A New Italian Restaurant Pairs Serious Cooking with a

Sense of Humor
newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/a-new-italian-restaurant-pairs-serious-cooking-with-a-sense-of-humor

Helen Rosner July 31, 2023

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Humor might be the hardest thing in the world for a restaurant to get away with. Plenty of
attempts can be found in the city’s dining rooms, especially at the billionaire-bait tasting-
menu spots, where caviar presented in an ice-cream cone is hailed as the pinnacle of
whimsy, and at restaurants embracing the new school of self-aware, proudly stupid
maximalism—places like Bad Roman, the impossibly popular restaurant in Columbus
Circle, where shots of booze roll across your table affixed to toy cars, the room is a series
of Instagram opportunities, and the food is an opulent afterthought. Café Mars, a new
restaurant in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, bills itself as “an unusual Italian
restaurant,” and I was worried, heading in, that I would find myself feeling coerced into
surprise or amusement as each dish hit the table. I don’t know what I was so afraid of.
“Unusual,” in Café Mars’s case, thank goodness, doesn’t mean predictable trompe-l’oeil,
or edgy for the sake of edgy. The flavors on the menu are familiarly Italianate (and
Italianate Americana), but they come in unexpected combinations, in weird and wondrous
shapes and textures.

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The restaurant, open since May, sits on a stretch of Third Avenue in Brooklyn that has not
yet been overtaken by the luxury high-rises colonizing the area around the Gowanus
Canal like a glass-walled algal bloom. Before its recent makeover, the space was home to
an Italian deli; decades before that, it was a pasta factory. During a recent meal there,
Paul D’Avino, who with Jorge Olarte is the co-chef and co-owner, stopped by my table
and pointed in the direction of the front door. “When my great-grandfather moved here
from Campania, he lived right there, across the street,” he said. “We were going to turn
this place into an izakaya, but I had to do right by my bisnonno.”

The menu’s “pancake primavera” is a big, trembling okonomiyaki of Italian greens and
pickled root vegetables.

The dining room doesn’t feel much like the sort of Italian restaurant anchored in ancestral
tradition. D’Avino and Olarte—alumni of such blue-chip kitchens as wd-50, Momofuku
Ssäm Bar, and the Noma fermentation lab—bypassed the trattoria-rustica vibe in favor of
something slicker, more modern, less fettered: smooth white walls, curvilinear shapes,
and geometric hunks of color inspired by the Memphis Milano design movement. The
booths in the front dining room are rain-slicker yellow; the custom-designed chairs at the
bar have wiggly fluorescent-pink legs; the wavy tables in the back dining room are
custom-shaped to fit together like puzzle pieces for larger parties. The open kitchen is
separated from the dining room by an emerald noren curtain, one of many signs of the
restaurant’s original interest in Japanese cuisine. Colorful neon lights outline cutouts
where the original brick walls show through, the rough-hewn past peeking into the sleek,
playful now. Everyone looks gorgeous in this dining room, cross-lit by multicolor lights; a
woman a few tables away from me, waiting for her friend, dressed all in white and reading
the new Emma Cline (apple-green cover, royal-blue text) could have been placed by a set
designer.

Debbie Harry rocks the dining room, while the bathroom soundtrack is an endless playlist
of the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, deadpan and absurd: “I had a piece of Carefree
sugarless gum, and I was still worried. It never kicked in.” There are actual jokes on the
menu, too, if you know what you’re looking for: pearlescent cubes of sea-bass crudo
bathed in a pool of “crazy water,” or acqua pazza, a tomato-based Neapolitan poaching
broth that here is served cold, arrive under a snowdrift of—gasp—grated Parmesan, a
willfully heretical rejection of the Italian rule never to pair cheese with seafood. But what
makes the combination work as wit is that it also works as art: even if you don’t realize
you’re biting a thumb at tradition, you know you’re eating something sly and elegant and
expertly composed, the intense umami of the Parmigiano bringing a miso-like roundness
and intensity. The cheese doesn’t just make the punch line; it makes the dish.

A meal at Café Mars begins with a splash of ceremony: a server shimmers to the table
bearing a woven basket full of mismatched stemware, and two bottles (something
sparkling, something nonalcoholic—when I visited, a vivacious prosecco and a sweet
rosé cider) from which to pour a preprandial sip. From there, it seems, almost every table
orders a plate of quivering dark-orange gelatin cubes. These are “jell-olives”: gently saline
Castelvetrano olives suspended in cubes of Negroni jello, like specimens in a murky jar.

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They are—this is an unreserved compliment—completely horrifying, an exercise in
absurdism. The flavor is fantastic, bright and briny, but the firm flesh of the olive and the
blobbily collapsing gelatin combine in the mouth to create a visceral texture that I loathed
bodily and also immediately wanted to experience again.

Paul D’Avino and Jorge Olarte are the co-owners and co-chefs of Café Mars.

The rest of the menu, blessedly, offers more straightforward pleasures. During the course
of two visits, I tried nearly every dish from the tightly edited selection: four snacks, five
small plates, four pastas, and three large-format entrées. Skip the garlic-knot monkey
bread—not bad, but dry, and the loaf is oversized for any party smaller than six—and start
instead with a tiny bowl of anchovies, dark and moody, curled up in an aromatic bath
involving “pizza crust oil” (made by literally blending house-made pies with olive oil),
topped with slivered peperoncini, and served alongside a wedge of milky-white focaccia.
Order that blasphemous crudo along with the punchy salad of sweet seasonal
cucumbers, trout roe, and delicate flakes of whey granita, dressed in a bracingly green-
tasting tarragon oil. D’Avino’s cheeky composition of shaved celery, hunks of charred
octopus, and tiny circles of crispy pepperoni—doused in ranch dressing—is the rare dish
that wouldn’t feel out of place in a high-end Portuguese beach town, at a Midwestern
potluck, or on the menu at Prune, circa 2010. It was so good I ordered it twice.

The handle on the door to Café Mars is a fettuccine-extrusion die; D’Avino and Olarte
clearly take the matter of pasta very seriously. They make their own, and seem to relish
reviving obscure or underappreciated forms. Girelle—a sort of fat, curly-edged double
helix—are served with “lemon, lemon, lemon” (butter, zest, bread crumbs) and capers
and basil in a meatless evocation of piccata. The shape that the menu simply calls
“waves”—scalloped curls that crest like Kanagawa’s great billow—is the best thing on the
entire menu. The waves are served in a heap with fresh peas and a handful of enormous
shrimp, tossed in an orangey-red sauce that might pass, in a photo, as something
predictable and tomato-based, but the nose and mouth (and eyes, watering) know better:
it’s pure Calabrian chili, with a spiky, brittle heat just barely tempered by butter—a pasta
dressed in the world’s fanciest Buffalo sauce.

The restaurant’s Gibson Martini was developed by the general manager Madalyn
Summers.

The Memphis Milano design movement served as inspiration for the dining room’s
curvilinear shapes and geometric hunks of color.

The menu, which D’Avino and Olarte plan to change with the seasons, is for now
overwhelmingly light: dishes are bright, produce-forward, and mostly sized for grazing
rather than for gut-busting. My favorite of the larger plates was the “pancake primavera,”
a big, trembling okonomiyaki of Italian greens and pickled root vegetables. Held together
with just a whisper of binder, it was as weightless as the bonito flakes that danced atop it.
The menu’s confident creativity extends to the desserts, most notably in a slice of crumbly
olive-oil cake whose dark marble swirl is made up not of chocolate but of puréed black

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olive. Under a dollop of whipped cream and blood-red marinated cherries, it was salty,
undeniably weird, and absolutely correct. A more traditional dish of fresh strawberries in a
zabaglione was light as sea-foam. In the thick heat of summer, I couldn’t imagine
anything better—especially because the restaurant’s air-conditioning was on the fritz
when I visited, though their Gibson Martini, developed by the restaurant’s general
manager, Madalyn Summers, was icy cold.

The menu does hold hints of heartier things to come: a note-perfect braised-beef-and-
onion ragù dresses a cord of rigidly geometric trenne—triangular penne, a jolting
departure from the tubular pasta’s expected sensuous roundness. Parmigiana, that old
red-sauce standby, gets a Flintstonian makeover with the use of rich, smoke-kissed pork
ribs—a slab of four, on the bone, breaded and fried and smothered in the requisite
marinara and cheese, and presented with a knife stuck in its middle. It’s accompanied by
a tangle of Japanese spaghetti salad, itself an adaptation of American-style macaroni
salad, mayo dressing and all, that in Japan would be made with cubes of ham but here
nods to Italy with the substitution of fried mortadella. It’s devilishly clever—a riff, a
callback, the rare side dish that rewards close reading. But nothing ruins a joke quite like
having to explain it. More important than being devilishly clever, it was devilishly good. ♦

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