Prolific restaurateur Stephen Starr — behind notable endeavors like the recently opened cafe at Louis Vuitton, Le Coucou, Upland, and a Pastis partnership with Keith McNally — has a new set of iconic Italian restaurants under his umbrella.
Starr is taking over Babbo and Lupa, two iconic restaurants from the Bastianich family that had taken a hit after the fall of Mario Batali, Grub Street confirmed. And in the process of Starr’s takeover, Mark Ladner, the Batali-Bastianich-era chef who went from opening Lupa to Del Posto, will be running the kitchen at Babbo.
Most recently, Starr teamed up with Nancy Silverton’s Mozza, with its flagship in Los Angeles, to open the DC restaurant that debuted in November. Of the Starr takeover of the District Mozza, Silverton said, “He’s just providing such an infrastructure, such layers of people that really are not something that I’ve ever had in opening a restaurant,” she told Eater DC. “We always open in a very skeletal way, and usually that last nail is hammered in, and then the doors are open and we begin. But I mean, he’s giving us an entire month of both front-of-house and back-of-house support and training, which is remarkable.”
Mario Batali first opened Babbo in 1998, landing the James Beard Award for best new restaurant in 1999. Babbo “had few peers among Italian restaurants, serving unusual meats with a side of light decadence,” Pete Wells recalled in the New York Times in 2017, citing the famous goat’s head, lamb’s tongue, head cheese, and beef-cheek pasta with a squab liver sauce. Lupa opened just a year later, in 1999, prompting a review as a “$25 and under” restaurant by Eric Asimov.
Following sexual assault charges against him in 2017 in the rise of #MeToo, Batali sold his ownership stakes in the restaurants, and both places took hits, never really finding their footing following the charges, despite tweaks in ownership. “This is a new era,” said Youjin Jung, the executive chef at Babbo in 2022. “The restaurant had been under big shadows. Let’s call it ‘orange shadow with a ponytail.’”
Ladner, meanwhile, left the group after a nearly 20-year run to found Pasta Flyer — a fast-casual pasta spot and a trend that’s just now picking up steam. It opened in 2017 to much fanfare but closed after less than a year. When Ladner was the chef, he helped the ambitious Del Posto land a four-stars New York Times rating (following a three-star Frank Bruni review) and a Michelin star. Ladner shaped his reputation while running the kitchen at Lupa before that. The chef mentored others such as Melissa Rodriguez, who took over when he left Del Posto; landed two Michelin stars in the same space that became comet-of-a-restaurant Al Coro; and molded the restaurant into the recently opened Crane Club — all at the same address.
Ladner also mentored Mario Carbone of Major Food Group. When Ladner left Del Posto to launch Pasta Flyer, Carbone wrote that Ladner “has been impacting the way we eat Italian food in the United States for nearly two decades.”
Following the closing of Pasta Flyer, Ladner worked with other restaurant groups, including Bar Enza in the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He left by 2023 and more recently was consulting for Parcelle.