Strega Opens In New Haven With Tasting Menu & Outstanding Wine List

“Yale asked me if I was interested in the space, and I took it as a challenge. A small space, few tables, no pizza – I was able to focus on fine dining.” I’m in New Haven, talking with chef Danilo Mongillo about Strega, his second restaurant of the same name, but with a very different concept. 

“You have excellent food here – French, Spanish, American – and I took bringing this level of Italian to downtown, not in competition, but just to bring more good food here. That was the challenge.”

The first time I ate at Strega was the location in Milford (both restaurants are just off the corners of their respective city greens) and I’d returned many times for his creations which were just a little different – the way a sentence is altered when the pen is in a different hand – and made with exceptional ingredients. I ask if the new Strega is based on anything regionally Italian, and he shakes the question off, moving in another direction.

“Fine dining is about the technique. It’s about the balance of the flavors – something sweet, something sour – and the balance with the wine. The balance of the bite.”

Mongillo grew up in Puglianello, north of Naples in a family with a butcher shop and olive groves. He joined the Italian army and was tasked – in extremely Italian fashion – with cultural preservation. He recounts stories as varied as saving a species of salamander which only lived in ancient cisterns in Cinque Terra, unused since the arrival of water pipes, and investigating food fraud rings selling counterfeit cheese, prosciutto, and wine. His path to being a chef began at home, was informed by his service, and would later land him in Connecticut. His two younger brothers learned from a chef and culinary professor who opened a restaurant back in Italy.

“We couldn’t believe it! We didn’t have one restaurant in town, everyone cooked at home, and he comes here and opens a fine dining restaurant. It was crazy,” Mongillo remembers.

His two brothers, Emanuele and Giacomo, are now chefs in Moscow and Ibiza, and the chef who taught them, Raffaele d’Addio, has joined Danilo in New Haven. The global circle seems complete. 

The Food

Strega New Haven had just launched their fall 2024 menu when I get there on a summery night in late October and decided to try the lot of it with a five-course price fixe dinner with wine pairings. We sit down to a quick service of bread from nearby Atticus Bakery and Terra Stegate olive oil – verdant in flavor and color alike - from the Mongillo family groves in Italy. 

The first course is Vellututa di Porro, a velouté of stewed leeks mashed with olive oil and a touch of cream. Whorls of oil – deep, dark brown, and emerald green – are spun over this palette, under sliced of fried garlic and a scattering of chervil. The soup clings to the spoon and bursts with flavor. The green is parsley oil, fresh as a bitten sprig, and the darker rings are made from soffritto – onion, carrots, and celery – which are roasted until almost burned, then crushed with olive oil and filtered. It lends an intense, smokey vegetable presence, with a following slight citrusy hit from the crunchy chervil.

This is served with Carpene-Malvolti prosecco, a certified DOCG wine made with original prosecco grapes (Glera), in the hometown of the beverage, Conegliano Valdobbiadene, and it is outrageously good.

“I was a soldier there for three years, I drank a lot of good prosecco.” says Danilo, laughing. “It’s like when you talk about good champagne, this is it from Italy.”

The fall/winter character of the menu at Strega is immediately apparent when the next dish arrives. It begins as an acorn squash soup, topped with roasted pumpkin seeds. Danilo notes you will usually see risotto or gnocchi in this dish, but he uses barley to add crunch. The texture does make a difference, arriving in three ways, with the soft roundness of the soup, toothsome barley, and crackly seeds, but what wowed us was a white spiral of provolone del Monaco fondue. The cheese is produced by a specific, ancient species of cow, protected by the Italian government, and aged in volcanic caves in Campania. Smooth and funky sharp, it cut through the sweet base, and its nutty flavor was beautifully complimentary to the barley and pumpkin seeds.

The soup was served with Mongillo family Terra Stregate fallengina white. He says this wine can be enjoyed fresh, but he has aged the bottles he serves longer on purpose to lessen its inherent floral characteristics, and bring out its minerality. Sweet, creamy, sharp, earthy – its all here.

The third dish, according to Danilo, is almost a requirement.

“This is my best seller, it doesn’t matter what season it is. In Campania where I come from, it doesn’t matter if it’s 80º outside, we’re having ragu. What matters is the meat: we do ox tail, pork ribs, and smoked beef cheek.”

The flavors are concentrated with braising, the meat almost dissolving, and served over hearty rigatoni and a smoked provolone from same cow’s milk as the Monaco. The staple is served alongside what I believe was the most exciting wine of the evening, Santa Tresa Cerasuolo di Vittoria, a blend of Frappato and Nero d’Avola, and Sicily’s only DOCG wine.

The Nero d’Avola is grown in one specific area which loses 40% of the crop every year to a tiny spider which only lives in these fields. As such it’s a protected species and this loss is built in by the people who both make and lose money protecting their grapes and the spider. It’s fruity and mineral, with plum and cherry on the tongue, and maybe a little fresh tobacco.

“It’s so romantic,” Danilo allows. “It’s also all volcanic soil, so pairing with the slight sweetness of the pasta and cheese, with the smoke of the ragu, the earthiness of the wine is just perfect.” The wine’s label spirals outward from a red dot marking Vittoria, and marks each succeeding culture to inhabit the area, like an anthropological layer cake.

The space at Strega, just at the corner of the New Haven green, is intimate, and unmistakably Italian. Diners sit close together in a room sharp with black, white, and chrome. A large plaster of Paris rose is printed on the ceiling, and your food arrives on plates and bowls which are sculptures of their own. It is a dramatic space for passionate food. Danilo is quick to credit these touches as the work of his wife, Rosanna, who guards them like a secret family recipe. 

“She won’t even tell me where she got them, because she knows I’ll tell everybody,” he laughs. “We choose the plates like a painter chooses his surface, his paints.”

The final course before dessert is Blade steak, with thick line of fat running top to bottom, braised with vegetables and topped with gravy, and served alongside a slab of King Trumpet mushroom, which gets its own gravy. The steak is rests on a splayed flower of roasted pickled red onion.

The rich, heavy steak – falling apart at the touch of a fork –  is instead cut and brightened by the sweet acidity of the onion.

The sauce on the mushroom is done gram by gram Danilo says, “maybe a little more mirin, maybe a little less soy,” and has a slight heat blended into the tangy umami. 

The steak is paired with Arente Valpolicella Superiore.

“We needs a little bit earthy again, because you get this salty umami with the meat and mushroom,” the chef explains. “You need a soft elegance with the wine, nothing to add heavy onto heavy.”

We end the evening with a sort of lemon meringue.

“We make the crust something like the biscuits we eat at breakfast in Italy: slightly chocolate, like an Oreo with more flour, so we add lemon custard, meringue, we play around with a classic.”

This is served in a bowl, the meringue torched and caramelized, then studded with berries and mint. The wine was once again as much a star as the dish, causing both a stir and conversation.

Velenosi Visciole is a dessert wine, yes, sweet and cheek-flushing hot at over 14%. It is made from the ancient Lacrima de Moro varietal, cut 30% with juice from the visicole, a species of incredibly sour wild cherries. 

“They are like the apple tree of god,” Danilo says of the visciole. “You can see it, but you can’t eat it.” The sweet and sour of the lemon and berries in the dish find harmony with the wine. My companion asked for seconds.

The five-course price fixe dinner at Strega New Haven is $100 per person, with an additional – and reasonable - $50 for wine pairings.

After dinner service, the chef becomes philosophical.

“America is full of places to eat, not everyone cooks at home,” he begins. “But if you want to go to a show, or go to MoMA, it’s because you want to see the art. It’s healthy, in a cultural way. We are immigrants, but not like our grandparents, and what they brought. I am not saying I am the best at this, but this is us, this is my art.”

Strega

1006 Chapel St., New Haven

Stregarestaurants.com

https://italianfoodnewhaven.com/