New York Italian Food Is Getting Weird (in a Good Way)

On a recent Friday at Daphne’s, a new Italian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the red sauce was green, made from chartreuse-colored tomatoes and a splash of vodka. The lasagna came in the form of noodles fried into chips, broken over a dish of beef tartare topped with shoyu-cured egg yolk. There was a Milanese cutlet, but its crisp carapace swaddled swordfish, not veal. And the booths were neither rustic and wooden nor wrapped in red vinyl; the place’s co-owners, Gary Fishkop and Paul Cacici, had instead installed banquettes covered with custom-made buttery-soft spearmint green leather.

In a city where Italian food is so often relegated to one of two buckets — purist, regional fare like that of the West Village institutions I Sodi and Via Carota, or takes on Italian American cuisine at places ranging from the family-owned Bamonte’s in Williamsburg to the celebrity-saturated Carbone in Greenwich Village — Daphne’s is the latest in a string of Italian restaurants that might make a nonna gasp. At Cafe Mars, which opened last year in Gowanus, Castelvetrano olives come in Negroni-flavored cherry red Jell-O cubes and the neon-stippled interiors reference the Memphis Group design collective of the 1980s. Farther east in Brooklyn, at Marie’s in Bushwick, the James Beard-nominated chef Miguel Trinidad serves chopped cheese ravioli the size of drink coasters and lamb patty white ragù.

“Atmosphere is everything,” says Mark Brucato, 44, a New York-born and -raised Italian American comedian who, under the name Lil Mo Mozzarella, has reviewed hundreds of Italian restaurants across the city. “These trendier Italian places are bringing this vibe, looking at fusing different things to try to separate themselves. Because 90 percent of Italian menus are the same.”

The restaurateurs and chefs behind some of these spots, like the co-chefs Scott Tacinelli and Angie Rito of San Sabino in the West Village, call this new wave of cuisine “American Italian.” San Sabino is a gutsier, brassier follow-up to their red sauce-ish restaurant a few doors down, Don Angie, with pepperoni carbonara and a crab-mortadella dip served with Ritz crackers. Some of the dishes, like the Insalata Louie and the spicy tuna with broken arancini, riff on ingredients from places where Italian immigrants settled on coastlines in the United States (St. Louis, San Francisco). “New York City has enough classic Italian restaurants,” says Fishkop, the co-owner of Daphne’s. “Chefs want to do their own thing and carve their own lane.”