One restaurant - TRANSYLVANIA
One man - JOHN BALEANU
One story - AN AMERICAN DREAM - A ROMANIAN REALITY

   Years and years ago, a romanian decided that he wanted to live in the Free World - a simple idea but not so simple to make it happen. But being a man of strong will, he did not let anybody or anything to stop him from achieving his goal. "It wasn't easy" are his exact words when asked how did it all begin. "I almost got killed in one of my attempts to cross the Romanian border - thanks to one of my friends". After a while, he managed getting in former Yugoslavia, one of the Romania's neighbor countries. In a few months, asking for political asylum, he was able to leave and arrived in USA. Filled with joy that he finally escaped the communist


regim, once he got on American land, he set up new goals, trying over and over again to succeed in his new country. He never gave up. "When I first got here, nobody helped me, I didn't know anybody."

 
This only made him stronger in which made his desire of making an old dream a reality. So after years of work, filled with good and bad, in the year of 1995, a new restaurant was rising in downtown Hollywood, Florida. But not just any restaurant: this one was a special place, born from long lived longings of his birth country, with its people and traditions. It was meant to be what it became: a place where all the people can feel at home, a place filled with old friend's stories and the joy of new friendships. John Baleanu, the man that made it all possible, live and breath for the place, welcoming everybody with a warm smile and a good joke.