Café Mars

Olives set in a cocktail cube

Castelvetrano olives sit inside orange Negroni cubes before they leave the pass as jell-olives at Café Mars in New York City. The gesture suits the room: Southern Italian appetite, cocktail-bar mischief, and enough control at the bench to keep the joke from outrunning the bite. Two co-chefs run that kitchen. Paul D'Avino's ties to the address are literal, since his great-grandfather immigrated from Campania in 1901 to the building across the street, and his own bench history runs through wd~50, aska, Lincoln Ristorante and Torrisi Italian Specialties. He argues for Italian totality rather than a regional zoom, and he will cite a Wendy's baked potato as the reference for a gnocchi dish. Juan David Gracia collaborates on a very long list of ideas, whittled from all of Italy, from Italian-American cities, and from global readings like Itameshi and the Argentinian tipa Italiana. Service Director Stephen Puntillo oversees the hospitality around it.

Pasta, parm treatment and the long joke

The kitchen’s method depends on familiar forms bent just past expectation. Baked potato gnocchi carries butter sauce, roasted garlic sour cream, charred broccoli, pickled pepperoncini, bacon, chives and mozzarella, a plate that treats the baked potato as structure rather than garnish. Waves pasta uses ridged curls with shrimp, asparagus and Calabrian chile, letting the shape do some of the work at the pass. Smoked pork rib parm pushes a quarter rack of ribs through the logic of parm treatment and sends it with spaghetti salad and mortadella. The measurements here often arrive as menu architecture rather than production figures: an à la carte kitchen of snacks, starters, housemade pastas, larger plates and desserts, with a seasonal Feast of the Seven Fishes that in 2025 is built as a 7-course family-style meal with 12 seafood servings. Even the drinks keep close to the food. A welcome pour may be prosecco or a zero-ABV alternative, and the bar folds bitter, bright and sweet flavors back into the cooking through the jell-olives.

Neon at the counter, discipline at the pass

The room carries the same refusal to be solemn. Café Mars has the charge of a 1980s space-age diner filtered through Memphis Milano: chunky colored booths, squiggly neon pink bar chairs, a bright back dining room and enough visual wit to make the first glance feel like part of service. None of that removes pressure from the pass. In a small, lively room, timing has less cover; the pasta has to land, the rib has to hold, the bitter cube has to eat cleanly, not merely photograph well. Solo diners sit into the bar’s odd geometry, while the counter keeps the kitchen’s humor close to the hands. The place is upscale casual, but the work is not casual. It asks for the same discipline as a quieter room, only with brighter light on the station.

A tradition made elastic

Café Mars holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand across 2023, 2024 and 2025, with Italian cooking treated as a living method rather than a protected border. The signatures keep returning to contrast, sweet against bitter, soft against structured, comfort against surprise. If the next chapter is the holiday table, the restaurant has already named its frame: the 2025 Feast of the Seven Fishes, served December 17-21, with 12 seafood servings passing through Café Mars.