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\Another piece of old-school New York dining history is preparing to take its final bow. Barbetta, the storied Italian restaurant on West 46th Street’s Restaurant Row, has announced that it will close on Friday, February 27, ending a nearly 120-year run in the Theater District.
The news comes just weeks after the death of longtime owner Laura Maioglio, who passed away in January at age 93, according to the New York Times. Maioglio took over the family business in 1962 and spent more than six decades turning Barbetta into one of the city’s most elegant Italian restaurants, well before white truffles and Piedmontese wines became staples on upscale menus.
Founded in 1906 by Maioglio’s father, Sebastiano Maioglio, Barbetta has long held a handful of bragging rights: it’s widely considered the oldest Italian restaurant in New York and one of the oldest still owned by the same founding family. Housed across four adjoining brownstones originally purchased from the Astor family, the restaurant became a theater district institution, attracting Broadway performers, opera stars, artists and politicians over the decades.
When Maioglio took control in the early ’60s, she radically shifted expectations for Italian dining in the city. Many Americans at the time associated Italian food with rustic red-sauce joints, whereas she introduced a more refined vision rooted in Piemonte cuisine. Seasonal white truffles, which were sourced through the restaurant’s own hunters and truffle hounds in Italy, became a signature, while the wine program helped introduce Barolo, Barbaresco and other Northern Italian labels to the American audience.
Barbetta’s lush garden patio, created in 1963, was among the first open-air dining spaces in Manhattan outside Central Park and eventually became one of the city’s most coveted summer reservations. Inside, antiques from Piemonte, a rare 17th-century harpsichord and grand chandeliers gave the restaurant the feeling of a European salon frozen in time.
In a farewell message posted to its website, the restaurant invited guests to visit during its final weeks, calling the closing “a remarkable journey” shaped by generations of diners and staff. To mark the occasion, many bottles from the restaurant’s extensive wine cellar are being offered at half their listed price.
For longtime theatergoers and romantics who have lingered under the garden’s magnolia and wisteria blooms, the closing feels like the end of an era. But for now, the doors remain open for one last round of agnolotti, truffles and memories before the curtain falls for good on Friday.