Silvano Marchetto, long-time owner of the restaurant Da Silvano and host to fashionistas, music, movie and rock stars and New York publishing elite, passed away of heart failure on June 4 in his hometown of Florence at the age of 77. Without trying to, he became a Page Six staple in the New York Post as the restaurateur in countless photos of everyone from Anna Wintour of Vogue and (left) Rihanna to Yoko Ono and Al Pacino, snapped by a flock of paparazzi outside. 
        Marchetto, like so many immigrants before and after him, sought the American dream in New York via restaurants. He achieved it in a spectacular fashion that allowed him to park his Ferrari at the curb of his restaurant as a symbol of his hard-earned success.
        Born in Trento, Italy, and raised in Florence, Marchetto studied at the Aurelio Saffi culinary school there, then worked at hotel restaurants in France and Switzerland, transferring his skills to New York when he emigrated in the 1960s. By 1975 he could afford the low rent in Greenwich Village to open his own trattoria under his own name, with four tables, featuring Tuscan food, then a rarity in New York’s Italian restaurants
        Back then a downtown arts scene was just developing in SoHo and the Village, and important art galleries had popped up in the neighborhood. Leo Castelli opened a block from Da Silvano and Mary Boone nearby. Da Silvano was where she brought Julian Schnabel and clients to dine and the young Andy Warhol brought the young Jean-Michel Basquiat.
        Marchetto catered to his glam crowd as much as they sought his benediction and a good table. Martin Scorsese brought Robert DeNiro. Gwyneth Paltrow dated Brad Pitt there. The newly appointed editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour (below), seeking to attract a more youthful readership by putting movie stars on the cover, helped shift focus to downtown trattorias, away from midtown French restaurants, as did her counterpart, Graydon Carter, at Vanity Fair.
        Soon, Wintour’s cover subjects like Madonna and a new passel of “super models” were joining her at Da Silvano for the lightened pastas and steak alla fiorentina. Vying for a table in the small eatery was akin to scoring a table at the literary hang-out Elaine’s way uptown, except Da Silvano’s food was much better.
        Marchetto was to downtown what Bice Cucina and Cipriani were to uptown, and getting a table at any of them meant hobnobbing with fashion designers like Prada and Missoni, Bill Blass and Calvin Klein. A pre-POTUS Donald Trump demanded spaghetti with meatballs—not on the menu—and Marchetto finally gave in and made the dish.
        All went well and Marchetto lived large, once taking out a full-page ad in the Post brashly declaring Da Silvano one of six of New York’s “hottest restaurants.”
        Marchetto was courted by the rich and became so himself. Yet money, fame and celebrity, as usual in New York, took its toll. A messy divorce in 2016 from his first wife, Marisa Acocella, made all the gossip columns for months and cost a bundle to settle. Worse, his lease ran out on Da Silvano’s premises and rent leapt to $42,000 a month. After 41 years, Marchetto closed his beloved restaurant, also citing his bad knees as part of the reason.
        He retired and isolated himself back in the Tuscan hills of Bagno a Ripoli. For a brief summer he opened a restaurant on Cyrus under his name that failed. He never again sought to open a restaurant, instead tending to his olive trees and avoiding the press.
        Unlike many other restaurateurs (some of whom he’d hired as waiters) who opened one, then, two or three branches, Marchetto felt secure at Da Silvano as a worldly beacon of la dolce vita, a place without pretensions, despite those of some of his customers. He had a corner of the world where people came as much to see him and to see the celebrities and eat the branzino, tagliatelle and crostini.
        I only met Marchetto on the one or two occasions I ever ate at Da Silvano, finding him a balance of the grand seigneur and the circus ringmaster. When I once wrote something nice about Da Silvano, his daughter Leyla called to say he wished to thank me and was very grateful.
lvano’s food, which was true to the trattoria style, not that of a fine ristorante, was simply prepared, using excellent ingredients, and satisfying to a celebrity crowd who often would order nothing but an arugula salad or double espresso.
       More than anything Marchetto boosted the new image of Italian food as the epitome of casual chic, where, if one liked, you could show up in a Hawaiian shirt, a silk scarf, chains around your neck and an armful of bracelets.  After all, that’s what he did every day.

         Seasoned experience can easily trump youthful exuberance and energy, if the latter do not respect the former. So many young chefs, with minimal experience in the kitchen, believe their imagination can transform their cooking beyond the results achieved by long, patient, dogged commitment to copying and perfecting what has proven to work to the expectations and pleasure of their guests.
         Case in point: the owners of Basso 56 in the New York suburb of Chappaqua, one hour from Grand Central Terminal. Partners Sherif Nezaj, Sammy Ukaj and chef Paolo Marco Cantini have among the them more than a century of experience working in restaurants, and it shows in their newest venture together.
        Nezaj began his American dream in 1974 in Port Chester, another town in Westchester, and went on to own the esteemed Il Monello in Manhattan, worked behind the bar at Sparks, Bruno, and Wolfgang's and is still a partner in Royal 35 Steakhouse.
        Ukaj  emigrated from Kosovo in 1989 at the age of 20., worked at Ray's Pizza and eventually  bought his own, then with his brother bought  Albivi Italian restaurant in Millstone NJ in 2004.
         Cantini, a graduate of Scuola Alberghiera di Stato, has been both a chef de cuisine and personal chef for more than 40 years. Born in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, Cantini has worked in Italy, France, and on both coasts of the U.S., and was co-owner of the original Basso 56 in Manhattan.
      Add these three professional careers together, and you have a at Basso 56 a classic Italian ristorante finely appointed, impeccably served and outstanding for its largess. Basso 56 is as far as one can get from the cramped, raucous, very expensive Manhattan and Brooklyn trattorias that pop up and flare brightly until the crowds move on.
        At Basso 56 the dining rooms are airy, with comfortably spaced tables,  set with linens, a bouquet of flowers and three votive candles. Ferns and chandeliers hang from a high ceiling, and walls are set with wine bottles from a good, well-priced list.
      The menu is a screed of all the most popular Italian dishes with several novel additions, like the grilled shrimp with white Tuscan beans scented with fresh rosemary ($19.50). Zucchini flowers  (left) are stuffed with ricotta and a little anchovy, deep fried crisp and dashed with tomato sauce ($17). Baked eggplant tortino parmigiana with fresh mint and basil ($19) oozes herbaceous aromas and melting cheese.
       Cream-rich burrata (right) is first warmed, then draped with prosciutto di Parma and graced with truffle oil ($21.50), while octopus is first  macerated in reduction and topped with a verdant summer pesto ($22.50). There’s a fine salad of baby arugula, Dijon pear, fennel and goat’s cheese with a Champagne vinaigrette ($15.50).
       
Eleven pastas, plus specials, offer difficult decisions when you have to choose among trofie pasta with the traditional Ligurian pesto studded with pignoli nuts and a touch of buffalo’s milk cheese ($22.50); a first-rate rendition of the toothsome maccheroni all chitarra (an Abruzzese dish) with a lamb ragù and pecorino ($27). On the Neapolitan side there is fat, fat paccheri with eggplant and fresh tomato and ricotta salata ($25.50), and the very and very correct spaghetti alla carbonara is made with guanciale, eggs, pecorino and crushed black pepper ($26.50). These are very large portions that you might easily split as a pasta course.
        Given Cantini’s background, it’s easy enough to see why his fish is impeccably cooked, like the dentice (wild sea bass) with a light pesto crust in white wine and lemon sauce dotted with tangy-salty capers and served with both June’s asparagus and mashed potatoes ($34.50).
        Pollo parmigiana ($32.50), making a return after being banished to out-dated Italian restaurants, is at Basso 56 a wonder of Italian-Americana, the flavorful chicken breaded and served old style with a side of spaghetti ($32.50). Baby lambs chops ($44.50) are grilled to succulence after being marinated in herbs and olive oil, served with a lovely artichoke mousse and mashed potatoes, while costoletta alla milanese ($54.50) is a huge, flattened veal chop with an arugula and tomato salad and tomato sauce on the side.
      For dessert skip the omnipresent tiramisù; I preferred the chocolate torta with ice cream.
        The service staff, under Ukaj’s direction, is attentive, the hostess’s eyes seem to see anyone in need of assistance, and the brightness of the place at summer’s twilight is an enchantment.
      Put all this together with the  global experience of the owners and chef, and Basso 56 is a lesson in Old School graciousness.

Open nightly for dinner.