Brooklyn’s best new restaurant just opened in Bed-Stuy 

By Scott Lynch

Gary Fishkop didn’t really have a plan when he signed the lease for this corner spot on Halsey Street and Throop Avenue in January of 2023. All he knew was: 1) he loved his adopted neighborhood of Bed-Stuy (he lives up the block); 2) he thought the space, a former bodega, had a ton of potential; and 3) as a South Brooklyn kid who grew up in Sheepshead Bay, he’s wanted to open an Italian restaurant his entire life.

Normally you can pick two, but you can’t have three. But he seems to have pulled it all off, especially after enlisting chef Paul Cacici as his partner and co-owner. Cacici, who grew up in Boston’s North End and currently lives in Glendale, Queens, also has deep Italian-American roots — his Decades Pizza is a well-regarded go-to in Ridgewood. After a long year of labor and love, Fishkop and Cacici give us Daphne’s, which opened last Saturday. It is an outstanding new restaurant, with big winners all over the menu and a very chill welcoming vibe.

Beef tartare with lasagna chips, $21 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

A big assist here comes from the chef de cuisine Jamie Tao — born in Flushing, raised in Bensonhurst — who before hitting the kitchen at Daphne’s spent time at Roberta’s, Contra and Wildair. Cacici and Tao’s opening menu at Daphne’s is compact, with 14 dishes total, but is filled with so many fresh, exciting twists that it feels much more expansive. The excellent beef tartare, for example, a dish that seems to get trotted out at every Brooklyn restaurant these days, is here topped with a potent shoyu cured egg yolk and arrives buried in a pillow fort of seasoned crispy pasta strips they’re calling “lasagna chips.” It’s delicious and fun.

Salsify and fiddleheads in green vodka sauce, $18 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

Even dishes you don’t see every day are given inspiring twists. The salsify and fiddleheads starter drenches the tender root vegetables and fledging ferns in an amazing green vodka sauce that I would happily eat plain by the spoonful if given the chance. There are also baked scallops done up with Italian-flag looking stripes of red, white and green, an artichoke crudité, and a grilled calamari salad with Castelvetrano olives, celery and a bright and fiery yuzu kosho.

Gemelli with beef cheek ragu, $26 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

Two pastas are currently available at Daphne’s; my advice is to get them both. The craggy reginetti is well suited to scoop up all those slivers of razor clam (bread crumbs and sharp budding chives further add to the appeal here), and the gemelli holds up well under the onslaught of a superb beef cheek ragu.

Reginetti with razor clams, $26 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

At this point you don’t really need an entree, but green pea fans will not want to miss the swordfish Milanese, in which the breaded seafood is accompanied by a lovely pea-leaf salad and one of the most purely pea-flavored pile of, well, peas, I’ve ever had. The two other secondi options are a roasted half-chicken with ramps on a pile of fries, and grilled pork collar with soupy beans.

Swordfish Milanese with spring peas, $28 (Photo by Scott Lynch)

“We’re just trying to put stuff on the menu that we like to eat,” says chef Cacici. “We’re playing around with some dishes that we grew up with, putting our spin on them, doing fun things. We want it to be like you can come here two or three times a week and have a totally different type of meal each night.”

The room is somewhat quirkily shaped with odd curves and, unusual for a corner location, the only windows are up front, in this case facing Halsey. Those windows are draped rather elegantly in ball-chain curtains, which designers Will Rose and Jeremy Anderegg said were meant to evoke Philip Johnson’s famous ballet theater facade Lincoln Center. Johnson used a similar technique for his even-more-famous design of the Four Seasons restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. It makes for a somewhat incongruous sight in this part of Brooklyn, but that’s also why it kind of works.

“I think the neighborhood is super excited for this,” says Fishkop. “The last two days have been slammed to the gills with people from the community showing up. Everyone who works here lives right nearby, so it’s very much much a neighborhood restaurant.”

Daphne’s is located at 299 Halsey Street, at the corner of Throop Avenue, and is currently open on Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday from 5:30 to 10 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday from 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.