Review: Stellina in Oyster Bay

Fabrizio Facchini presides over a Nassau County culinary empire — three restaurants, two cafes and a wine bar — but Stellina Ristorante was his first beachhead. In 2022, the chef and his partners, Tom and Adriana Milana, took over Osteria Leana and buffed that hidden gem (the entrance faces a municipal parking lot) until it gleamed.

And it's a jewel box too — the tiny room, chicly decorated in shades of ivory and Adriatic blue, has 10 tables, an open kitchen and a wood-burning pizza oven. The menu, on the other hand, is enormous and sprawls all over Italy and beyond.

A native Italian with roots in Calabria and Umbria, Facchini strives for real Italian flavors but is not hemmed in by one region. "When I do pasta Amatriciana, it’s with imported bucatini and guanciale [cured pig jowl] the way it’s done in Rome," he said. "Our cannoli are stuffed with sheep ricotta like in Palermo."

But many of Facchini’s best dishes evince a fanciful creativity. He transforms pinzimonio, the rustic Italian crudité platter, into a refined salad of shaved raw vegetables; paccheri (big, floppy rigatoni) luxuriate in saffron sauce with Sicilian pistachio pesto; the generous lasagna combines the meat ragù and béchamel of the classic Bolognese rendition, but also the gooey mozzarella that’s more common here; veal Parmesan involves a 16-ounce pounded chop that’s breaded, broiled and topped with tomato sauce and burrata; the Stellina burger, an Italian-American mashup if ever there were one: eight ounces of Wagyu beef with Taleggio cheese, mesclun, grilled onions, lemon-herb pink sauce on a toasted brioche and served with truffle fries. Pizzas, all excellent, can be simple (topped with paper-thin slices of spicy Calabrian sausage) or extravagant (buffalo ricotta, arugula, truffle honey and black truffles).

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