Gioia Italian Restaurant, Market, & Gelateria Opens In New Haven October 19th

Gioia, the new wood-fired Italian dining/cocktail/gelato/rooftop bar on Wooster Street from partners Tim Cabral (Ordinary) and Avi Szapiro (Roìa), is set to open in October, but we’ve already visited the spot to give you a first look.

You’ll see the space, get a glimpse of the enticing menu, and read our exclusive interview with the partners about the concept’s creation in their own words. Read on!

Avi describes how the two met one night in 2011 when he was eating at Caseus: the seed event which would lead to the creation of Gioia.

Tim Cabral of Ordinary Bar

“I thought nobody knew me or what I was doing, and Tim comes up to me and says ‘I heard you’re opening a restaurant, what’s the concept?’”

That turned out to be Roìa, which opened within two weeks of Tim’s Ordinary (“We literally shared a back door between the restaurants, we’d steal stuff from each other all the time.”), and the two became great friends, to the point they started brainstorming ideas just so they could work together. 

“When COVID happened we had more time, so we started putting those ideas into a real plan. We saw the space (the former Tony&Lucille’s), and I loved it immediately, but Tim took some convincing.”

“We knew we wanted to get out of the city, downtown, and I saw this as a neighborhood without a market, so that idea took hold.”

Tim, true to form, saw another kind of vacancy.

“I saw it as a neighborhood without a bar. There are some great little ones, but mostly for people who come to Wooster Street, eat, and leave. We wanted a local space where the neighbors could come and gather.”

You can see all their ideas come together in one place at Gioia. Those bars – at length within Gioia’s main dining area, and another to come on two rooftop-spanning levels with its own separate menu – are guaranteed to be huge draws. 

The in-house market, selling their pasta, salumi, wine, cheese, produce, and coffee will be open to the public all day – even selling the restaurant’s brilliantly painted, Italian-made plateware from FIMA Deruta Ceramico Tradizionale. In the evenings, after market hours, the space will be available as a private dining room for parties.

We at CTBites are almost unreasonably excited to tell you about the in-house gelateria, because we’ve had some, and it is incredible.

A rotating selection of gelatos will be available, and we tried test batches of their chocolate, pistachio, an eye-rolling blood orange, and a vanilla/coconut milk/white chocolate swirl, with toasted hazelnuts and olive oil. 

Gelato will be available both in-house, and as a walk up and walk around treat from their sidewalk window around the corner on Brown Street. 

The menu at Gioia was still a work in progress during our visit, and I asked Szapiro about what sets Gioia apart as an Italian restaurant on Wooster Street. He had one word.

“Fire.”

“When I opened Roìa, I wanted to cook with fire, but because of the building and set up, I couldn’t. There’s such an honesty to it, and a flavor that’s just spectacular.”

The wood fired kitchen at Gioia is a bit of masterpiece, with several burners, grills, and parilla-style adjustable height grates. I spied potatoes, pineapples, and a tomahawk steak hanging above.

“With the steak you get this infusion,” Avi said of the setup. “It’s slowly cooked rare above to absorb all the flavor, then we give it a quick sear.”

The steak was served sliced, off the bone, and very rare, with a light crust and a mouth watering dusting of fennel pollen. It’s an excellent indication of how different the menu is at Gioia, the restaurant taking its own direction amongst the rich history and esteemed reputation of its neighbors.

They prepared a simple dish: roast chicken and potatoes, a “family meal” for the few of us in the not-yet-finished space, which exceeded all expectations. The crispy-skinned golden spuds had had us dragging each other to the table.

“Have you tried the potatoes? You have to try the potatoes.”

“There’s a riff with what Tim and Michela do behind the bar with what we’re doing in the kitchen,” said Szapiro. “The pineapples, the peaches, they’ll appear everywhere.”

Decades of experience in the New Haven bar and cocktail scene will be immediately apparent when reviewing your options from Tim and beverage director Michela Zurstadt, along with a LOT of amaro. The intensely herbed, brandy based liqueur is a bartender (and Italian) favorite, and is readily recognizable to anyone who’s ever had coffee with Fernet, or Nonino in a Paper Plane. 

Michaela’s version of a Paper Plane – the Red Eye – which switches mezcal for bourbon in the base, and includes amaro and Red Eye bitters, was an early star of the show. It’s exciting to think about the future of this program.

The wood-fired menu includes dishes of Italian sausage, whole local mushrooms, braised ossobuco, and more. Pizzas (16” “Wooster Squares,” margherita, clam, n’duja...) play the hits, Gioia style, and there is a specific focus on their pasta program. We sampled an outstanding  gnocchi cacio e pepe.

“There’s something about fresh pasta that has this nourishing component to it, but there’s something else it achieves, almost nostalgia. It feels like home,” said Szapiro. 

“I hope that’s something we can give people here. It’s the same with wood fire cooking, it’s delicious, it’s primal, it adds something you can’t get otherwise.”

“Food and beverage both,” said Cabral. “We wanted the place to be fun, an environment where we’d like to be. To have programs that people can explore and ask questions about, but still be familiar.” 

He returned to the point several times. 

“We want to be ego-free about what we do.”

“Wooster Street” isn’t just an address. It is a phrase which evokes sense-memory in locals, and is the prime mover which made New Haven pizza a nationally accepted style. Many of this writer’s early memories of food involve Consiglio’s, just across the street from Gioia. 

What’s it like to open an Italian restaurant here?

Cabral, a long time New Haven guy whose roots run deep as anyone’s in the community, said the two had been thinking deeply on it.

“We have so much respect for Wooster Square, what it means for New Haven, and for us to be here, we wanted to compliment the area,” he began.

“One of the things Avi and I have, I hope, done over the years is pick places that have history, and honored it. I grew up going to Richter’s (the comfortable, beery bar which had residence within the venerable Taft Hotel bar’s space from the ‘80s-’00s, now lovingly restored as Ordinary), and I heard a frozen yogurt place was going to buy it, tear everything out. I couldn’t have that. And Roìa has had so many lives, we want to keep the stories of these places going.”

A vibrant new life, with honor and respect to what came before. That’s Gioia.

Gioia (Joy-Ah), open October 19, 2023

150 Wooster Street, New Haven 

475 250 3451; gioianewhaven.com

IG: @gioianhv

Restaurant, market, and gelateria open Tuesday – Sunday.