Patti Allen and Greg Kormanik’s Attitude goes from scraps to scratch

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It takes a certain amount of chutzpah — call it attitude, if you prefer — to open a new breakfast-and-lunch restaurant in a midtown location that has had more incarnations than Lord Vishnu.

But Patti Allen and Greg Kormanik, the owners of Attitude — the still-unopened bruncheonette at 600 East 31st Street — say the name was inspired by their own strong personalities: Allen’s family heritage is Italian; Kormanik’s is Polish. They’re outspoken, headstrong and unreserved.

This is, after all, a couple who met at an estate sale several years ago. “I thought he was funny,” Allen says. “So I walked up and gave him my card.”

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That card led to phone calls, dates, a relationship and a business partnership. Allen has operated a vintage shop, Bella Patina, in the West Bottoms for nearly five years. Kormanik is a good cook and a talented baker, so they installed a 40-seat café inside Bella Patina, Vintage Eats & Sweets, which proved popular but was open only during the shop’s hours: one weekend a month during First Friday shopping weekends.

The success of Vintage Eats & Sweets emboldened the couple to expand the business into a full-time café with real hours and a more substantial menu. In January, when all of the city permits are approved, Allen and Kormanik will operate Attitude six days a week — from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. — in a century-old storefront at the corner of 31st Street and Cherry. (Vintage Eats & Sweets, now called the Painted Rooster, has been sublet to new owners, while Allen’s sons currently operate Bella Patina.)

The original tile entrance to the building still spells out “Drugs,” although the two-story structure was the Wirthman Hill pharmacy for just a decade in the years prior to World War I. After that, it housed a men’s clothing store, a hat-cleaning shop, a flower shop and, for the second half of the 20th century, a tire supply store. (The billiard hall next door had a much longer, more stable tenure, lasting well into the 1960s.)

After signing the lease on the building earlier this year, Allen and Kormanik found a few relics in the basement that dated to the Wirthman Hill days, including dusty apothecary bottles and a rusty sign. They’ll be on display in the 35-seat dining room, which now boasts antique tables, a snazzy glass-and-crystal chandelier — “We were at an estate sale,” Kormanik says, “and opened a closet door, and there it was” — and original tile floors from 1911.

“When we started looking at locations,” Allen says, “my first priority was ambience.”

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Instead of replastering the aging interior walls, which are mottled with a shade of institutional green paint that’s about a century old, the partners preserved them with a coat of polyurethane and decorated the surface with antique mirrors and silver-plated trays and platters.

The setting will be an eclectic but classy venue for Kormanik’s all-scratch menu: pancakes, French toast made from his house-baked cinnamon loaf, flaky biscuits with sausage gravy, and egg dishes. Daily lunch specials will include Allen’s lasagna recipe and the stuffed-cabbage casserole first created by Kormanik’s mother.

As experienced dealers in vintage merchandise, Allen and Kormanik knew that they wanted Attitude to look and feel like no other dining venue in the city. Stacked neatly on a table in the center of the dining room are towers of Shenango china — the sturdiest commercial restaurant china you could find in the last century — that will be the house pottery when Attitude opens.

“We were looking for this kind of china but a lot of it,” Allen says. “We were at a sale, and someone overheard us asking for it, and he told us to drive over to the church where he works. Someone had donated quite a bit to the church, and he sold the whole lot to us.”

Now Allen and Kormanik are just waiting for the opportunity to heap those plates with fried potatoes, fried eggs, buttered toast and slabs of lasagna.

“We’ve gotten this far,” Allen says. “Now we just want to open for business.”