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Photo: Arrigo’s of Fresh Pond Rd
In the beginning, there were Italian sandwiches, and it was good. But ambition tends to grow beyond what can be contained on a roll. In Ridgewood, two former lunch spots, Arrigo’s and Salvo’s, have, over the past year, extended into the evening hours, with menus expanded to match. The two spots, similar in old-Italian leanings though distinct in their menus, have contributed a new tricolore slant to the neighborhood. Arrigo’s is housed in a former Ukrainian deli, but the lace-curtained design is so complete you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for Nonna’s. The area still has plenty of Slavs — the Pierogi Boys is nearby — but especially when refracted through the light of the popular Il Gigante, the neighborhood, long home to a Sicilian population who moved outward from neighboring Bushwick, is taking on a familiar cast: Welcome to Little Ritaly!
Where Salvo’s owner, Salvatore La Rosa, used to bike his wares around the neighborhood himself, he’s grown, turning out mortadella hoagies and Sicilian tuna sandwiches during the day and Sunday-sauce ragù as part of a small Sicilian-leaning menu, served on Friday and Saturday nights since the beginning of the year. It’s grown quietly: The restaurant takes no online reservations, and its website offers nothing but the opportunity to buy an Italian-made cycling cap and a Diet Coke. Salvo’s dining room, a retrofitted former shoe-repair shop on Forest Avenue, has a similar out-of-time quality. It keeps the original tile floors but otherwise looks like a Sophia Petrillo fantasy (“Picture it: Sicily, 1922 …”), with handwritten menus, dark-wood partitions, and a hulking old-school Faema espresso machine. Salvo’s serves a very credible fritto misto, with hulking shrimp, tender squid, and a big fried sardine lazing beneath a shower of potato chips. Spaghetti con le sarde is sweet with plump black raisins, if a little heavily bread crumbed, and the all-day-stewed Neapolitan ragù, with short rib, spare rib, and sausage, is respectably heavy. Pinned to the chair, we only vacated for a subsequent party when requested hours later, spooning up the last dregs of a puckery lemon granita dolloped with cool cream.
Arrigo’s, on Fresh Pond Road, has a similar vibe if a slightly more ambitious menu. Paul Caici, its chef and co-owner, is readier than La Rosa to make substitutions to the classics: His Milanese isn’t chicken or veal but swordfish, and his beef carpaccio features mustard dashi. Caici and his partner, Gary Fishkop, previously opened Daphne’s in Bed-Stuy, which my colleague Tammie Teclemariam praised for “straddling the line between fashionable and familiar.” After opening Arrigo’s primarily as a lunch spot in spring 2025, Caici had added dinner by the fall, and the restaurant now occupies the majority of his time. (He lives nearby and found the restaurant on foot; the Ukrainian former owners still live upstairs.) Some dishes overlap between the two, with a few alterations — Arrigo’s roast chicken is no longer pesto’d, as Daphne’s was, but it’s still very well made and still comes dripping in au-poivre-ish green-and-pink peppercorn gravy on a pile of skinny fries — but it was the housemade pasta that won my day. Torchiette (“little torches”) are tossed with a white Bolognese made smoky and gamy with guanciale and rubbled rabbit, but the biggest surprise to me were the salty pops of taggiasca olives.
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