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The team that’s been dubbed one of the “world’s best” bars several times over, Dante is opening a new spot in the West Village this summer.
Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson are making headway on opening the doors for Dante Aperitivo. “It wasn’t a planned expansion, but I’ve been in love with that corner for years, and the opportunity came up,” says Pride of their desire to open in the old Nat’s on Bank space at 51 Bank Street, at West Fourth Street.
The new all-day restaurant, with a full kitchen and raw bar, will serve items like seafood towers, half lobster with horseradish mayo, caviar tater tots, zucchini flowers stuffed with goat cheese, and pastas like spaghetti with clams. A chef has not yet been publicly named.
“It’s not necessarily about expanding the brand,” says Hudson, who designed the 40-seat space with white marble against navy walls with brass accents. “We want to create something you want to go to multiple times a week, just the ease of it.”
The Bank Street space is one of two locations they’re working on opening soon. Their largest project is a vast space outfitted with a wood-fired pizza oven and grill (10,000 square feet, according to Commercial Observer). It’s still on track to debut later this year in Nolita at 210 Elizabeth Street, near Prince Street.
Over at the new West Village ___location, Pride says they’re committing to the $15 cocktail — once the standard price of drinks in New York, now considered affordable in a landscape of $20-plus drinks — a move that other bartenders have been trending towards as customers have become all the more price-conscious. Drinks (leaning low ABV) will include summer-ready sips like a piña colada spritz and a Negroni with clarified watermelon.
“What we’ve always tried to do is simple cocktails that are easy to understand; they’re not overly molecular, or heavy-touch,” says Pride. The Americano, he says, is what they’re especially excited about spotlighting at Dante Aperitivo. Here, it’s featured as a strawberry-tomato version.
With as many awards as Dante has been heaped with, it would be easy to charge top-dollar in a neighborhood like this. “We just want to be reasonable,” says Pride. “We’ve seen cocktails get more culinary, but we want to also bring it back to something more everyday and egalitarian.”
This is the third spot for Dante in the West Village, where the duo lives and has planted a flag going back a decade. In 2015, the Australian couple transformed Caffe Dante (79-81 MacDougal Street) from what was at the time a 100-year-old institution facing closure. In 2020, they added Dante at 551 Hudson Street, before expanding outside of New York with an outpost in Beverly Hills back in 2023.
