If you happened to watch Season 2 of Mike White’s White Lotus, or you’re a fan of Timothée Chalamet in Luca Guadagnini’s Call Me by Your Name, then you’ll have added appreciation — like a fine grating of Pecorino Romano over your primo pasta course — for the new Brooklyn trattoria Pasta Night.
Owners Renato Poliafito, 51, and Joseph Catalanotti, 50, opened the restaurant in October with both gay cultural touchstones in mind, across the street from Poliafito’s popular Ciao, Gloria bakery on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights.
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The owners each claim Italian ancestry and a dream of reimagining the meals that their families shared growing up. Poliafito spent childhood summers in a small town outside of Catania on Sicily’s east coast. Catalanotti’s father is Sicilian and says, “We cooked all Sicilian food, all the time.”
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“It’s been a bit of a whirlwind here,” Poliafito says of the last six months at Pasta Night, almost understating the stresses that accompany any business start-up, let alone one housed in what used to be a funeral home until the 1970s and remained vacant for years.
“You can see it’s got like these kinds of stained-glass things happening,” Poliafito says of the building’s 19th-century exterior. “So we decided to keep the facade like that, but just make it Pasta Night.”
Inside, diners can soak up a spot-on Italo 80s vibe along with their marinara and reflect in the glow of Cicciolina, the onetime Italian adult actor, politician, and muse to New York artist Jeff Koons.
At its heart, Pasta Night is about recreating those communal meals that both men grew up with, now with chosen family for a large part of their clientele.
For all the hardships associated with opening a new restaurant, “We believe in it,” Catalanotti says.
“We believe in a neighborhood and community-focused restaurant,” they add, “and we love feeding people.”
LGBTQ Nation: What are some of the key ingredients — forgive the recipe illusion — to creating a successful restaurant in 2025? A brand manager hooked us up for this interview. Does every startup need that kind of behind-the-scenes support, and what other forms does it take?
Renato Poliafito: (Laughing) Well, to answer the first part of your question: if you know the answer to that, please let us know. We’re still trying to kind of figure it out.
It does seem like the environment right now running a business in New York, especially with food and hospitality — it’s challenging. It’s always been challenging, but now it seems extra challenging. It’s like there’s so many things you have to hit right on the nose, right off the bat, and if you have a wobbly exit out of the gate, it takes you even longer to kind of stabilize. The cost of ingredients are insane. Labor is insane.
Would I advise it? I don’t know. I mean, it’s the business that I’m in, and Joey was very interested in it — and hopefully still is. Sometimes I feel like I sold them a bill of goods, but I think I was pretty straightforward. I was honest. I was like — No, I wasn’t?
Joey Catalanotti: (Laughing) I mean, you know going in it’s a labor of love. So like, you do it because you love it. You don’t do it because you think you’re gonna —
Poliafito: Make millions.
Catalanotti: First of all, you won’t. And second of all, that attitude will ruin you, you know what I mean? So I think both of us came to it from a love of something we were interested in.
Especially in this political climate, I feel like you’ve got to lead with love, right? If you’re always leading with love, no matter what, you can’t go wrong. Even when things are rough, it still feels like we’re doing something that feels like a positive thing for people and for the community.
You are partners, but you’re not a couple, and I’ve read that you met at Renato’s bakery across the street. Was it a culinary meet-cute, and who proposed a new restaurant to whom?
Catalanotti: (Laughing)I had been frequenting Ciao, Gloria since it opened, and Renato and I became good friends. We talked about little things here and there, like coffee, roasting coffee, and the bakery, and Italian food. And we had both had these lifelong dreams of wanting to open up an Italian restaurant.
We have these, like, wacky landlords that own a number of buildings in the area, and they kept coming to Renato and being like, “How about here? How about here?” And then this place opened across the street, and Renato was like, “Oh, that’s the place.” And so when it came about, and tell me if I’m wrong here, but basically, he was like, “Oh, I think that Joey might be someone who would be interested to partner up on this adventure.”
So I want to start a modest neighborhood restaurant from scratch. How much is it going to cost me?
Poliafito: A million bucks, at least in New York.
Catalanotti: Yeah.
Poliafito: Start to finish. Soup to nuts. We went into this trying to be cost-conscious, and it’s still a fortune. Everybody — every handyman, contractor, plumber, electrician — they will just gouge you and say, “Well, this is the price,” and it is. It is the going price of things. So it’s kind of shocking to function in that type of environment because it’ll take so much longer to make your money back and then finally make a profit.
To tack on what Joey was saying, you have to just really dedicate yourself to it and know that it’s going to take so much time and so much effort to get done. That’s kind of where we are.
The failure rate for new restaurants is generally considered to be about 20%. One study found that 60% fail on their first year, and 80% will call it quits after five years. When are you going to know that you have a success on your hands?
Poliafito: I would say we’ll know for sure after the first summer what direction we’re headed. Summer in New York, and especially in this neighborhood on this street, is very telling.
We had a very trying first few months, and we’re just now starting to see a little bit of daylight. It was very similar with Ciao, Gloria across the street when I opened. We opened six months before the pandemic, and then I had to shut down and reconfigure the entire business to accommodate this new world we were living in. But fortune kind of shone upon us, and it turned out to be a positive thing. And now we’re going into year six, and it’s great, but it took a while — I would say, like, two years of back-breaking work to get to a point where I’m like, “Okay, this will work.”
If you were kings of the world, what’s the one regulation restaurants in New York are subject to that you’d eliminate, and why?
Poliafito: The ADA, the Americans with Disability Act. Not because we don’t want anyone with disabilities to come in and enjoy the food, but there is this cottage industry of lawyers who go around and sue small businesses countrywide, and you end up spending tens of thousands of dollars to pay this lawyer and a disabled person who’s never been to your restaurant. I consider both of my places to be ADA-friendly, yet they will come in and be like, “Well, you know, this toilet paper holder is actually an inch off.” And you’ll have to pay —
Catalanotti: $10,000 for that.
Poliafito: $10,000. It’s literally that level of insanity. So I would not eliminate the rule, but say that if you do want to come in and sue a business, owners have 180 days to make the corrections before they could lay the lawsuit on you.
Renato, starting with your bakery, with locations in Red Hook and Tokyo, as well, you’ve been in the restaurant business for 20 years. What do you wish you’d known when you opened your first shop in 2005 that you know now in 2025?
Poliafito: I was very nervous and scared in the beginning because I basically just had to teach myself everything. I think that if I went into it with a more relaxed attitude, I probably wouldn’t have been so stressed and anxious all the time. It was exhausting because it was so much work, plus I was so stressed because of financial reasons — would the business succeed and all that stuff. Also, knowing who to work with in terms of business partners and investors and stuff like that, I probably would have made different choices.
Joey, is Renato less stressed now?
Catalanotti: I didn’t know him back then, but I’d say I think that he is pretty stressed right now (Renato laughing).
But part of the reason why I actually wanted to work with him was because I respected the way that he ran Ciao. It’s rare to find, I think, someone who is a manager who’s not totally micromanaging, but also allowing the employees to do what they want to do while they can lean on him when they need him.
I think, currently, we’re both pretty stressed out and trying to do our best.
Has social life in Brooklyn returned to something close to normal since the end of the pandemic? And how is it different now?
Poliafito: Oh, it’s like beyond normal. It’s like, I would say it’s more active and vibrant than it was pre-pandemic.
Brooklyn is definitely, in my mind, way more interesting and more exciting than Manhattan in a lot of ways. In the gay community, there’s more of a lean-in to partying, going to clubs — it’s almost bacchanalian in a lot of ways. Everyone’s going out, everyone is clubbing, it’s just a very different all-night, all-weekend long type of culture. It’s fascinating that way. I mean, maybe not our age group, but just a few years younger. It’s pretty wild.
On balance, are food delivery apps like DoorDash a plus or minus for restaurants like yours, and would you wish them away if you could?
Poliafito: Wow. (Joey laughing) You know, it’s been a boon for us, and I think for any business in New York, you have to rely on it if you want to survive. Would I wish it away and replace that with people coming in or doing takeout? Yes, because these services create a revenue stream and a business model that I had no interest in when I opened Ciao, but I was forced into it because of the pandemic, and now every restaurant has to offer it.
No matter who you are, you have to have some kind of takeout unless you’re wildly successful every single night of the week, which, you know, only a handful are. You need to rely on it. The E-bikes and that buzzing around and dealing with DoorDash delivery people, it is a headache. It is an absolute headache, but it is the world we live in right now.
You cite the 1970s and 80s Italian aesthetic seen in Call Me by Your Name as inspiration for the restaurant’s interior. 1) Is that a coded shout-out to a gay clientele, and 2) Have either Timothée Chalamet or Luca Guadagnino been by, and if not, is your brand manager on the case?
Poliafito: (Laughing) Yes, it is coded. Everything I say is coded. I want this to be the queer, gay go-to Italian place for the entire borough of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, and parts of Queens!
Yeah, I feel like it is a personification of who I am and who Joey is, and we want to celebrate that. A straight couple with their kids that come in, they enjoy it just as much. But I have plans to really kind of lean into the gay aspect of it in the coming months, like, this is a safe space — with really good pasta!
Who puts the soundtrack together for Pasta Night, and what’s your favorite track right now?
Poliafito: We have a very extensive playlist of 70s and 80s Italo disco, plus adjacent music. I put the playlist together with a friend of mine, and there’s one song that I’ve loved since I was like nine, called “I Like Chopin” by Gazebo. There’s another song, as well, “Vamos a la Playa” by Righeira from 1983 that I absolutely love.
Aside from Jennifer Coolidge’s now iconic line, how accurate do you think Mike White’s portrayal of Sicily was in Season 2 of White Lotus?
Poliafito: (and Joey laughing) Literally, like, 100%. Very well done. The dialogue between the Sicilians, when they’re talking to each other, the way they talk and how blunt and forward they are, 100% accurate.
The LGBTQ+ community are well known as first adopters when it comes to popular culture of all kinds. How important is an LGBTQ+ clientele to building your success?
Catalanotti: It’s critical. We want to be a queer space. About 30% of our clientele is queer and as we’ve seen in history, folks always know that when the queers come first, it’s safe for everyone, right? And once the queer people are coming, everyone else knows that’s the cool thing, right? That’s the trend, we’re the trendsetters.
It’s like, we move to the cool places before other people do. We have the cool fashion before other people do. I think for restaurants, it’s the same. Once you have a big group of queers going to a place and thinking that it’s a good restaurant, or has great cocktails, or, like, the wait staff’s hot, everyone’s like, let’s do it. Let’s go there. Let’s plan our birthday there.
I’m trans, and me and my friends, we’ll travel to go to a queer-owned place. Like, I will make it a priority to frequent those places and support those places, because it’s important to me and our community. To have this space feels incredibly important, and then to set that trend in terms of who’s coming here, that also feels important.
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