“Rita and I tend to create places we are longing for,” says chef Jody Williams, who opened the West Village’s Via Carota three years ago with partner Rita Sodi as an homage to Sodi’s onetime home outside Florence. The couple’s next collaboration, Pisellino, celebrates the classic Italian bar, an icon of urbanity that serves so many crucial social and culinary functions with such panache it makes our best watering holes look inept.

In Italy, says Sodi, “it’s the first place in your neighborhood that will open, where you go at seven for your first coffee, to meet someone, talk, eat something sweet; for spuntino at lunch, very quick; for a drink before dinner and something to eat.”