IT’S ‘CIAO’ TIME AT BELOVED DA SILVANO
Farewell to Italian pioneer and celeb haven
DA Silvano, the legendary Italian trattoria and boldface hangout in Greenwich Village, went defunto on Wednesday after 41 inspiring, tumultuous and often scandalous years.
Long live Da Silvano! Or, lunga vita, in owner Silvano Marchetto’s native Italian that often stepped on his unfathomable English.
Marchetto dropped the curtain on his long-running pasta-and-preening scene without warning. The bright yellow awning at 260 Sixth Ave. had proclaimed a sunny, celebrity-strewn scene inside since the Gerald Ford administration. Its loss leaves the city a less interesting place even for those who never set foot there.
Da Silvano recently settled a few lawsuits by staff who claimed they’d been cheated out of tips — an issue that’s vexed many restaurateurs. But Marchetto blamed the closing mainly on rent that gradually rose from $500 a month in 1975 to $41,000 a month today, as well as labor hikes due to kick in with higher minimum-wage laws.
“I just can’t do anymore,” he told The Post Wednesday morning.
BUT before today’s lethal economics caught up with it, Da Silvano enjoyed a rare, double-barreled reputation — as a pioneer in northern Italian cuisine when most 1970s Italian restaurants still served Americanized “red sauce,” and as a clubhouse for the likes of Madonna, Sean Penn, Hilary Swank, Uma Thurman and Jack Nicholson, fashion-media powerhouses Barry Diller and Anna Wintour and just about everyone from the uptown and downtown art worlds.
The great Mario Batali praised Marchetto on Tuesday as “one of the first guys to bring real Italian food to New York. Not spaghetti and meatballs, but the real Tuscan food he knew and loved. He always used good ingredients in season, like puntarella,” the prized chicory variety from Lazio, the area around Rome.
“I used to go for brunch every Sun- day with my family in warm weather, sit outside and watch the parade go by — it was some of the best peoplewatching in town,” Batali said.
For sure: While celebs vied for prime round indoor tables near the windows, the sidewalk patio welcomed ordinary tourists who found themselves at the next table from Yoko Ono and her son, Sean Lennon.
Da Silvano’s 40th anniversary party in May 2015 drew a typically eclectic Manhattan mix of Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, Monica Lewinsky, Amy Fine Collins and Marla Maples — and ubiquitous celeb lensman Patrick McMullan, who said Da Silvano was “the first place I had risotto.”
But its passing marks the end of another treasured phenomenon: a restaurant that’s entirely a function of its owner’s personality and whims.
As at Elaine’s under Elaine Kaufman and at The Four Seasons dominated by Julian Niccolini, glamorous regulars’ devotion to ringmaster Marchetto made the place immune to changes in taste or reputation.
MARCHETTO is one of those larger-than-life New Yorkers who was bornn colorful. In the early 1970s, he moveded from Florence to New York and brought his frac-fractured brand of Englishish with him.
“He needed a subtitletitle machine all his life,” Batali joked.d.
In a YouTube videodeo a few years ago, Marchetto claimedaimed to have driven his dad’s armyy tank at age 11. Author William Stadiem described him in his 2007 book, “Ev-Everybody Eats There:re: Inside the World’sd’s Legendary Restau-urants,” as “perpetu-ually 20 althoughh turning 60,” with “a bit of a Portofinoo beach stud about him” as well as “some Palm Beach preppy.”
Although Marchettotto was “practiced at coddlingoddling celebrities and manufactur-ufacturing his own luster,”er,” as Stadiem wrote, he was serious about Italian food. He regarded “Hoboken” cuisine of the kind Frank Sinatra loved as an insult to Italian culture.
At Da Silvano, customers found an approximation of the Tuscan cuisine Marchetto loved.
But while his “Tuscan” menu was soon bettered elsewhere, Da Silvano’s boldface-magnet energy thrived and endured. All of Manhattan’s buzzy worlds passed through.
It was less hostile to first-timers than other celeb magnets, although they’d likely be seated not in the restaurant’s original poster-strewn dining room, but in annexes Marchetto added on either side.
Page Six and lesser gossip columns will twinkle a bit less brightly without Da Silvano’s inexhaustible anecdotes. The place was full of appalling, funny and inexplicable goings-on.
MARCHETTO opened Da Silvano in May 1975. It was a few blocks north of the then-electric Soho art scene, and artists and clients of galleries such as Ileana Sonnabend and Leo Castelli strolled in. Marchetto years later recalled, “After we opened, one day LeLeo Castelli came in. NexNext weekend we were ppacked.” In 191987, ArtNews reportedported, Castelli
hosted a dinner for the first Art Against AIDS fund-raiser hosted by Elizabeth Taylor where Taylor, “clad in silk and diamonds,” handed Castelli a check for $400,000.
A zany, boozy spirit infused the place from the get-go. In his 2008 memoir, “Dirty Dishes,” Marchetto’s former manager and later rival Pino Luongo recalled Silvano as “often drinking before lunchtime.”
The spirit was contagious. According to Luongo, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowland “got so drunk that Cassavetes began challenging Gena that she couldn’t stand up.” She removed her shoes, hopped on the table and performed “an improvised flamenco dance” for star-struck customers.
In 2007, New York Times critic Frank Bruni chopped Da Silvano’s two-star rating down to one star and likened its chicken liver crostini to “pet food.” But strange occurrences continued to amuse and appall the public by turns.
In May 2004, a bleeding man staggered into Da Silvano screaming, “I got stabbed!” “He was holding his stomach,” Marchetto said later. “He lifted his shirt and there was a hole.”
That fellow survived, but the reputation of Britain’s Princess Michael of Kent (“Princess Pushy”) struggled to recover from an incident the same month when she allegedly told a table of black diners who were too loud for her taste, “Go back to the colonies.”
MARCHETTO battled for years with Giovanni Tognozzi, his onetime partner in cheaper Bar Pitti that Marchetto launched next door. Marchetto eventually sold his Pitti share, but the grudge never died.
In August 2008, Tognozzi chased Da Silvano maitre d’ Alessandro Bandini down the sidewalk, “screaming wildly in Italian” and threatening “to have your head shaved,” Page Six wrote. Bandini had stopped into Bar Pitti to greet a friend. “He’s been thrown out before, but he came back,” Tognozzi explained.
Another night, art dealer Tony Shafrazi flipped out on actor Owen Wilson and art collector Peter Brant in front of diners. “Shafrazi was cursing them both out,” Page Six reported. Wilson responded, “Go bleep yourself ” as he calmly downed a dandelion and heirloom-tomato salad. Wilson and Brant apparently hadn’t returned phone calls by Shafrazi, who later called it a “misunderstanding.”
One month later, the manager of a garage where Marchetto parked his Ferrari settled a suit for $2.5 million against Marchetto, whom he’d accused of grabbing his testicles two years earlier. Silvano allegedly turned around while waiting for his car and “rubbed plaintiff Cruz’s penis with his hand,” the suit claimed. Marchetto called the suit an “extortion” attempt.
In another eerie episode, a man in an American-flag jacket popped out of a sidewalk grate in October 2014 and tossed a smoke bomb into rival Bar Pitti next door. The scary attack chased actress Rose McGowan and others into the street.
“I saw him come out, it was like Ninja Turtles,” a witness related. Marchetto denied any involvement. The perp, who fled into a nearby subway, has never been caught.
Now the Da Silvano party’s over. Forty-one years of Marchetto’s merry antics, high and low life, laughter and romance, al dente pasta and fine Barolo and Brunello — all gone overnight. And the city already seems like it’s a little less fun.