In a city whose kitchens remain curiously stubborn in their testosterone, Café Zaffri arrives like a scented breeze through a heavy velvet curtain: all elegance, zero pretense, unmistakably female. Tucked into a corner of The Twenty Two New York — the London export turned social club-hotel — it’s a dining room that feels like the afterglow of a whispered secret. Curved banquettes. Mood lighting. A menu you’ll want to eat twice. And at the center of it all: four women — Jennifer and Nicole Vitagliano, chef Mary Attea, and pastry sorceress Camari Mick — who are rewriting not only the narrative of Middle Eastern fine dining in New York, but the rules of hospitality altogether.
The Vitagliano sisters — whose downtown darling, Raf’s, made downtown feel downtown again — did not so much assemble a team as summon one. “It is definitely not a coincidence,” Nicole says of the female-majority force behind Café Zaffri. “We set out to find our ‘forever team.’” Which, in restaurant terms, is something like finding your forever therapist: rare, tender, and likely overdue.
At the stove: Mary Attea, the executive chef of the Michelin-starred The Musket Room, where her style is considered restrained — a sort of poetic minimalism in duck fat and dashi. Here, at Zaffri, she steps into something both bolder and more personal. “The Musket Room helped me find my voice,” she says, “but here, I get to draw from my own memories.” Those memories — fragrant with sumac, pine nuts, za’atar, family tables in the suburbs of Lebanon — now inform a menu that folds the heart of the Levant into the haute rhythms of Manhattan dining.
There’s lamb wellington swaddled in grape leaves. Charred octopus dusted in harissa. And yes, there is hummus — but not the kind you impulse-buy at Whole Foods. “We don’t need to re-create the past,” Attea says. “We just need to evoke it.” Think less culinary sepia, more 4K cinema with a home-cooked soul.
Café Zaffri’s pastry counter, meanwhile, is where things get quietly revolutionary. “Middle Eastern reveries in choux,” one critic wrote of Camari Mick’s desserts, and for once, it wasn’t hyperbole. Her rosewater-slicked creations don’t shout; they whisper. “I realised restraint wasn’t about holding back,” she says. “It was about intention.” There’s a quiet luxury to her work — an understanding that nostalgia doesn’t have to mean cloying. That reverence can be reimagined.
Of course, nostalgia is the currency of the moment. From TikToks romanticising suburban childhoods to $28 chicken tenders at downtown brasseries, memory sells. But what Zaffri does is different: it filters cultural memory through a prism of diaspora identity, gender, and joy. It is the kind of restaurant where the hummus is plated with conviction and the staff speaks softly but firmly. It feels like a dinner party thrown by your chicest friend’s Lebanese grandmother — if she also happened to read Cabana, host salons, and be on a first-name basis with every fishmonger at Union Square Greenmarket.
The Twenty Two is no shrinking violet of a hotel — it’s a splashy, scented arrival with velvet rope energy — and yet Zaffri, the first space to open inside, is its spiritual heartbeat. “She’s gutsy, defiant, expressive,” Nicole says of the space, as though describing an old friend. Or herself. Or, perhaps, the city they’re feeding.
Still, there’s something quieter happening in the kitchen. “A cultural shift,” Attea says. “We’re empowering voices that have long gone unheard. Nurturing both the people and the food.” Translation: no more screaming chefs, no more broken backs in pursuit of brittle stars. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being plated, course by course.
And what does it feel like — emotionally, viscerally, spiritually — when you take that first bite?
Like you made the right choice. Because you did.
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