Key Foods Team Opens Contessa on Newbury Avenue in Boston

Good news for Boston all through the continuing heatwave: The most recent rooftop restaurant, Contessa, debuts tomorrow, June 22, at the lately opened lodge the Newbury Boston on Newbury Road. The elaborately adorned place serves Italian delicacies and comes from worldwide mega-group Major Food items Team.

Founders Mario Carbone, Abundant Torrisi, and Jeff Zalaznick have opened dining establishments this sort of as Carbone and Sadelle’s in New York Town and over and above when some of their places to eat repeat from metropolis to town, this is the 1st Contessa, and it’s also the group’s very first go into Massachusetts. (Shortly, they’ll also open up the a lot more relaxed Parm at the Burlington Shopping mall.)

Andrew Scrivani

Geared toward all-day eating, Contessa serves Italian foods, especially highlighting some northern Italian dishes — feel tortellini en brodo, garganelle verdi al bolognese, and a significant dry-aged bistecca fiorentina. There’s also a prosciutto assortment from several regions antipasti these as octopus agrodolce and beef carpaccio and pizzas with toppings these as mushrooms or spicy clams. (Whilst various Key Food Group dining establishments provide Italian or Italian-American menus, this is the group’s initial foray into pizza.) For dessert, there’s gelato, cakes, and Boston cream pie bomboloni. This is Boston, following all.

The beverages also lean Italian — lots of aperitivi, grappa, amari, and up-to-date versions of basic cocktails, from Negronis to spritzes. The wine checklist characteristics central and northern Italian selections but also solutions from France and North The us.

Douglas Friedman

Contessa is located adjacent to the Community Garden on Boston’s ritziest browsing road, inside of the hotel previously known as the Taj and in advance of that the Ritz-Carlton — one particular of the country’s first locations of the latter — newly revamped into the Newbury Boston by actual estate and hospitality administration enterprise Highgate. Appropriately, the cafe structure is quite eye-catching, with big extravagant restaurant from a extravagant cafe group atop a fancy resort vibes. It is by Ken Fulk, who also labored on the Las Vegas spots of Carbone and Sadelle’s, amongst quite a few other one of a kind spaces dripping with floral installations, bold tiling, and upholstered household furniture that screams “luxury.” Fulk intended Contessa with three-martini lunches and superior teas in mind, also drawing inspiration from northern Italian estates and Milanese designers. Diners will obtain lots of marble, velvet, and floral touches, with a colour palette major on rose and teal.

Whilst Contessa isn’t identical to present Main Foodstuff Group places to eat, critiques of some of the group’s other venues offer you a glimpse into what Boston may possibly hope from this newcomer: in a term, swankiness. As Eater’s crew of New York critics wrote in a 2014 evaluate of Carbone, the cafe serves “gigantic, pricy, nuanced variations of Italian-American standards” punctuated by “a retro Palm Springs coolness.” It’s a “quintessential” location, a must for out-of-towners. Carbone and its siblings are inclined to be lovely, fashionable, and scene-y. Just one of the other eating places, the Grill, “is [New York City’s] only 4-star ode to the earlier,” Eater NY critic Ryan Sutton wrote.

Andrew Scrivani

Boston is looking at a barrage of New York restaurateurs plant roots in this article these days, for superior or worse (see also: Blue Ribbon Group getting in excess of the former areas of Eastern Regular, Island Creek Oyster Bar, and the Hawthorne in Kenmore Sq.). While the city is not normally right away welcoming to outsiders — specially at a time when the pandemic has shut so many modest, unbiased firms — Bostonians familiar with Key Food stuff Group’s venues in other metropolitan areas are optimistic about its arrival right here.

Contessa is open up for cocktails and dinner support as of June 22, with breakfast, lunch, and brunch to observe in the coming months reservations will be out there through the restaurant’s internet site. Private eating for teams up to 25 will be accessible starting in the tumble. Significant Food Group is also guiding all other food items and beverage operations at the hotel, together with the Avenue Bar, which opened in the spring.