Italian fine dining, according to chef Melissa Rodriguez, is an oxymoron. “It’s a fine line to dress it up and take it out,” she says. “You’re walking a tightrope.” Push the less-is-more cooking too far and you squelch its spirit, not far enough and diners start to question exactly why they’re paying $245 a pop for dinner. But Rodriguez, who recently opened Al Coro with partner Jeff Katz, is confident as a high-wire cook. “I like doing things people tell me I can’t do,” she says.
Al Coro, housed in the former Del Posto space in Chelsea, is a near impossible project on paper. Rodriguez ran the Del Posto kitchen after Marc Ladner’s departure in 2017. Katz had taken over as general manager eight years earlier, and when the landmark restaurant closed for Covid-19 in 2020 and permanently in 2021, the duo bought the business and set about gutting the space, exercising the demons of former owner Mario Batali and reimagining what fine dining should feel like post-pandemic. And they did it all in a 24,000-square-foot piece of real estate that really should only work as an Equinox or Tao-like clubstaurant and on a block with former mega restaurant neighbors—Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Morimoto, and Toro—conspicuously absent, killed off by Covid. There are 150 seats to fill, not to mention private dining and a forthcoming downstairs bar, Discolo.
Al Coro isn’t just a swing for Italian fine dining. It’s got to prove that New York still supports big ideas.
For Katz and Rodriguez, buying Del Posto, rather than starting fresh elsewhere, was obvious. “Why would we leave?” says Katz. “We spent so long in the space, it was pretty easy to start thinking about what could have been better or different.”
Al Coro’s renovations rid Del Posto of its “New Jersey funeral home” vibes, an opening-week guest told Katz. The grand staircase is gone, replaced by a nine-seat bar with liquor bottles backlit and aglow. White linens were swapped for chocolate tabletops.
A moodboard for Discolo included Wilt Chamberlain’s bedroom and Yves Saint Laurent’s living room, and some of that throwback aesthetic made it upstairs in the restaurant’s custom chrome and micro-suede furniture.
Mostly, Katz and Rodriguez wanted to purge any hint of fussiness, and opening Mel’s, their wood-fired pizzeria, earlier this year helped loosen everyone up. Rodriguez hadn’t worked in a casual restaurant for two decades and found herself stripping away ideas and components from dishes. “Your normal developmental behaviors have to be questioned,” she says. “And the same thing goes for service in the dining room. Why are we still doing all these steps?”
The pandemic, too, broke restaurants—fine dining and otherwise. While much of Del Posto’s management team (the food and beverage director, pastry chef, chef de cuisine, director of operations, kitchen manager, events director,…
Read more:Inside Al Coro, a New NYC Restaurant That Makes Italian Fine Dining Feel Like a Party