One of the few restaurants in the city serving Sicilian cuisine from the turn of last century has closed after 121 years in business in Carroll Gardens.
The owners of Ferdinando’s Focacceria announced on Sunday morning they would immediately cease operations at their Union Street café “due to unforeseen circumstances.” In an Instagram post, the restaurant’s management apologized for not offering their longtime patrons an opportunity to try their celebrated panelle sandwiches, arancini, or tripe stew one last time before shutting down for good.
“It was a decision that was both difficult and painful. But nonetheless necessary,” according to the caption. “Rendering a 121-year institution such as ours a fond memory cannot come without a mix of emotions. Fading into the Red Hook sunset quietly, without fanfare, was felt to be a proper and discreet finish.” Calls to the restaurant went to voicemail.
Tributes, understandably, have poured in on social media. CBS New York reporter Tony Aiello wrote on Twitter, “Thank you, Frank, for great food and warm memories. Brooklyn won’t quite be the same without you.” Bay Ridge Councilman Justin Brannan said his great-grandfather Pasquale often visited to eat after working on the Red Hook docks.
“He would order a vastedda” — spleen — “sandwich and bring home some capuzzelle” — baked sheep’s head — “for later,” he says. “For me, it was pane e panelle and an ice-cold bottle of Manhattan Special. Ferdinando’s was a very special place. We knew it. We just thought it would be there forever.”
Ferdinando’s opened in 1904 as a lunch counter serving fried chickpea and beef spleen with ricotta and caciocavallo cheese sandwiches to Italian American longshoremen at the Brooklyn waterfront. More than 2 million people settled in New York City from Italy during that decade and the Buffa family, which owned the restaurant, offered affordable family-style food reflective of their Sicilian heritage.
“Italian immigrants typically worked dangerous, labor-intensive jobs so it made a lot of sense that they served hearty, low-cost foods,” Ian MacAllen, author of Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American, says. “Organ meats are economical and calorie-efficient and chickpeas are an easy-to-grow high-calorie food, so if you can produce a sandwich that is cheap and filling, you’re directly serving a community of laborers.”
The Buffa family kept serving those working-class staples on the menu over multiple generations as they became harder to find in the city. They didn’t take shortcuts either, canning sardines used for their house specialty, pasta con le sarde, and — true to the shop’s name — oven-baking focaccia from scratch.
Celebrities flocked to the place too. Frank Sinatra once sent his chauffeur to buy rice balls. Mike Piazza, Christopher Meloni, and Steve Nash all visited. Martin Scorsese liked the restaurant and its tin ceiling so much that he filmed a scene for The Departed there even though the movie was set in Boston.
The closure of Ferdinando’s comes as Italian fine-dining establishments are enjoying a renaissance in the city thanks to Carbone, Don Angie, Lilia, and Misi. Even Cafe Spaghetti, which is directly across the street from Ferdinando’s, offers banquet-style seating in a heated, ivy-lined outdoor garden.
At the same time, neighborhood red sauce go-tos like Ferdinando’s have been disappearing across the country. “If it was fancier and had tablecloths and people ordering prix-fixe menus and doing the social-media work that a lot more popular modern eateries are doing, you probably wouldn’t have a reason to close,” MacAllen says. “It’s a lesson that we should embrace our Italian restaurants while they’re still open.”