Anthony's Kitchen, Emilio's Door, and a Sidewalk Between You and Both
The red-sauce clubhouse on East Houston keeps a private room for regulars and a two-hour queue for everyone else. Here's how to eat it right.
The gold- and red-etched window on the south side of East Houston is the tell, and most people walk past it. Inside, the room is loud with cutlery and clubby with regulars, and somewhere behind the swinging door Anthony — one of Emilio's three chef sons — is finishing a plate of Pollo Emilio under lemon and capers. This is the red-sauce restaurant that half of Nolita treats as a living room and the other half stares at from the sidewalk, waiting.
The Vitolo family has run it for decades, long enough for the clubhouse to have grown into its clubhouse energy. Obama has eaten here. Rihanna has eaten here. The private back room is reserved for family, friends, and people the family has decided are regulars, which you are not, which nobody who reads this sentence is. What's left is the main dining room and the queue that feeds it, and the queue is the whole story.
The best red-sauce cooking in Nolita is behind a door that treats you like a stranger until it decides not to.
Editorial Deep
The menu covers the American-Italian canon end to end and doesn't wander off it. Cacio e Pepe, Carbonara, Bolognese, Spaghetti al Pomodoro. Veal Parm, Pollo Emilio under lemon-caper sauce, Veal Antonio breaded and fried and drowned in a vodka cream with ham and peas that sounds ridiculous and reads as the signature it is. Clams show up twice — Cocktail del Molluschi on the half shell, and the Baked Clams — because a red-sauce room without clams is a red-sauce room that has lost its nerve. There is no tasting menu, no reinvention, no chef's counter narrative. Anthony cooks; the menu holds.
The other diners are the room. On a Tuesday at 7 the four-top next to you is a Nolita couple in their fifties who have been coming since the sons were teenagers, and the two-top behind them is a fashion buyer in a black turtleneck who is on a first date she is going to win. On a Friday at 9 it tilts younger and louder and the door gets tighter about who it lets past. There are people here in quiet expensive clothes and people here in a denim jacket, and the room treats them identically, which is the trick.
You find the discreet door on the south side of Houston, you give a name to the host outside, and you are told a number of minutes that is either accurate or wildly optimistic. There is no bar to wait at, no lounge, no text-when-ready system — you stand on the sidewalk on East Houston Street until a table opens. On a weekday at 5pm sharp, when dinner service starts, the wait can be short. On a Friday at 8 it is routinely two hours. The host outside is not warm and does not pretend to be; treat it as weather.
Do not order the Spaghetti al Pomodoro as your only pasta and call it dinner. It is fine, it is not the point, and a table that leaves here having eaten one plate of tomato pasta and a side of broccoli rabe has spent Nolita money on food it could have made at home. This is the way people short-change themselves at Emilios: they queue for two hours and then order defensively. The bill only earns its keep if you order across the menu — clams, a pasta, one of the Antonio or Emilio plates, focaccia to share — which is why bringing a group and sharing widely is the only real value play.
Come back on a cold Tuesday in February at 5pm, when Houston Street is empty and the wait collapses to twenty minutes and the room warms up around a plate of Baked Clams and Anthony's Pollo Emilio. That is the version of this restaurant the reputation is built on. The February Tuesday version is a genuinely great red-sauce dinner in Nolita; the Saturday-at-9 version is the same food eaten after two hours on a sidewalk, and it is not the same meal.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Baked Clams, Pollo Emilio, Cacio e Pepe or Penne Antonio, Veal Antonio to share
“The best red-sauce cooking in Nolita, behind a door that does not want to help you.”
Come at 5pm on a weekday (it is first come, first served) and order across the menu — clams, one of the Antonio or Emilio plates, and a pasta split. If the queue is over ninety minutes, walk five blocks to Rubirosa and eat there without apology.
The Verdict
