get to interact with the guests. It’s something that is fun for me, gives us a busy Monday and is kind of an exclusive kind of thing.”
Louie’s held its first Chef’s Social in August and drew nine people, two of whom were Maglione’s parents.
April’s Chef’s Social, on the other hand, attracted 40 guests, many of them repeat customers. The word, it seems, is getting out.
“The coolest thing about it is the social aspect,” Maglione says. “After month two or three, we had people call us up and say, ‘If So-and-So is going to be there, can we be put with them?’
“Last month I put a table of 10 together, five couples at one table. I go back two courses later, and there’s a guy, he didn’t know anyone at the table at the start of the night, and now he’s sharing a story with the whole table. People enter as strangers, but they open their bottle of wine, start eating, start sharing stories and before you know it, they’re leaving as friends.”
Louie’s has also established a tradition of being open on holidays, even Christmas Day. For special occasions, the restaurant offers special menus both for dining in and for family-style takeout. The restaurant will be offering both options for Mother’s Day; check out the website for details.
If there is one thing that Dilts and Maglione might say could be better about Louie’s, it would probably be the building, which in addition to being bland and non-handicapped-accessible, is just a space that they have had to make work, rather than a space that was designed to be the kind of restaurant that they want to operate.
They have made the best of the situation by painting the interiors in soothing colors and decorating the walls with homey touches, like black-and-white family photos and pictures of restaurants where they have worked.
But they were happy to tell me that they do have an agreement in place with their landlord to move into a newly built space sometime in the next couple of years.
While the duo would not share any details about the location for publication, they did say that the restaurant would remain in Robbinsville and that they are hopeful of opening sometime before the 2025 holiday season.
Louie’s By Chef Jason. 1111 U.S. 130, Robbinsville NJ 08691. Open 7 days a week from 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Reservations recommended for weekends and holidays. To make a reservation for the next Chef’s Social, call (609) 208-3685.
Jason Dilts and Dominic Maglione outside Louie's by Chef Jason, the restaurant the pair run together in Robbinsville.,
