Buon Appetito! Pasta Night Opens in Prospect Heights
Buon Appetito! Pasta Night Opens in Prospect Heights
Owner of Ciao, Gloria debuts a new Italian eatery and market
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.”
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