Some say you can never go home again. The weight of this statement may resonate more for the immigrants who chose to leave, refugees who were forced to and those whose communities have been ravaged by tempests or wars. Brooklyn restaurateurs Renato Poliafito and Demetri Makoulis are both first-generation Americans who have inherited a sense of their families’ birthplaces through their mothers’ cooking and languages spoken around the table in their separate Brooklyn kitchens. And since the first week of October, they, along with Makoulis’ wife, Sarah Schneider, have poured the past into their present with two restaurants dedicated to the very act of going home again.
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Pasta Night and Gus & Marty’s are two of Brooklyn’s newest dinner spots; they opened, respectively, on October 1st and 4th. In Prospect Heights, Pasta Night is an Italian-American eatery or, as Poliafito calls it, “Italian with an American accent.” Gus & Marty’s, from Egg Shop’s husband-and-wife team, Makoulis and Schneider, is Greek—eye-rollingly delicious, authentic Greek with a dash of designer Williamsburg. And to the bones of its creamy stuccoed interior, it is a love letter to the islands from which Makoulis’ family emigrated.
When I spoke to the owners of Pasta Night and Gus & Marty’s, they knew little to nothing of the other, despite their similarities. Before debuting their newest projects, both restaurateurs were experts in breakfast fare. Makoulis and Schneider debuted their eggs-only dining concept, Egg Shop, in SoHo and Williamsburg in 2014 and 2017, while Poliafito opened his café, Ciao Gloria, in 2019. They both pivoted to dinner-only concepts, moved by individual journeys that brought them closer to their origin stories. And after pushing launch dates from week to week, the restaurants finally emerged, simultaneously, in two Brooklyn neighborhoods in early October.
For Makoulis and Schneider, creating Gus and Marty’s, which they named after their fathers, was about offering a new chapter for the Greek-American experience in New York. They wanted to pay homage to tradition, family and community with incredible food and a redefined atmosphere.
“Growing up, we’d go to Astoria and we had our mainstays—the Greek diners I’d go to with my dad…you’d see the same thing: white and blue, a little bit of........