Five Essential Dishes to Order at Locanda Verde Hudson Yards
This year, Andrew Carmellini, the chef, author, and restaurateur behind spots like his namesake Café Carmellini, Leuca, and The Dutch, expanded his New York culinary empire even further. His much-loved Tribeca stalwart, Locanda Verde, recently opened in a second location in Hudson Yards, serving up many of the same favorites and a few new hits.
“Almost everything that’s on the Hudson Yards menu is something we’ve done before, either on the menu or as a special. This gave me a chance to revisit all of the recipes we’ve done over 15 years, and this is kind of bringing some of those things to light,” Carmellini says.
He hopes to maintain more than just the quality of the cooking, keeping the unique “New York” feel of the original location intact even in a new neighborhood.
“I was really nervous about the idea of doing a new one for a while, because it’s such a neighborhood classic in Tribeca, which is such a good neighborhood. This is a very busy, newer neighborhood, but we’ve more or less been sold out since we opened,” he says. “I’m not nervous anymore.”
We sat down with him to talk about five essential dishes to order at Locanda Verde Hudson Yards, in his own words.
The Resy Rundown
Locanda Verde Hudson Yards
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Why We Like It
Tribeca’s temple to Italian cuisine, led by master Andrew Carmellini, has branched out and given us one more reason to visit Hudson Yards. Do know that the fire-roasted garlic chicken is required eating here. -
Essential Dishes
Blue crab crostino; ravioli; lasagna verde; Roman-spiced duck; fire-roasted garlic chicken; and the cookie box. -
Must-Order Drinks
Vesper in Coattails; Roman Smash; zero-proof Senza Mule; and any of the excellent wines hailing from France and Italy.
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Who and What It’s For
Fans of Locanda Verde and chef Carmellini’s cooking seeking out a spot to dine near Hudson Yards. Nearby office workers seeking out an ideal power lunch spot. Anyone with a penchant for skilled Italian cookery and comforting fare. -
How to Get In
Reservations drop four weeks in advance. Walk-ins are also welcome.
1. Blue Crab Crostino
“This is a day-one Locanda Verde dish. There wasn’t a lot of new crostini work done in the 2000s; it was just something you didn’t necessarily see on menus. But we had this crostini section, and I wanted to do something fun that wasn’t typical.
“I love crab, and I love to use it in a lot of different variations. I wanted to do something that was visually really nice — almost the Italian flag with the red, white, and green on top, and also just really, really tasty. Not that the combination of crab and garlic is anything new, but putting it on toast with some tomato is almost like a pan con tomate. It’s almost a hybrid Italian-Spanish dish with good old American crab.
“It’s a favorite. I took it off the menu right after COVID, just for all of the usual reasons, and I got so many complaints about it [being removed]. That’s why it came back, and it’s on the new uptown menu for a reason.”
2. My Grandmother’s Ravioli
“This started as a dish at Café Boulud [Carmellini was its executive chef in the early 2000s] . After a couple of years, we had a customer that was a regular of ours, and the reason they came back was for my ravioli. Back then, we were making them on Sunday, and I used to call them my Sunday ravioli.
“It’s not exactly how my grandmother would make them, because we didn’t grow up with tomato sauce. My family is from Friuli and there’s not a lot of tomato sauce in that cuisine. But these meat raviolis are definitely a variation of hers, and the combination of a fresh tomato sauce and ravioli was just too good.
“It’s also been on the menu since day one at Locanda Verde. The key to these is that we make them for every service, so the ones you get at lunch are made for lunch and the ones you get at dinner are made for dinner. That’s what gives them that really velvety texture.”
3. Lasagna Verde
“This is a newer dish to the menu. It’s something we’ve run as a special before for years.
“I feel like the platonic ideal and the best part of a lasagna is the crispy bits, and getting to mix those crispy bits with the mushy bits. It took us a while to figure out a way to get this in the restaurant so that everybody gets crispy bits, because usually there are pieces in the middle and only the side has them. We developed a technique to make sure that everyone gets crispy bits.
“It’s not actually made with green pasta; it’s just named after Locanda Verde. It’s our house pasta. For me, it was an important thing to have.”
4. Roman Spiced Duck
“This is a cool dish. Again, it’s something I’ve done at least a variation on for about 20 years. The cuisine of ancient Rome is very, very interesting. It’s not necessarily what most people think of as typical Italian food especially in America, but there was a gourmand whose name was Apicius, and he wrote a cookbook and kept detailed recipes of Roman cooking at the time.
“It’s really interesting. There are honey and figs, different spices and fish sauce and grape reductions. It’s this very sweet, sour, and spicy food.
“This is basically a variation on that. I call it an Apicius glaze, made with honey, vinegar, and coriander. It has a little bit of cumin inside, with black pepper and allspice. It’s a very, very old recipe for duck.
“It goes on top of green farro, which is an ancient Italian grain. The farro we have is a green farro that still has the husk on it, which gives it this smoky flavor. The dish is a combination of this sweet, sour, spicy duck and this interesting grain. It’s a very delicious, wintery, ‘can’t stop eating’ kind of dish that has roots in Roman cooking.”
5. Carmellini’s Cookie Box
“We do quite a lot of private parties and events at Locanda Verde, and we always had a cookie plate on the party menu.
“We’re never offered it on the regular menu before, but now we’re going to do it uptown and downtown. We had this idea to do this Italian cookie box with a rotating cast of characters of Italian-inspired cookies.
“I say Italian-inspired, because a lot of times Italian cookies can be made with all almond paste and can be a bit dry. Those are not that.
“Some of them are rooted in history. We have a Sicililan sesame cookie. Sesame is a really cool ingredient especially in Sicily because it was brought over from the Middle East. There’s a pistachio cookie that’s almost a variation on a pignolata cookie. There are two that are actually recipes from my first cookbook, ‘Urban Italian.’ There’s a raspberry pinwheel, and the black cookie, which is a mint chocolate cookie.
“They’ll change over time, and they come in a branded box. It’s just an ideal Italian cookie plate. It’s really good with a glass of Vin Santo, and we offer it with that. Traditionally, especially in Tuscany where my grandfather is from, you’ll see cookies served that way.”
Locanda Verde Hudson Yards is open for dinner Monday through Saturday from 5 to 11 p.m., and for weekday lunch from 11:30 a.m. until 3 p.m.
Ellie Plass is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Follow her on Instagram and X. Follow Resy, too.
