San Sabino Is the New West Village Restaurant Placing an Italian-American Spin on Seafood

It could be simple 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 material 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 record? A 3rd of the bottles are below $100.

But all that leaves out some vital 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 (effectively, 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 record.) “We take loads of liberties and dangers and break loads of guidelines in the case of typical Italian delicacies,” Rito says. They do, nevertheless, 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.

San Sabino’s shrimp parmesan.

Photograph: Evan Sung