Sonia Ahmed photo
Joseph Iannaccone making "Caramelle" pasta at the new restaurant Casanova.
One of the most popular dishes at Casanova, a new Italian restaurant on Park Street, starts with a pork chop sizzling in a pan of clarified butter, while a vodka sauce — made of crushed tomatoes, basil, and heavy cream — reduces in another pan.
The sauce is then drizzled over the pork chop, topped off with pecorino cheese and crispy speck, put in the oven, and then served up as pork chop parmigiana.
That’s just one of the menu staples of Casanova, which opened two weeks ago at 278 Park St.
Head chef Joseph Iannaccone and general manager Giuseppe Passeggio walked the Independent through the new restaurant’s culinary specialties and origins during a Tuesday afternoon interview before the restaurant’s 4 p.m. opening.
Located on Park near Elm Street, the restaurant also serves up such dishes as Nerano pizza, which features creamed squash and fiore de latte cheese, and Caramelle, a candy-shaped pasta with sweet potato filling.
The restaurant is open 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday, and closed on Mondays.
Iannaccone and Passeggio said they met working at Goodfellas, which is Iannacone’s father’s Italian restaurant on State Street.
Iannaccone recalled working as a chef there when Passeggio, who was a manager at Goodfellas at the time and who had worked there for 15 years, proposed they open a restaurant together.
Iannaccone said he had a long journey to opening the restaurant. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 2017, then started working as a chef in Napa, California.
“I was 19 years old living in Napa by myself,” he said. “It was crazy.”
Iannaccone said he then worked at Michelin star restaurant Le Bernadin in New York for two and a half years, as well as at The Vestry and The French Laundry with chef James Kent. He moved to Florida to work at Steven Starr’s Le Zoo restaurant then moved back to New Haven to help his father revamp the Goodfellas restaurant.
“We redid the menu, redid all the decor in the restaurant, basically lifted it up from scratch,” he said.
Iannaccone said he and his father were a great duo, and that it was hard to leave Goodfellas to start Casanova.“I have to go and venture out on my own,” he said.
Iannaccone said his daily routine consists of arriving at the Park Street restaurant at 7:30 a.m., rolling out the handmade pasta, prepping other ingredients with his fellow chefs, then doing invoicing work before opening for service.
What makes the restaurant unique, according to Iannaccone, is that their menu items are a mix between New Haven style and traditional Italian food.
“It’s a mix between me and him. He’s Italian American. I’m probably more Italian than American,” said Passeggio, the other owner and an Italian immigrant.
Iannaccone said they do things differently at Casanova’s, creating their own flour mix and even fermentation process.
The next step for the restaurant is creating a seasonal menu, according to Passeggio. There will be a completely different menu in fall and winter, to have some variety for customers.
When asked what would be on those menus, Passeggio grinned: “We cannot disclose that right now.”
Giuseppe Passeggio sitting in front of a mural of Giacomo Casanova, an Italian explorer and writer that inspired the restaurant's name.
Ianneccone rolls out and then cuts (below) the pasta dough to make the Caramelle dish.
The outside, and inside (below), of Casanova.
