Buon Appetito! Pasta Night Opens in Prospect Heights
Owner of Ciao, Gloria debuts a new Italian eatery and market in Brooklyn
A new Italian market/restaurant from the founder of Ciao, Gloria, opens today (October 1) in Prospect Heights!
Located across the street from Ciao, Gloria at 575 Vanderbilt Avenue, Pasta Night is a curated market by day, specializing in gourmet Italian products including house-made pastas and sauces, as well as housewares, books, and other specialty items.
In the evening, Pasta Night becomes a casual Italian restaurant, serving handmade pasta dishes, small plates, salads, and desserts courtesy of Ciao, Gloria.
The concept of Pasta Night evolved from a monthly dining event that Ciao, Gloria owner, Renato Poliafito, began hosting pre-pandemic at his popular daytime café. “We would make a pasta dinner and have a dinner service, which was a different vibe than our breakfast and afternoon café,” Poliafito explained recently over the phone. “I did it for a few months before the pandemic hit, and then we couldn’t do it anymore.”
Along with the rest of NYC, Ciao, Gloria closed in March 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions. When businesses were allowed to reopen at limited capacity, Poliafito began offering dinner kits to customers stocked with house-made pasta and sauce, salad, and a dessert — “all the components to put a dinner together,” he says. “It was like a restaurant meal that you could prepare yourself in just a few minutes.”
After pandemic restrictions were lifted further, Ciao, Gloria continued selling the convenient kits but eventually shifted back to hosting pasta nights again. “It was at the time when people could only sit outside,” Poliafito notes. “We started it in the late summer into the early fall,” but cooler temperatures and an uptick in the café’s regular business forced them to stop hosting the monthly event. “It kind of wrapped itself up, but it was always something that we waxed nostalgic about.”
When Smokey Vale, a menswear shop located across the street from Ciao, Gloria, closed about a year ago, Poliafito, with business partner Joseph Catalanotti, decided to take over the vacant storefront and “flesh out this idea of Pasta Night and make it an evening place [with] an alimentari component.”
Pasta Night seats 25 inside and a year-round enclosed patio out back accommodates an additional 25. The menu will offer “mother sauce-forward pasta dishes” with “inventive takes” on carbonara, pesto, and marinara. The Big Ragu is a beef ragu dish in a white sauce base with a parmesan cream – “not your typical ragu,” but “hearty and delicious,” Poliafito assures.
Non-pasta mains will include a Chicken Milanese as well as an Italian spin on fish and chips – a Peroni beer battered fish and panelle (chickpea flour) chips served with PN Sauce (or Pasta Night Sauce), a zesty dipping sauce. There will also be salads, arancini, meatballs, and other small plates.
Save room for dessert which will come from Ciao, Gloria, of course, but enhanced with gelato from Biddrina Gelato. “You can get a crostata with a side of gelato, a gelato sundae, or tiramisu, things we normally can’t sell at Ciao, Gloria because we don’t have a refrigerated display,” Poliafito explains. “Think panna cotta and all those Italian spoon-able desserts that people tend to love, we’ll be able to offer that here.”
The kitchen will be headed by Chef Carly Voltero. “She’s been at Ciao since day one,” Poliafito notes. During the pandemic, Voltero helped Ciao, Gloria shift gears and “build the savory program and establish what we were doing for delivery, and really helped make Ciao what it is today.”
Initially Pasta Night will open with beer, wine, mocktails, and house-made Italian sodas – all perfect accompaniments for an antipasti board, a rotating selection of cheese, meat, focaccia, and dips such as tapenade or peperonata. “Think classic Italian aperitivo hour with a nice cocktail and little bites,” Poliafito says. A few cocktails will be added to the menu once they receive their full liquor license.
Poliafito describes Pasta Night as a fine-casual establishment “where people come in and order at the counter,” he explains. “Your food will be brought out to you, but if you want to order dessert or another plate of pasta, we’ll have people on the floor with handhelds that can add on to your order so you don’t have to go back in line…. You pay then and there, so there’s no waiting for the bill. When you’re done, you can just get up and go.”
During the day, Pasta Night will be open as a specialty market. Poliafito describes the market concept as another “hold-over from the pandemic” noting, “when we re-opened during the pandemic, I converted my retail section – which was originally cookbooks and candles – into a kind of mini-Italian market. It was really successful, but it was a very limited amount of space…. So, in a way the pandemic created the concept, and I took it further.”
Customers can shop an array of local and imported items including bomba calabrese, tinned fish, olive oils, flour, and all the ingredients needed to make pasta at home. The market will also sell fresh house-made pastas and sauces, as well a cheese and charcuterie – from local farms – for do-it-yourself antipasti platters at home.
Pasta Night will be Poliafito’s third food venture. Formerly a graphic designer, he opened Baked in Red Hook with business partner Matt Lewis in 2005. He left the acclaimed bakery in 2017 and launched Ciao, Gloria in October 2019. Ciao, Gloria and Pasta Night pay homage to Poliafito’s Italian-American roots in both food and design.
While Ciao, Gloria’s sleek, modern interior is influenced by Italy’s coast circa the 1950s and 1960s, Pasta Night’s cozy design reflects the southern Italian countryside in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Exposed brick, natural woods, earthy tones, and antique mirrors provide a rustic charm, reminiscent of how Poliafito saw Italy as a child on family trips to Sicily.
A Gowanus resident, Poliafito has lived in Brooklyn for nearly 30 years, but is partial to Prospect Heights. “It’s always been one of my favorite neighborhoods in Brooklyn,” he says. “It’s hard to find the type of energy here in any other neighborhood.”
“I spend so much time here, I really enjoy it, and I love the people,” he continues. “It was a no-brainer opening up Pasta Night because I want to provide something else for them.”
Pasta Night opens on Tuesday, October 1st, on Ciao, Gloria’s five-year anniversary! Buon anniversario!
Pasta Night
575 Vanderbilt Avenue (between Pacific & Dean Streets), Prospect Heights
Pasta Night is open for dinner 6 days a week (closed Tuesdays), 5pm to 10pm, for walk-in service only. Delivery and lunch service will start later in the fall.