Husband & Wife Team Brings Food, Fun, and Monsters to Park Slope and Gowanus
Meet the owners of Café Mars and Leroy’s Place in Brooklyn
Paul D’Avino and Serene Bacigalupi deliver a double dose of whimsy with their pair of small businesses – Café Mars in Gowanus and Leroy’s Place in Park Slope.
The couple brings a playfulness and levity into their spaces. D’Avino’s Café Mars exudes a lighthearted cheekiness in its “unusual Italian” menu and bold Memphis Design scheme. Bacigalupi’s gallery/gift shop Leroy’s Place feels like an offshoot of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, with checkerboard floors, displays chock-full of unique gifts, and interactive puppets.
“Both of us are dreamers and spend a lot of time daydreaming about what these things could look like,” Bacigalupi says, explaining the inspirations behind their business concepts. “We travel a lot. We’re always going into cool shops, art museums, art spaces, and restaurants.”
Originally from Norman, Oklahama, Bacigalupi grew up in an artistic family. “My mom is from the Bronx and my dad is from San Francisco. They hitchhiked across the country and met at a yoga ashram in the ‘70s and then moved to Oklahoma to a commune, so I grew up with very quirky, liberal, artist parents,” she says.
Her parents run a business making hand-painted silk clothing, and Bacigalupi and her older brother, Forrest, travelled around the country with them to various craft fairs. “I spent half of my childhood on the road [traveling] to these art fairs and festivals, and then half the time in a normal public school in Oklahoma,” she recalls. She studied anthropology and dance at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and says she “found my way to illustration later in life. It was just for fun at first, and then I realized that I could sell the work…. I really didn’t feel compelled to go down the traditional art gallery route to make it a career so I started doing art fairs and craft fairs and selling my work.”
Since 2009, Bacigalupi has been taking vintage landscape paintings and reimagining them for a series she calls Monster Makeovers. She inserts whimsical creatures into the scenery, creating alternate worlds and playful new narratives.
“I honestly feel they have a life of their own and that I am sort of a catalyst,” Bacigalupi says of her cast of characters. “The world of Leroy’s Place started in these monster paintings.”
In 2015, while living in New Orleans, Bacigalupi met a puppeteer, Jacques Duffourc, and teamed up with him to add three dimensionality to her work. “We started accumulating these really large puppets and these beautiful props and we’ve made some short films together.” She uses puppetry to create immersive environments to tell the stories depicted in her paintings, “where people can see this whole unique concept and walk into it,” she says.
D’Avino was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Connecticut. He studied international relations at Brown University and, following the recommendation of a school advisor, took Swedish for two years. He became fluent, studied abroad in Sweden, and ended up living there for three years after college, where he developed his passion for cooking.
“I was a super picky eater growing up and I only ate like seven different things, so it kind of shocked everyone who knew me growing up,” he says of his unexpected career path.
While living in Sweden, a friend encouraged D’Avino’s culinary interests. The pair traveled around the country working on small farms, checking out different restaurants, and trying different foods. After a stint bartending in Stockholm, D’Avino returned to the states where he attended the now shuttered New England Culinary Institute in Rhode Island.
Explaining how he and Bacigalupi reconnected after meeting during high school, D’Avino says, “I had just gotten back from Sweden. I was driving my brother and two of his friends across the country.” The group were looking for places to crash along their road trip.
D’Avino had played water polo competitively when he was younger and met Bacigalupi’s cousin, Guy, through the sport. “The morning we were going to be in Oklahoma I was like, ‘Hey, I think Guy’s cousin is in Oklahoma,’” he recalls. He got Bacigalupi’s number from Guy and they stayed with her and her mom. “We very much hit it off,” he says.
He started his culinary career in New Orleans, “one of the very best restaurant cities in America,” working at Cochon and Brigtsen’s. New Orleans was also closer to Bacigalupi who was still living in Oklahoma.
In 2010, D’Avino moved to NYC with Bacigalupi where he worked at a string of notable restaurants including wd~50, Aska, Gwynnett St, and Alder. Bacigalupi was building the Leroy’s Place brand by selling her work at craft fairs in the city. In 2016, the couple moved to New Orleans where they continued to establish new connections – they married there that same year, and their son was born there.
The family returned to NYC in 2018 and immediately found a vacant storefront on 7th Avenue, a few blocks from their home, for a brick-and-mortar location for Leroy’s Place. “Originally Leroy was a character…I had no idea what Leroy’s Place would become when I named it that so long ago,” Bacigalupi says of her initial concept. “Then over time people started to call me Leroy” due to the “Leroy’s Place” sign she used at craft fairs. “I’ve always loved the name. I think it’s really friendly. I also liked that idea that it was a little separated from me, that there was this sort of imaginary person that was drawing all these little unicorns,” she continues. “It’s always been fictional…but we’ve since named our son Leroy, so now there is a real Leroy.”
The shop offers a curated selection of handmade gifts and art by Bacigalupi, as well as dozens of vendors from around the world, including knit monster hats, witch hand gloves, felted ghosts, cockroach hair clips, sandwich- and sneaker-shaped candles, art prints, cards, and icon emblazoned jewelry and keychains featuring David Bowie, Divine, The Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Dogg, and tons more cute and kooky merchandise.
The on-site studio in the back of the shop gives visitors a sneak peek of some of the creative goodies being made, and an outdoor courtyard hosts community events in the warmer months.
“We do a monthly community party in the summer where we partner with the record store Psychic Records down the block. They do vinyl DJ sets and we have sidewalk chalk, snacks and drinks, and invite the community in. We’ve done small puppetry performances, vintage pop-ups, comedy shows, small [events] for artists to connect and collaborate,” Bacigalupi says of the outdoor space. “I think spaces are important for community and gathering and experiencing. I always wanted to have all these wonderful things in one place. I love having this space.”
In 2021, Bacigalupi and her brother Forrest opened a second Leroy’s Place on Royal Street in New Orleans. During Covid, Forrest worked on a short film that Bacigalupi’s collaborator, the puppeteer Duffourc, produced. “Forrest was immersed in the Leroy’s Place world and was like, ‘This is something really special. I want to help this continue,” she says. They took advantage of the prime French Quarter retail spaces that had become vacant during Covid and opened up shop. While the Brooklyn and New Orleans spaces are both about 800 square feet, the New Orleans space serves more as an art gallery in the highly trafficked tourist area, showing more large-scale works by the artists on their roster. The Park Slope location is more of a neighborhood shop and community space.
“We actually have a ton of people from New York discover us in New Orleans on trips,” Bacigalupi muses. They say, “Oh my god, there’s one in New York?”
Now that Bacigalupi had her business running smoothly, it was time for D’Avino to take a leap, debuting Café Mars in Gowanus in 2023.
“When we were in New Orleans we thought about opening a restaurant there,” Bacigalupi notes. They wanted a place that was a “little playful” where diners would “appreciate the nuances and creativity behind it.” Ultimately, they decided to open in Brooklyn. “At the end of the day we felt that the concept would really work here. Also, we have family here, Italian roots in the neighborhood, and we love that Gowanus was an Italian neighborhood.”
“Café Mars was not supposed to be an Italian restaurant. It was supposed to be an Italian-ish izakaya,” adds D’Avino. “I looked for spaces all over New York for two years and then found the space that we have now, that just so happened to be across the street from where my great grandfather [lived] in 1901 until 1918, so that kind of switched the whole thing and now we have Café Mars.”
D'Avino’s great grandfather immigrated to the states from a town called Tramonti in the province of Campania in southwest Italy. He lived in a tenement on 3rd Avenue, right across the street from where Café Mars stands today. He was a waiter at the Rainbow Room and later opened a restaurant with his brother. Though he never met his great grandfather, D’Avino was inspired to change the concept of his restaurant to honor him. The change paid off. Café Mars is consistently praised for its imaginative spin on Italian cuisine. See Park Slope Living’s post on Café Mars’ opening from May 2023.
Six years after moving to Brooklyn, the family are happily settled into the neighborhood, enjoying trips to the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Prospect Park. “It’s so much quieter, it’s so much more relaxed and calmer [than Manhattan], but still, on our corner, is a great coffee shop, a slice shop that’s open until 4am, seven days a week, a bunch of regular old bars, regular great ramen shops, lots of really good stuff that [isn’t part of] the NYC hype machine…you don’t have to wait in line to go to a restaurant,” D’Avino notes. “I see people that I know walking around, which helps make a very big place feel not quite so big, and that’s not something you get in Manhattan.”
“I do think it’s the community feel,” adds Bacigalupi. “I knew that by putting Leroy’s Place in Park Slope we were opening up to a kid audience…. It was never intended to be a thing for kids, it was for grown-ups and appropriate for kids. We call it a toy store for grown-ups but seeing how the kids over the years now have developed real connections to the characters, that has been really beautiful…. I feel really proud to be a visible part of a community, and I don’t think that would necessarily happen in every neighborhood.”
D'Avino appreciates the community spirit in Gowanus as well, particularly with his fellow business owners. “When we were opening, all the other establishments were like, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood. Let us know If you need anything.’ And that continues to be the case – it’s very much a restaurant community. If somebody’s ice machine goes down, there are three places that will bring you ice. Everyone is very helpful and involved with each other.”
With two successful businesses under their belts, what’s next for the creative couple?
Bacigalupi hopes to bring the puppetry productions she and her collaborators have developed in New Orleans to New York. “The hope is to do more of that performance and live puppetry work here,” she says. “Art is so important, and I’d love to tell these monster stories in more substantive ways.”
“Continuing to try to get a little better every day at Café Mars,” D’Avino answers. “Keep making food and having fun.”
“We want people to have fun when they come into our places,” Bacigalupi adds. “Sometimes people forget to have fun when they go out – I think New Yorkers especially need reminding – it’s okay to have fun!”
Pam Wong is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator who loves contemporary art and sharing community stories. Follow her on Instagram at @arthagnyc. To read more of her writing, go to arthagnyc.substack.com or arthag.typepad.com.
I love Leroy’s Place! 🥰