NYC – New Restaurants, Fall 2019 (courtesy of the NYT)

This week in the NYT the food section listed all the wonderful new restaurants opening in the Fall and Winter of this year. So many restaurants, so little time…

Canal Street Oysters – 380 Canal Street (West Broadway), 646-448-4032 – restaurateurs Anthony and Tom Martignetti, opened this raw bar housed in a Beaux-Arts building with seating for 200, including 30 at the central limestone bar. Heading the kitchen is Charlene Santiago, from the John Dory Oyster Bar and Reynard. The oysters were great (wine list small and not very interesting), space was casual and comfortable (see photo below), but not much else to eat (some crudo and fish taco’s). So stop by for oysters and plan dinner elsewhere.

232 Bleecker – 232 Bleecker Street – located on Father Demo Square in the West Village. The executive chef will be Suzanne Cupps, who is leaving Untitled at the Whitney, where she was the first woman to be executive chef in a Danny Meyer restaurant. She will have a six-foot wood-burning oven facing a chef’s counter. An upstate farm owned by Dig Food Group, the restaurant’s owner, will supply fresh produce she will feature.
Da Toscano – 24 Minetta Lane (Avenue of the Americas) – opening in the former Perla space, a homecoming for the chef, Michael Toscano, who was Perla’s executive chef. He will take advantage of a wood-burning oven to turn out the hearty regional Italian fare; his wife, Caitlin Toscano, will manage the restaurant.

Piggyback NYC – 140 W. 30th Street – The chef Leah Cohen, who owns the Southeast Asian restaurant Pig and Khao with Benjamin Byruch, sees opportunity in the undeserved neighborhood near Madison Square Garden. Their new Piggyback NYC will serve cha ca la Vong, the Vietnamese fish classic in a thicket of herbs; charcoal-smoked rib-eye; and Filipino lumpia spring rolls with Shanghai-style sweet chile sauce.
Llama San – 359 Avenue of the Americas (Washington Place) – Serving a very personal interpretation of Brazilian cooking from Manoella Buffara, specializing in Nikkei cuisine, which blends Peruvian and Japanese fare in dishes like raw fish tiradito. Erik Ramirez of Llama Inn in Brooklyn will open Llama San, in a polished, pale-wood West Village setting with an open kitchen and a Peruvian wall-hanging. “Nikkei through a New York lens” is how he described food like spicy seafood stew with mirin and miso.
Ernesto’s – 259 East Broadway (Montgomery Street) – Ryan Bartlow worked at Frenchette in New York and Alinea in Chicago, but his experience at Akelarre in San Sebastián, Spain, is what will drive the cooking at his much-delayed restaurant on the Lower East Side. The restaurant will feature Basque-inspired food — whole baby fried mullet, fried cod cheeks, hake in green sauce, and braised rabbit with walnuts, Rioja-style — in an airy, glass-enclosed setting.
Cathedrale – 112 E. 11th Street – Channeling another part of Southern Europe, Cathédrale will offer French-Mediterranean pissaladière, bouillabaisse and rotisserie chicken chasseur by the executive chef Jason Hall, who cooked at Gotham Bar and Grill. The new place, in the Moxy East Village hotel, has a trim open kitchen glowing with polished copper, a zigzagging bar and a soaring arched dining room in a space that reaches deep underground. It’s the most dramatic-looking newcomer this season, with more than 300 seats. Owned by the Tao Group Hospitality this is no surprise. The restaurant’s name is meant in part to evoke the Fillmore East, the 1960s music hall nearby that was nicknamed the Church of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi has installed an ethereal mesh sculpture titled “Fillmore” on the ceiling.
Le Veau d’Or – 129 E. 60th Street – Le Veau d’Or is reopening and refreshed by Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson of Frenchette.
Shukette – 230 Ninth Avenue (24th street) – Middle Eastern fare will arrive with the opening of Shukette, the latest from Vicki Freeman, Marc Meyer and Chris Paraskevaides of Cookshop and Vic’s. Ayesha Nurdjaja, the chef and a partner, will make use of a charcoal grill.
Daily Provisions – 375 Amsterdam Avenue (78th Street) – Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar chain will establish its flagship in the former John Dory Oyster Bar, in the Ace Hotel New York. New items will include apple pie soft-serve with pie-dough crumble and a roll stuffed with eggplant Parm. The company will also move its cooking classes here from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Di Martino Pasta Bar – Chelsea Market, 75 Nonth Avenue – Pastificio Di Martino has been making excellent dry pasta near Naples, Italy, since 1912. The company is opening a store, a pasta bar and restaurant in the former Green Table space in Chelsea Market.
Il Fiorista – 17 West 26 Street, 646-490-8240 – one newcomer to watch is Alessandra and Mario De Benedetti. They recently moved to New York from Northern Italy, where Ms. De Benedetti was a professor and her husband was in private equity, but both wanted a change of scene where they could work together. Theirs is a light-filled restaurant with a flower shop in the front that Ms. De Benedetti will run, with abundant edible flowers adorning Mediterranean food by the chef, Garrison Price, who was at Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria and Cafe Clover.

Ella – 436 West 15th Street – Chef Manoella Buffara, who lives in Southern Brazil (and has a 20-seat restaurant in Sai Paulo), will open this “Brazilian casual fine-dining” restaurant showcasing vegetables, fruits and seafood, all in colorful presentations. She is planning an open kitchen and wood fired grill.
Portale – 126 W 18th Street (old Rouge Tomate space) – Alfred Portale, who was the chef and a partner at the esteemed Gotham Bar and Grill for nearly 35 years, left in May to open this restaurant where he could offer his personal take on Italian food. He plans to make pastas in-house and dress them with seasonal ingredients for what he is calling modern Italian. He is turning the two-room space into something easygoing with exposed brick and the same à la carte menu in both rooms.
Davide – 403 West 13 Street – Another influential chef, Larry Forgione, is also shifting gears from American to Italian. Mr. Forgione won fame in the 1980s for pioneering new-American food and domestic ingredients, but in recent years his son, Marc has drawn all the attention. Mr. Forgione will work with his son in the spacious lower level of the former Spice Market in the meatpacking district. The restaurant is named for Davide Sorrenti, a young fashion photographer who died in 1997, and is being designed by the artist Roiy Nachum. “When we cook at home, we do Italian over a wood-burning fire,” the younger Mr. Forgione said. “Why not do it in a restaurant?” He also said his father was “obsessed” with pinsa, a type of oval Roman flatbread made with various toppings, like pizza, and they plan to serve it, along with traditional and new interpretations of pasta.
The Vestry – 246 Spring Street (Varick St.) – Shaun Hergatt, an Australian transplant who earned a Michelin star for Juni before it closed in 2016, will open the Vestry, an 80-seat restaurant carved out of a corner of the Dominick Hotel, in Hudson Square. He envisions an American menu, strongly biased toward local and seasonal fish and vegetables. Maitake mushrooms with surf clams and daikon sprouts, avocado with honeynut squash, tilefish with edamame, and crispy nori tartlets with salmon are a few of the dishes he’s likely to feature.

Palais By Perfect Pie – 134 East 61 Street – Bill Yosses, who was its high-profile pastry chef at the Four Seasons (and held that position at the White House when the Obamas lived there), will open Palais by Perfect Pie with John Wu and other partners. It will be an all-day bistro and a brick-and-mortar outlet for his online business selling sweet and savory pies. He is also luring a former mentor, Jean-Jacques Rachou, out of retirement to work alongside him in the kitchen from time to time, consulting on the food. Mr. Rachou, best known as the owner of La Cote Basque, will assist Mr. Yosses in expanding the savory side of the French-accented menu.