Nolita restaurant at The Ritz-Carlton, Naples, is the new face of Italian dining at the North Naples resort. The restaurant replaced Terrazza and offers made-from-scratch pizzas and pastas on a menu inspired by the Nolita neighborhood, short for North of Little Italy, in New York City.
Nolita brings a more up-to-date experience compared to its predecessor with the addition of brick ovens and more familiar New York-style dishes. Open to guests and locals, the restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner.
A signature appetizer is calamari soaked in milk prior to frying to ensure a crunchy texture. Pasta dishes include agnolotti with porcini mushrooms and robiola cheese and lamb ragu rigatoni.
The staples of the menu are the brick oven-fired pizzas, including the Pope of Naples with fennel sausage and wild honey and the daviola with spicy calabrese salami and red chili flakes. Chef Gabriele Candela is the lead pizza chef and spent time in Napoli, Italy, last year learning how to create the true Neapolitan pizza. Candela, who was born in Sicily, Italy, takes pride in using the highest quality ingredients imported from Italy, including the flour that is fermented for 48 hours.
In the center of the restaurant is a large bar to enjoy specialty cocktails with a focus on different prosecco spritzers, including Nolita Spritz with sage and the Hugo Spritz with elderflower liqueur. Ritz-Carlton, Naples Director of Food and Beverage George Fistrovich said the bar brings a nice balance by drawing in nightlife in the evenings while still having a family-friendly option for each meal of the day.
“We have a signature drink and food concept here that is much more in tune to what’s happening everywhere,” Fistrovich said. “We did our research and we looked around with what Naples is offering, and we wanted to make sure when you walk into this restaurant, especially at nighttime, it has its own personality, it has its own life and place like all the restaurants and bars we have here.”
Nolita offers a classic buffet-style breakfast with made-to-order omelets, a waffle station and in-house made pastries. For dessert, customers can treat themselves to tiramisu, limoncello strawberry cheesecake or boozy ice cream.
“Our demographic here and our guests are very much in tune to the Nolita-type of cuisine, so we brought that here with our master pizza chef and everything that’s handcrafted here,” Fistrovich said. “If you’d go and put yourself in New York City, you’d be able to see that kind of food that we have here. It’s really that namesake that really matters compared to what Terrazza used to be.”
