It would be easy to call San Sabino a neighborhood restaurant. It’s small, for starters, with only 55 seats, including the bar. Then there’s the decor: The dining room is adorned in a warm, welcoming butter yellow and accented with mahogany tables and a fabric ceiling. Finally, there’s the food itself, which includes lobster ravioli, shrimp parmesan, and cheesy frittelle—comforting dishes that feel elevated but not esoteric. Oh, and the wine list? A third of the bottles are under $100.
Yet all that leaves out some important culinary context: San Sabino is the second restaurant by Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli, whose first venture, Don Angie, earned a Michelin star in 2021 and remains one of the most difficult reservations in New York. Creating delicious yet unpretentious restaurants is their secret sauce (well, that and a mean marinara), and San Sabino is no exception.
Rito and Tacinelli would never call their cuisine purely Italian; they respect the traditional techniques of true Italian food too much. (In 2023, Italy nominated its culinary traditions to the UNESCO Cultural Heritage list.) “We take a lot of liberties and risks and break a lot of rules when it comes to typical Italian cuisine,” Rito says. They do, however, call it Italian-American. Their dishes are often inspired by the melting-pot meals they both enjoyed growing up in their respective Italian-American families: Tachinelli’s mom, for example, would always order lobster ravioli from their favorite restaurant in New Jersey.
While Don Angie focuses on heartier fare, San Sabino leans into seafood. While developing the menu, Rito says they looked to American coastal areas with large Italian immigrant populations, such as New Orleans, San Francisco, and the Jersey Shore, as a jumping off point. Wild langoustines are dolloped with Louisiana-style scampi butter, whereas a shrimp Louie salad comes with their own riff on the classic dressing. Their crab and mortadella dip, meanwhile, updates the retro bologna dip. (“It sounds weird, but it was something that existed in the ’60s,” Rito says, laughing.) Then there are the cocktails: “Scottie’s martini” comes with garlic bread-flavored vodka, and a “Sanseze spritz” has Aperol-infused pineapple.
But perhaps the overarching theme of every dish on the menu? “We're just trying to have fun and kind of put a new spin on things,” she says.
And, on a Thursday night in March, that’s exactly what everyone was having: fun. The bar was packed with revelers and every table, full, with a wine bucket beside it. Hopeful diners lined up outside the door for a last-minute reservation. But by the looks of it, those will be few and far between for quite some time.