Chef Tied To 'World's Best Restaurant' To Open New Gowanus Eatery

BROOKLYN, NY — When Chef Paul D'Avino first started searching the five boroughs for a space to open his own restaurant, he envisioned opening an izakaya, or the Japanese version of a neighborhood bar.

That was, until he found the storefront at 272 Third Ave.

The corner space, it turns out, was across the street from where his great-grandfather had settled when he came to Brooklyn from Italy in 1901. It also happened to be the site of a longtime Italian-American grocery and, before that, a pasta factory.

Turning it into an Italian restaurant seemed written on the nine-foot factory basement walls, D'Avino said.

"The space just feels very right [for that]," he told Patch. "I looked in other places, but looking back now, it couldn't be anywhere but Gowanus."

The result will be a new eatery, Cafe Mars, that D'Avino said will pay homage to the traditional Italian roots of the neighborhood while celebrating his and co-chef Jorge Olarte's eclectic backgrounds in the food world.

Olarte — who D'Avino met while the two worked at a Williamsburg restaurant together — was a chef de cuisine at Momofuku Ssäm Bar and most recently worked at Rolf and Daughters in Nashville.

D'Avino's background includes Brooklyn restaurant Aska, running a restaurant in Iceland and working for a short time in the fermentation lab at Noma in Denmark, which was rated the best restaurant in the world for the fifth time in 2021.

The Cafe Mars menu will bring new twists on classic Italian cuisine, including subtle nods to his original Japanese plans, according to D'Avino.

"We took the Japanese stuff — Japanese fermentation, noodle techniques and general seasoning ideas — and sort of put them under the hood," he said. "This is an off-beat Italian restaurant, but if you were knowledgeable about Japanese food you might see and taste some of these influences."

The off-beat nature of the menu will in part be inspired by the forward-thinking, fast-car driving part of the Italian world, he added.

Ideas include a "baked potato bar gnocchi" that will come with customizable garnishes, a savory cannoli with chicken liver mousse and using garlic bread to make the flour for a handmade pasta.

"We’re trying to do what they do in the rest of Italian culture in food," D'Avino said.

Cafe Mars will likely not be ready to open until the fall of this year given renovations at the space, which sits at the corner of Third Avenue and President Street, according to D'Avino.

Still, the eatery took its first step this week with the unanimous support of Community Board 6's Permits and Licenses Committee, who voted on its liquor license application on Monday. The liquor license will head next to the full board, though the State Liquor Authority has the final say.

If the coincidences of the space hadn't already, the liquor license process has confirmed to D'Avino that his passion project ended up in the right place, he said.

While he was knocking on neighbors' doors for the application process, D'Avino said he described Cafe Mars as an "unusual Italian restaurant," explaining that he used to describe the eatery as "weird," but worried it would be off-putting.

"Every one of our Gowanus neighbors was like, 'I like weird, say weird,'" D'Avino said. "I was like, 'Ah, my people.'"