Taking a peek at Bestia restaurant’s website can be very dangerous. You meant to just check the hours, but as photographs of dishes fly by, the effect is immediate. You’re hungry for the house-made salumi, chicken liver crostini, steamed mussels and clams or roasted marrow bone strewn with crispy breadcrumbs.
Ori Menashe and his wife the pastry chef Genevieve Gergis are knocking it out of the park with their rustic, yet modern Italian cuisine. Open almost two years now, Bestia is still one of the toughest reservations in town. Can’t snag a table? Go anyway and wait for a seat at the bar to open up, where you can indulge in pan-roasted chicken gizzards with roasted beets and aged Sardinian goat cheese or pizza smeared with house-made spicy ‘nduja sausage.