San Sabino Makes Seafood For the Social-Media Age
Welcome to the shrimp show.
New York dining is subject to endless trends and booms, and the wheel of proteins always spins: burger flexing, farmhouse pork chops, the wide world of cutlets and parms. These days, the glassy eye of my dinner stares back at me: Fish’s time has arrived. Seafood places such as Penny and Theodora have been joined by the likes of Il Totano (named for Italian squid), Eel Bar, and Strange Delight. More and more, the city’s unbookable spots are marine-curious.
Angie Rito and Scott Tacinelli’s Don Angie was born during an earlier era of New York trends, the post-Torrisi red-sauce revival, but has maintained its near impenetrability right up to the present day. They have proven canny readers of the current moment. For the pair’s second restaurant, San Sabino, which opened in March three doors down from the Don, they apply their Southern Italian American spin to fish.
From the start, San Sabino has been — thanks in part to its ubiquity on TikTok — as jammed as Angie. I gave up on stalking the restaurant’s Resy page and resigned myself to trying the line that forms at its door every day. At 4:28 p.m. on a recent Thursday, I was the 12th person waiting. For three seats at the bar, the quoted wait was two hours and 45 minutes.
Four hours and 30 minutes later, we took our stools. My job often includes long waits and unappealing tables, but it’s unusual to have time for a quick opera in the predinner window between request and acceptance. Tempting as it might have been, there was no blaming the staff; the whole front of house was unflaggingly knowledgeable, competent, and upbeat. It’s just that San Sabino, which looks like a Chardonnay-colored cruise ship designed by Memphis Milano, is neither big nor casual. No one accidentally ends up at San Sabino, and everyone inside seems acutely aware of their good fortune.
I was, at the outset, not one of them. Grumpy from the long delay, we ordered our first appetizers under a gray cloud of pique. But the S.S. Sabino sailed confidently on. It was a plate of stuffed mussels, in their half-shells under a loam of ’nduja-spiked rice, that turned my head. Like the best of San Sabino, they were showy, vivid, maybe a little impious. But martyrdom is for the saints. Rito and Tacinelli aren’t purists. They’re unsubtle volume-boosters, unafraid to heap zip on zip. Where other chefs might use pepper, they season with pepperoni. The mussels tasted of smoke, spice, sea, and a slick of lemon aïoli. We gobbled them up.
Sometimes the embellishments overwhelm the main attraction. A handsome octopus carpaccio, like a stained-glass window of mollusk and salumi over whipped potatoes, was bright with pickled mustard seeds, but it didn’t taste much of octopus. A widely documented platter of shrimp parm — three giant shrimp, bodies butterflied, breaded, and fried, with their heads rising out of Arrabbiata sauce like Dantean gamberetti al purgatorio — is a clever bit of social bait, as long as you don’t mind that it doesn’t taste all that shrimpy.
Buttery bread-crumb toppings, fried or not, turn up over and over again: on the parm, coppa-laced in the insalata Louie, over thin fillets of halibut with “hearts of palm Oreganata.” Even steak, a menu concession to carnivores, is done katsu style, breaded and fried.
That might be a sop to help the seafood go down among a possibly fish-ambivalent crowd. But it’s hard to argue with success. Showmanship is clearly filling tables night after night and is not, of itself, necessarily an impediment to flavor. I was taken with the lobster triangoli, maxi ravioli in an Alfredo-esque white garlic cream sauce that only revealed their crimson innards after they were pierced with a fork.
Is a reveal like that worth four hours of waiting before even sitting down? There’s finesse in San Sabino’s brashness, I have to concede, even if much — like a garlic-bread martini — seems mostly designed to provoke. “A lot of the menu is about the sacrilege of combining dairy with fish,” a waiter told us cheerfully when we inquired about an unholy-sounding combination of raw scallop, pickled kiwi, and buttermilk. There’s a palate for that and an audience willing to spend an afternoon on line to try it, too. But there’s also a lot of other excellent seafood in the city right now. I’ve seen what Rito and Tacinelli can do with more; I’d be interested to see what they’d do with less.