Springtime means new restaurants, and New York City has some noteworthy additions.
Osteria Carlina Opens a Tribeca Location
Osteria Carlina Tribeca opened this week at 11 Varick St. It’s the latest charming Italian spot from Moreno and Christina Cerutti, the husband-wife team behind Osteria Carlina in the West Village and Bar Mario in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which debuted in January. (The couple have a third partner in Bar Mario, Alesandro Bandini.)
At Osteria Carlina, the menu is “an homage to Moreno’s Northern Italian origins,” according to a release. Expect braised meats and stuffed pastas, such as beef cheeks in Barolo with potato puree, and Maine lobster tortelloni with mascarpone, to name two alluring items from the launch menu at the Tribeca location.
Moreno Cerutti, who lists 20 years of hospitality experience in Turin on his resume, started his New York City career seven years ago but now is in entrepreneurial expansion mode, creating eye-catching spaces that suggest little slices of Italy in beloved NYC neighborhoods.
Cafe Mars Announces Opening Date in Brooklyn
The hotly anticipated Cafe Mars announced May 17 as its official opening date. Billing itself as “An Unusual Italian Restaurant,” the contemporary chic spot at 272 3rd Ave. in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn is already taking reservations via Tock. (Check out the renderings at Format Architecture Office.)
The team behind Café Mars includes chef Paul D’Avino, an Italian-American who has worked on several restaurants known for high-end gastronomy, including wd~50 and aska, and Jorge Olarte, who lists Ssam Bar and most recently, a stint at Nashville’s Rolf & Daughters, on his resume.
The two are looking to bring a decidedly different take on the type of Italian food served in this neighborhood for more than a century. A Culinary Agents listing for job openings says the chefs are taking an “all-encompassing look at Italian food, by looking at not just a region in Italy, but everywhere Italian food has a foothold. While that includes happily drawing on all parts of Italy, we also look at what makes unique the many different subsets of Italian-American food, be it Brooklyn, New Orleans, Philadelphia, or St. Louis, as well as countries like Argentina or the itameshi cuisine of Japan.”
Sounds intriguing! Appetito will report back soon.
Due Madri Opens at the New Market 57 at Pier 57
The Butcher Girls, partners and whole animal butchers Erika Nakamura and Jocelyn Guest, have revealed their latest concept. Due Madri in the new Market 57 at Pier 57 on Manhattan’s west side, The now-open kiosk specializes in “Roman sandwiches, Italian favorites and aperitivi,” and it sounds like the owners did their homework before crafting the menu.
An Instagram post from earlier this week notes, “Take us back to that time just a couple of months ago, when @joceygu @irenewongi and I got to take a mad dash through Bologna, Modena, Florence, Tuscany, and Rome to put the bells and whistles on the sandwiches we serve @duemadrinyc. We researched before we went, did some fine detective work while we were there, and came back with a renewed sense of Italian magic and wonder.”
Amen to that! The menu features delectable-sounding sandwiches such as the “Nonna,” with roasted red pepper, marinated artichokes, basil, Pecorino Romano, and semi-dry tomato, and the “Sergio,” with braised beef, pickled radicchio, salsa verde, and aioli. Given the butchery background, there’s a lot of meat on the menu, from porchetta to mortadella.
In Other News
>>>The team behind Il Buco has announced a new members subscription program with quarterly boxes featuring items from Il Buco Alimentari and its other restaurants, including “imported provisions, small-batch specialties, and house-made goodies.” The boxes can be picked up or delivered in NYC or shipped nationally, with memberships starting at $149 per quarter. More info and limited signups here.
>>>For those who weren’t following the biggest news of the week, the case of the New Jersey pasta mystery, The New York Times seems to have revealed the solution to the case. To catch you up: Last week in Old Bridge, NJ, residents reported that somebody had dumped hundreds of pounds of seemingly cooked pasta in the woods. Theories and speculation ran rampant, with many thinking that an Italian restaurant had for some reason discarded the noodles. Once word spread on social media and on Reddit, all sorts of pun-filled jokes about the situation materialized, including calls to send the perpetrators to a “penne tentiary” and it was “pasta expiration date.” According to the Times, a local official disclosed that they had figured out two things: 1) the pasta wasn’t actually cooked, but had softened in the rain, and 2) it didn’t come from a restaurant; it was traced to a private residence.
>>> Last but not least, congratulations to all our chef and restaurateur friends who are supporters of Napoli's football club, which clinched its first Serie A Championship in 33 years this week. Among those celebrating are the teams at NYC's Song'E Napule and San Francisco's Casaro Osteria, whose owner recently shared with Appetito how his pizza and pasta restaurants have roots in boyhood trips to watching Napoli play.
