Don Angie Owners Open a New Italian Spot in Manhattan

San Sabino is the latest endeavor from the team behind Wine Spectator Award of Excellence winner Don Angie, one of the hardest-to-get reservations in New York City. The new restaurant features seafood-focused, Italian American cuisine and an accessible wine list. Open since March 12, San Sabino is next door to Don Angie in Manhattan’s West Village. Like its sibling restaurant, it represents a partnership between co-owners and chefs Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli (a wife-and-husband duo) and restaurateur Michael Stillman of the Quality Branded hospitality group, which owns the original Smith & Wollensky steak house as well as Bad Roman in New York, among other restaurants.

Rito and Tacinelli—authors of the cookbook Italian American—opened Don Angie in 2017 to critical acclaim, adding to a wave of fine-dining Italian restaurants garnering attention across the U.S. In the years since, Don Angie has earned praise for its list of Italian and American wines as well as dishes like a rosette-shaped lasagna for two and a chrysanthemum salad heaped with shaved Parmesan. At their new restaurant, Rito and Tacinelli are focused on fish, but still keeping a throughline of decadent showstopping dishes.

“I don’t think of the programming at San Sabino as a differentiation from Don Angie, but rather as a natural extension, building on what has made Don Angie’s food and beverage programs so successful over the past seven years,” Quality Branded beverage director Meng Chiang, who oversees the San Sabino wine list, told Wine Spectator via email. “We tried to stick to [Rito and Tacinelli’s] ethos in creating the list, with natural adjustments for San Sabino’s more seafood-focused dishes.”

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The 55-seat restaurant (named after Tacinelli’s grandfather, Sabino) is located on 113 Greenwich Avenue, on the intersection with Jane street. GRT Architects (who also designed Don Angie) styled the dining room in a butter-yellow hue that glows under warm evening light. The space is mid-century modern with a mix of Italian design elements like glossy handmade tiles, lacquered mahogany tables and natural stone accents.

Don Angie Goes Out to Sea

While Don Angie elevates and harkens back to traditional East Coast Italian dining (meaning white tablecloths and red-sauce dishes), San Sabino’s primary focus is seafood, drawing inspiration from Italian American coastal communities in the U.S., like those of New Orleans, San Francisco, New Jersey and New York. (That is, San Sabino does not serve the cuisine of coastal Italy.) The menu takes a tongue-in-cheek approach: Guests start the meal with the likes of a terrazzo-patterned octopus with spicy capocollo, or a 1950s-style crab and mortadella dip dressed with pistachios and dill over Ritz crackers.

As at Don Angie, Rito and Tacinelli feature a roster of handmade pastas like lobster triangoli with a black garlic–laced white vodka sauce and a spin on spaghetti alle vongole with Manila clams and fruity Peruvian aji amarillo chiles. With their seafood entrées, the chefs offer bold presentations, including the photo-worthy “Parm”, a dish of three large Ecuadorian U5 prawns blanketed in arrabbiata sauce and stracchino cheese. Even the restaurant’s “turf” features a bit of “surf”, as with a lightly breaded steak “Magazzino” topped with anchovy chili crisp and pine nuts.

[article-img-container][src=2024-03/restaurant-news-san-sabino-wild-langoustines-031324_1600.jpg] [credit= (Evan Sung)] [alt= Plate of wild langoustines with New Orleans scampi…


Source : https://www.winespectator.com/articles/don-angie-owners-san-sabino-open-nyc

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