For the past four years, while the cost of a high-end tasting menu shot up as fast as the city’s pencil towers, the Milan native Gaia Bagnasacco has been preparing authentic Italian food at bargain prices not seen since the nineteen-nineties. On an unremarkable graffiti- and scaffolding-covered stretch of East Houston Street, her eponymous basement-level B.Y.O.B. café is a true “hidden gem,” straight out of “Let’s Go: New York City.”
From the signs for free Wi-Fi to the red plastic water tumblers and the vitrine tables overflowing with magazines, the café feels like the communal space of a youth hostel. One Saturday evening, a woman wondered aloud how she would be able to enjoy her meal with the severe face of Ruth Bader Ginsburg staring back at her from the cover of Time. Soon enough, the table was overtaken by a platter of parchment-thin bresaola carpaccio and an umami bomb of rich, creamy burratina cheese mixed with sautéed mushrooms and enough fresh parsley to qualify as a side salad. Nearly every dish at Gaia comes with plastic serving spoons and a crumpled foil trough full of freshly house-baked focaccia soldiers. The same bread, cracker-thin and lightly toasted, is also used for scandalously cheap five-dollar panini, piled high with wide ribbons of mortadella, prosciutto, or speck.
Hot dishes and pastas arrive briskly, in aluminum pots reminiscent of a cheap camping-stove setup, belying their bona fides. One night, two types of ravioli were sublimely al dente: spinach and ricotta with bacon, in tomato sauce, and walnut, stuffed with sweet mascarpone and strands of radicchio sliced as thin as saffron threads. But it was the fresh-made tagliatelle, in a spicy tomato sauce with clams, shrimp, octopus, and eggplant, that commanded seconds and thirds. Bagnasacco’s oven-baked dishes satisfy cravings for simple, homemade food, such as meatballs and potatoes generously dusted with Parmesan crumbles. The only misses on the menu—beans with sausage, cabbage salad—involve too much of what tastes suspiciously like Frank’s RedHot.
Bagnasacco controls every last detail about her café, from the early kitchen closings (at seven Tuesdays through Thursdays and eight on Fridays) to the language on the menu (“Fruit juices are delicious,” “Let’s try if you like them”). She is strict but fair (reservations are required after five o’clock), and famously defensive on her own Yelp page (“Where are the educated customers?”). She appreciates courtesy, and may send you home with cookies and Nutella pastries; if your manners are lacking, she may chide you. One night, she told a lingering group, “Don’t get too comfortable, we are closing soon.” The café is less a restaurant than Bagnasacco’s kitchen, and she rightly commands your respect. ♦
Open Mondays through Saturdays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Entrées $5-$15.
