Bacaro

"Everyone has a go-to Italian restaurant, and for passersby like Ly Ngo, Sam Giordano, Laura Brown, and Caitlin McMullen, that restaurant is Bacaro. Now in its tenth year, the Division Street restaurant has proven its staying power in a city of amazing eateries. Bacaro’s wine bar and small plates (“cichetti”) are modeled after the “bacaros” of Venice—workingmen’s pubs that serve snacks and small glasses of wine." - Passerbuys

"If you prefer squid ink pasta that slaps hard, go eat the spaghetti nero at Bacaro. It’s been on the menu ever since the restaurant opened in 2007 at 136 Division Street, near East Broadway, where Chinatown bumps into the Lower East Side. Bacaro’s subterranean dining room is one of the more memorable places to eat in the city; its stone, exposed brick, salvaged wood, antique chandeliers, and flickering candlelight conspire to create what essentially feels like a sexy medieval dungeon. The restaurant is owned by Kama Geary, who’s been there since the beginning and bought the business from the original chef and owner, Frank DeCarlo, in 2018. Bacaro is a Venetian-leaning restaurant, and, as DeCarlo told me when I spoke to him late last year, the spaghetti nero “is a dish of Venice.” It uses ink from cuttlefish (seppia), which are abundant in the Venetian lagoon. Rather than being worked into fresh pasta dough, the ink goes straight into a sauce that’s tossed with plain-old dried spaghetti." - Daniel Meyer

"Bacaro, Passerbuys Manhattan by Passerbuys. Everyone has a go-to Italian restaurant, and for passersby like Ly Ngo, Sam Giordano, Laura Brown, and Caitlin McMullen, that restaurant is Bacaro. Now in its tenth year, the Division Street restaurant has proven its staying power in a city of amazing eateries. Bacaro’s wine bar and small plates (“cichetti”) are modeled after the “bacaros” of Venice—workingmen’s pubs that serve snacks and small glasses of wine."

"[My friend Meg] told me to come to Bacaro in Chinatown, and that she’d be with her friend Chase, a documentary filmmaker. Meg and Chase were drinking martinis when I arrived, so I ordered one too, even though in my head I had been planning to go home after two beers. One martini turned into two, and two turned into three, which I couldn’t believe. Then we ordered dinner — I got ricotta cavatelli with duck ragu — and somehow I ended up with a fourth martini."

"Frank DeCarlo will focus on his Lower East Side restaurant Bacaro after stepping down from Peasant." - Tanay Warerkar