The Women Who Run the West Village
Michael Hainey | Air Mail News
Rita Sodi and Jody Williams have built five of the neighborhood’s most beloved restaurants. Now the duo behind Via Carota are heading to the Met and the Flatiron Building
I was sitting with Jody Williams and Rita Sodi on an early-summer afternoon, sipping espresso alfresco at Via Carota, their beloved Italian restaurant in the West Village of New York City, when I asked the two chefs, who are partners in business as well as in life, why their restaurants rise above so many others. Why do people carry such a devotion not just to Via Carota but to their four other spots in the neighborhood:I Sodi, Buvette, Bar Pisellino, and the Commerce Inn? With the news that they will soon be expanding their portfolio uptown, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Flatiron Building, I was eager to know how they’d maintain the magic.
That’s when Williams tells me about the Italian nonna, a figure you might have seen if you’ve ever wandered down a side street in an Italian village and, through the open kitchen door of a small trattoria, caught a glimpse of a gray-haired woman sitting at a marble-topped table, quietly rolling out meatballs or pinching pasta for that day’s lunch, just as she has for decades. “Even if I were to make nonna’s meatballs with her exact recipe,” Williams says, “her meatballs would still taste so much better than mine because she has mani del proprietario.”
The phrase, Williams says, means “hands of the owner, or hands of the house,” and gets to the idea that what sets a great restaurant apart from a good one is the secret, soulful touch the owner or chef brings to the creation of the food and the space. “It’s at the heart of what we do,” Williams says, as she nods to the waiter for more espressos. “Not just with the food we cook but how we design the spaces. The details. We consider every detail. From the ingredients we source to the perfect height of the tables, to the size and cut of glasses we use for the wine. All of it matters.” I look to Sodi for what she can add, but she only gives me a tight, silent shrug of the sort Italians often give, a gesture that seems to be shorthand for acknowledging an eternal truth.
If one needs any evidence of the touch Sodi and Williams possess, all one has to do is stroll Grove Street in the West Village, where they have created a streetscape whose beauty and vibrancy in the life of the neighborhood would make Jane Jacobs, its patron saint, weep with joy. There’s Bar Pisellino, everyone’s idea of what their Italian coffee-and-cocktail spot would be if they actually lived in Italy; catty-corner is Via Carota, probably one of the most desired tables in the city; nearby is I Sodi, their Tuscan trattoria; and a two-minute walk away from that is Buvette, their all-day café. Curl around the corner, and you’ll find the Commerce Inn, their cozy, American tavern.
Curiously, they chose Grove Street not out of any grand strategic vision but for a more powerful reason. “We fell in love on Grove Street,” Williams says. “We had our first date here. Our first kiss. When we started together, we knew there was nowhere else we’d rather be.”
She adds that with each restaurant they sought to preserve what they love about the neighborhood—its intimacy, its streetscape—while giving it something they felt it lacked: an everyday trattoria, a quiet place for Sunday dinner, or the perfect stand-up bar. “We made this little part of the Village our home,” Sodi says. “We live here, too. So everything we make, we want it to feel like home.”
Williams and Sodi both came to the city from elsewhere, then met here over—what else?—food. Williams grew up in California. After moving to New York in the 1980s, she caught on as the lunch entremetier in the kitchen of Rakel, Thomas Keller’s ill-fated French-American restaurant. (“I was probably the worst cook he ever hired,” she says.) She left for Italy in 1987, desperate to learn more about the country and its recipes firsthand, and worked in kitchens in Rome as well as in Reggio Emilia, in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna. “I think of that time in Italy as me getting my doctorate,” she says. “I realized I wasn’t going to learn about Italian food working in Second Avenue restaurants.”
Williams was in Rome, working at Harry’s Bar, when she was offered a job as sous-chef in Lidia Bastianich’s New York restaurant, Felidia, and returned to the city in the early 90s. In 1996, she landed her first chef post at Il Buco, before moving to Giorgione with Giorgio DeLuca, and then to Keith McNally’s Italian restaurant, Morandi, in 2007, where she created the menu and ran the kitchen from opening day. “I think I got fired from everywhere,” she says with a smile. “But that time was really important. Especially Il Buco. What they aspired to—using only the ingredients available from the market that day—was a kind of cooking I understood. In Italy, there’s no walk-in refrigerator; you cook what you buy, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. I love that thinking.”
Sodi, meanwhile, grew up living the kind of life—and eating the kind of food—that Williams had devoted herself to finding and mastering. Raised on a farm outside Florence, she learned to cook from her mother. Home was a big garden and Sunday lunches that stretched until sundown. “I never ate at a restaurant until I was 21,” she says. “We cooked all our own meals. Why would we go anywhere else for food?”
In her mid-20s, she entered the fashion business, eventually moving to Florence to work on denim for Calvin Klein, where she became an expert on fabric, sourcing, and distressing techniques. The job took her to New York a few times a year. She loved the city and its energy, but had no patience for the food. “My colleagues who lived here would always want to take me to ‘the best Italian place in the city,’” she says. “When I got there, I couldn’t believe how not good they were.”
After too many substandard Italian dinners, in 2006 she decided to move to the city and open I Sodi, serving dishes based on her mother’s recipes. “My plan was to find a chef who could cook my mother’s food, and I’d charge money for that. They’d cook. I’d supervise.” But when she couldn’t find a cook who could capture the essence and taste of the dishes—someone who possessed the mani del proprietario—Sodi says she knew she had no choice but to do it herself.
By 2008, Williams kept hearing her colleagues at Morandi talking about a new restaurant in the neighborhood. “They all kept saying, ‘You have to meet this chef. She’s incredible.’”
After work one night, Williams found a seat at the bar at I Sodi and immediately felt she was in the presence of something special. “Rita had only 10 items on the menu. That’s when you know someone’s good, when they can go deep with so few ingredients. Her food was phenomenal.” Even more phenomenal was that Sodi had never cooked professionally before opening the restaurant just a few weeks earlier.
After 15 years in the Village, Williams and Sodi are now venturing beyond it, with plans for restaurants in two of the city’s most storied buildings: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Flatiron Building. In a way, the expansion seems almost inevitable: two New York landmarks partnering with two restaurateurs who have become landmarks in their own right.
At the Met, Williams and Sodi will oversee new dining concepts that are set to open in 2027—the same year they will launch an offshoot of Bar Pisellino in the Flatiron Building. These moves follow two other recent openings: one this past spring, of Buvette London (there are already outposts in Tokyo and Seoul) and Spazio Creativo, a private-party space beneath Via Carota. (Saturday Night Live christened the latter with an after-show party in April.)
When I ask how they decided to take on such big projects, Sodi and Williams say that when it comes to choosing what’s next, there’s no master plan. “A lot of times, when we have to decide something, we just do the old ‘sulla bomba del cannone, bing, bang, boom,’” Williams says, describing the Italian version of eeny, meeny, miny, moe. “I guess it’s like having to cook something with only the ingredients on hand—we know we’ll always be able to make something great.”
I look to Sodi. She gives me another small shrug. Over her left shoulder, people hoping to land a table at Via Carota when the doors open are queueing up as they do every afternoon. The line is there every day on Grove Street, as it will be tomorrow, too, and every day after that. Soon, no doubt, one more line will form outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and another outside the Flatiron Building. You get the feeling the people will be in very good hands—le mani dei proprietari.
