“The menu was simple. Filled with chapel chairs from Wales, and bottles of amaro and buckets of chestnuts and pomegranates, the wide-windowed gastroteca looks like an osteria that you might pass by in an alleyway in San Gimignano, but with a touch of Sonoma County shabby-chic knickknackery.What transpired from that meeting is one of the great partnerships of the New York restaurant scene. We recommend talking to your lawyer to ensure all state + federal compliance is maintained. She remembers church trips to the Vatican and Sunday lunches that would stretch on for hours. Enter these spaces and the city outside falls away—you feel like you’re on holiday.“Everything is important to us because we live and work in these places.” Williams says. How Rita Sodi and Jody Williams—owners of restaurant Via Carota—created some of New York’s most distinctive and beloved dining spaces. They continue to debate which of the salads at Via Carota is the perfect salad. Cooking advice that works. She doesn’t have any rules.” Williams says: “It’s dangerous to make rules. Chopped judge Maneet Chauhan was honored along with Katy Sparks, Alex Raij, Rita Sodi and Kathleen Squires in the E-Cookbook category for the online cookbook series The Journey. But they disagree on how to do so. Two and a half years later, Williams opened Buvette, a snug French-style flâneur-magnet around the corner from I Sodi, where the croque monsieur feels bigger than the elfin tables it sits on.
“We are completely different people,” Sodi says. With stock fragrantly simmering on a nearby burner, Sodi rolls out sheets of fresh pasta and stuffs and crimps every single raviolo by hand. A small bowl of fried artichokes comes next.Whereas the mood at Buvette can feel as improvisatory and unpredictable as a Cassavetes movie, with servers and customers threading their way through needle-narrow slivers of space, the kitchen at I Sodi tends to be as serene as a Tuscan monastery.
The un-recipe: Find the prettiest produce that March can pony up (such as slender carrots and haricots verts, small heads of lettuce, breakfast radishes, and asparagus). We didn’t have a freezer, so you just had to eat.” They’d fry up migliacci — crepes they made from the pig’s drained blood. “Maybe you recognize something that your grandmother has or that was part of your history,” says Williams. Is there any part of the process they trust someone else to oversee? “It is a powerful way to connect us all.”At Via Carota, menus stay in cubbies on the backs of chairs. “We feel … like the space is a friend or living,” she says, and applies “the same standard we have at home.” She means it, admitting: “Our employees, if they’re handling a wretched-looking broom, we think, ‘Oh my God, can you imagine if that was in our house?’ We’d run out the door!” Accordingly, each of their restaurants is outfitted with a Miele vacuum, which is what they use at home.“We don’t use a color palette—there’s a purposeful absence of color,” Williams says. Topics of discussion include w~b at home, mindful moments, radio hour, zero~waste living, book club + more.As you evaluate your budget, this is a time to reevaluate your hours of operation and meal service offerings.
“Sorry about that.”“Did you order pasta?” Williams asks.In the weeks leading up to the opening of Via Carota, Sodi and Williams were unusually evasive about the menu, possibly because they hadn’t figured it out yet, though they had agreed on serving traditional and earthy Italian nourishment.