It could be straightforward to name San Sabino a neighborhood restaurant. It’s small, for starters, with solely 55 seats, together with the bar. Then there’s the decor: The eating room is adorned in a heat, welcoming butter yellow and accented with mahogany tables and a cloth ceiling. Lastly, there’s the meals itself, which incorporates lobster ravioli, shrimp parmesan, and tacky frittelle—comforting dishes that really feel elevated however not esoteric. Oh, and the wine checklist? A 3rd of the bottles are underneath $100.

But all that leaves out some essential culinary context: San Sabino is the second restaurant by Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, whose first enterprise, Don Angie, earned a Michelin star in 2021 and stays some of the tough reservations in New York. Creating scrumptious but unpretentious eating places is their secret sauce (nicely, that and a imply marinara), and San Sabino isn’t any exception.

Rito and Tacinelli would by no means name their delicacies purely Italian; they respect the standard methods of true Italian meals an excessive amount of. (In 2023, Italy nominated its culinary traditions to the UNESCO Cultural Heritage checklist.) “We take a variety of liberties and dangers and break a variety of guidelines with regards to typical Italian delicacies,” Rito says. They do, nonetheless, name it Italian-American. Their dishes are sometimes impressed by the melting-pot meals they each loved rising up of their respective Italian-American households: Tachinelli’s mother, for instance, would at all times order lobster ravioli from their favourite restaurant in New Jersey.