It’s been a rough couple of years for the Italian seafood restaurant Esca, in Midtown Manhattan, NYC. The nearly 20-year-old fine dining Italian restaurant finally enjoys a new happy moment, reopening with new owners, menu and wine list. The executive chef Dave Pasternack and Victor Rallo have decided to give Esca a well needed makeover.
Dave Pasternack and Victor Rallo
Buying the restaurant from the former Batali & Bastianich Group in May, Pasternack and Rallo—already partners owning Staten Island restaurants Surf and Barca—brought it back to business with a Mediterranean makeover. After a summer of renovation, Esca has a new light-filled interior and an enriched wine list and menu, ready to get back its reputation.
“It’s been a very good month, very busy,” Dave Pasternack tells La Cucina Italiana while taking a break from planning the menu, which changes every day. “The restaurant is brighter, it’s more casual, it has a more European feel to it.”
Pasternack is a self-described “seafood obsessed” and spends as much time as he can out there fishing. His restaurant, much like his life, centers around fish and its seasonality.
“Fish is like a tomato. It’s in season, it’s out of season. So, some things are better in the winter time, and some things are better in the summer time, you know. Cod is great in the winter time, fluke is great in the summer time. Tuna is great in the fall,” he says, adding that tuna is his absolute favorite fish to catch, “because it’s a powerful one.”
As much as he likes fish, Pasternack has introduced a couple of meat dishes in the menu as part of Esca’s makeover, and he has expanded the flavors and the wine list – curated by his business partner Victor Rallo – outside the borders of Italian cuisine, to be more wholly Mediterranean. “It’s New York City, people want international,” he explains.
Pasternack has a few suggestions on what to order when coming to his restaurant. “First, have some crudo,” he says, referring to the wide variety of Italian style raw fish on the menu, including halibut belly with virgin sunflower oil and blue fish with pickled jalapeño. “Then, some linguini with clams, and a fish cooked whole. I guarantee you will come back.” To go with the meal, he recommends one of the many wines on the list coming from Mount Etna, the famous volcano of Sicily. “That’s where the most exciting moment in Italian wine is,” he says. “The wines are really interesting. High altitude, volcanic soil, really diverse,” he says. “White or red, they’re perfect with seafood.”
Welcome back, Esca!