Rich Torrisi is one of the most important chefs working in New York right now, and at 275 Mulberry Street — inside the 19th-century Puck Building — he has created something that is simultaneously a showcase of New York's Italian-American heritage and a genuinely original restaurant. The vaulted ceilings, red brickwork, cast-iron columns, and emerald quartzite bar tell you where you are before a single dish arrives. The dishes themselves tell you something more surprising: this is Italian-American food at its highest expression.
The menu is à la carte, which at this level of cooking feels like a gift. You can have the cavatelli with Jamaican beef ragù — a dish that sounds like it shouldn't work and which is one of the most discussed preparations in New York right now — or you can have the Dover sole Francese, which demonstrates that the classics endure because they are correct. The kitchen respects the canon and then does something unexpected with it, drawing on the genuine multicultural reality of New York's culinary history rather than its tourist-facing mythology.
The dining room is divided between a brasserie-style bar section and a more formal back room; the private dining room in Old World Italian tailoring shop style accommodates up to twenty guests. On a busy Friday evening, the energy is exceptional — the kind of kinetic dining room atmosphere that New York does better than anywhere else in the world, and which Torrisi has captured entirely.