New York has already said goodbye to several deeply rooted neighborhood restaurants this fall, and another familiar dining room is preparing to go dark. Mezzaluna, the Upper East Side trattoria that opened in 1984, will close today November 1 after 42 years.
Founder Aldo Bozzi built the Third Avenue restaurant around the kind of Italian experience New Yorkers once traveled overseas to find. Seasonal produce and high-quality Italian ingredients went into straightforward but polished pastas, pizzas and appetizers, while the room offered something equally important: a warm, unpretentious place where regulars could return for decades.
A trattoria that became part of the neighborhood
Mezzaluna arrived when Manhattan’s Italian dining scene was still divided between old-school red-sauce restaurants and more formal European rooms. Its mix of salads, carpaccio, wood-fired pizza and contemporary regional pasta helped introduce a lighter, stylish trattoria model without turning dinner into a special-occasion production. The name—Italian for both a half-moon and a curved chopping knife—matched a restaurant that felt unmistakably imported yet easy to make part of a New York routine…