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Restaurant Review: I CavalliniLigaya Mishan, one of The New York Times’s chief restaurant critics, visits I Cavallini, an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn that draws a line of reverent diners every night.
This week, I review I Cavallini, a sequel to the beloved Four Horsemen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Where the Four Horsemen’s menu wanders, beholden only to seasonality and Mr. Curtola’s curiosity, at I Cavallini there’s a narrower brief. The kitchen is pledged to Italy. For a chef whose instinct is to resist the familiar, maybe this is a little constricting. The space is gorgeous, but it feels a little bit like a stage set, a fantasy of a Brooklyn restaurant. And some of the dishes I ate also felt works in progress. But Mr. Curtola is doing interesting things. There’s a dish of beef tendons in Italian called nervetti, which is as gentle an introduction to this part of animal musculature as you would wish. The menu lists pastas as primi and meats as secondi, in the Italian way. You can make a meal just out of the pastas. They’re quite generous, and really a highlight of the menu, especially the farafalonni — big floppy bowties glossed with Calabrian chili butter matching these chewy strips of smoked pancetta. But the bluefin tuna belly on the night I had it was all fat. So there are a few stumbles, but I feel like the kitchen earns a certain grace because it’s determined to push beyond the obvious. What’s lovely here is that it never feels like any of the dishes are just checking off a box. You can read my full review at nytimes.com.
Ligaya Mishan, one of The New York Times’s chief restaurant critics, visits I Cavallini, an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn that draws a line of reverent diners every night.
By Nyt Food
October 18, 2025