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Dell’anima Returns to the West Village
Photo: Matthew Borowick
This week, the West Village — currently a hub for Gen-Z brunches and creator-core fashion — will get a jolt of Obama-era nostalgia when Dell’anima returns. After a seven-year stint uptown at the now-closed Gotham West Market, in Hell’s Kitchen, the trattoria is returning to its brick-and-mortar roots below 14th Street.
The restaurant, relocated to the Cornelia Street space that was once Pearl Oyster Bar and was most recently Figure Eight, is helmed by partners Andrew Whitney, Danir Rincon, and Jacob Cohen, who met one another while working at Dell’anima’s original Eighth Avenue location. “We were in Gotham Market, and then for two and a half years we wanted to expand and go figure out what the next step was, and it was kind of a blessing in disguise when Gotham Market closed,” Cohen says. “We always wanted to come back down to the West Village.”
When Dell’anima opened in 2007, the rustic-by-design spot helped teach New Yorkers to love ricotta toast, sbagliatos, and chef’s-counter seating. Sommelier and GM Joe Campanale (who was barely of drinking age himself, in his early 20s) had just come from a stint at Babbo and quickly became a local celebrity as the keeper of the restaurant’s infamous two-hour-long wait list. “It was a little hard to get into, but once you got into it, you could sit as long as you wanted and you could relax and have a good bowl of pasta,” says Whitney, who started at Dell’anima as a pasta cook and is now the executive chef. “You could drink good drinks in a fun, warming environment.”
Dell’anima’s allure as an exclusive den of handmade pasta and broccoli rabe made it a frequent location of 2010s tabloid sightings: Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis stopping in for a late-night dinner, Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield on a potential date. “Emma Stone was a huge regular at our original location,” says Rincon, who started in 2010 as a bartender and is now the general manager. “She sat at the bar one time, and she was like, ‘I’m just going to sit here and play Candy Crush and drink a glass of wine.’”
When the original location ran out a ten-year lease and closed in 2018, Whitney, Rincon, and Cohen bought the concept from the restaurant group Epicurean Management and moved it uptown, taking over a bar area and 55-seat private dining room in Gotham West Market. Cooking for a food-hall audience meant more solo diners with lower check averages, more people looking for “one bowl of pasta” at lunch, and less intrepid tastes in wine. “I would put up a grape variety that people didn’t know, and then the wine would just sit there,” Rincon says. “I put Nerello Mascalese on the menu, and people would be like, ‘Do you have any Pinot Noir?’” Whitney, for one, is excited to once again cook for more adventurous diners: “I like quail. I love sweetbreads. I love crudo. And those things just didn’t take off over there.”
The original was famous for its open kitchen. Here, the cooking space is semi-visible from the dining room, but it won’t be quite the same as the kitchen seating: “We had six coveted seats in front of the kitchen, and that was our shtick for a little while,” Whitney says. The setup made the original Dell’anima famous, but it came with headaches, like drunk guests reaching over and snacking on cooks’ mise en place, or ventilation. “We went through so many different air ducts and hood systems because the kitchen just smoked the hell out of the whole damn restaurant,” Whitney recalls. “It’ll be very nice to have our own kitchen space.”
Still, for maximum 2010s nostalgia, the family-style menu will hang onto a few classics from the restaurant’s early days. Like the original restaurant, Dell’anima 3.0 will offer a variety of bruschetta to start (including, yes, some ricotta toast). The pollo al diavolo with chiles and broccoli rabe is here to stay, along with carbonara with speck and egg yolk and charred octopus John Mulaney championed in a 2012 interview.
Beyond the evergreen dishes, Whitney’s motto for seasonal menu development is keep it simple. “At the moment, I am really trying to just work in the three-to-five-ingredient range,” he says. “I’m just so excited to flex culinary muscles that I haven’t flexed in a while,” he says. “To get tripe back on the menu during the cold winter months — I can’t wait.”
Another throwback: late hours. In a city with an ever-waning assortment of places to eat after 9 p.m., Dell’anima will keep the lights on through the night. “When the kitchen closes at midnight, we have a strong hour of bar food that you can come eat after the Comedy Cellar, or after a movie, or even after the bar,” Whitney says. The late-night menu might include some bruschettas, flatbreads, or a smashburger. Keeping things flexible is the goal: “We want to have fun once again,” Whitney says, “and not have just a set menu like we did at Gotham.”
Photo: Matthew Borowick
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