On a recent morning, Catharine Dahm ducked into Raf’s, the French-Italian bakery and restaurant on a pocket-size block of Elizabeth Street in downtown Manhattan. It was her first time there, but before the check had even arrived, she was resolved to return.
“This is going to be my regular spot while I’m here,” said Ms. Dahm, a 32-year-old fashion designer, who was in town from Paris and staying nearby. The restaurant’s facade, with breads displayed in the front window, reminded her of the Old World-style cafes back home, Ms. Dahm said. At the time, she didn’t realize she would be inducting herself into a contingent of regulars who hail from the worlds of fashion, design and media.
Unlike its buzzy NoHo neighbors Jean’s and the private members club Zero Bond, where celebrity sightings make frequent fodder for social media and Page Six readers, or the nearby Milanese import Sant Ambroeus, known to locals for its “see and be seen” vibe, Raf’s maintains a substantially lower profile. But since inheriting the space that was the longtime home to Parisi Bakery, a supplier to many of the city’s top eateries, the spot has discreetly established itself as a stylish yet unpretentious refuge for fashion world fixtures to congregate on and off duty.
Despite its close orbit of scene-y and in-demand restaurants — there’s also Estela, which once hosted President Barack Obama; Emilio’s Ballato, where tourists line up for tables nightly; and the go-big-or-go-home-hungry bravado of Torrisi — Raf’s has managed to thrive as a clubroom for the fashion crowd while mostly flying under the radar of social media.
Last week, the restaurant hosted a dinner party to celebrate the release of i-D magazine’s inaugural issue under new ownership. Among the 35 guests joining the editor in chief, Thom Bettridge, and Karlie Kloss, whose media company has acquired the magazine, were the model Devyn Garcia, the stylist Stella Greenspan and the Luar fashion designer Raul Lopez.
“I grew up in New York,” said Mr. Bettridge, a regular since the restaurant’s opening days. “It reminds me of the feeling of some of those ’90s-era restaurants where there’s this kind of buzzy vibe, but it also feels like home — like Odeon or Pastis.”
The luxury e-commerce retailer Net-a-Porter, Cultured magazine and the fashion label Proenza Schouler have also hosted dinner parties and events at Raf’s, where waiters nimbly zigzag among the dining room’s snug 11 tables. On weekdays, it has become the favored canteen for magazine tastemakers, including the Interview editor in chief Mel Ottenberg, and designers and fashion insiders with offices in nearby SoHo.
“At one point, I felt like I was there for a lunch or breakfast meeting two or three times a week,” said Isabella Isbiroglu, a director of global communications at the fashion label Khaite.
The wood-fired ovens, an elemental feature of the restaurant long predating Parisi Bakery, have been around since 1935, when a young immigrant from Sicily named Angelina Bivona opened Angie’s Italian & French Bakery Cafe. Angie’s was never really a French bakery, though.
Raf’s owners, the twin sisters Nicole and Jennifer Vitagliano, explain that the curious descriptor was a way of sidestepping the anti-Italian immigrant sentiment of that time. “She called it French-Italian to make it sound fancier,” Nicole Vitagliano said. The sisters, native New Yorkers who grew up in an Italian American household, had found a property tax photograph revealing the bakery’s storefront while researching the building’s history.
“That photo ended up informing our entire concept,” Nicole Vitagliano said. “Calling it French-Italian when there was nothing French about it spoke to us.” Today Raf’s front window signage has the same phrasing, while the interiors bear a European cafe-society aesthetic. It’s a little Parisian, a little more Italian, with servers nattily attired in pajama-style tops. There’s a pink marble bar, saffron velvet banquettes and a frescoed ceiling with a cloud-filled sky hovering over the warmly lit room.
Flash photography is a no-no in the dining room. “It’s distracting,” Jennifer Vitagliano said. “We take our guest experience very seriously, and when there’s a flash, it’s like suddenly everyone stops.”
The consequent shortage of social media content is fine by its owners. “We like to see people of influence in here, not influencers,” Jennifer Vitagliano said. To her, that means guests like Patti Smith and Lauren Hutton, longtime New Yorkers whom she remembers seeing at the Noho Star, a bygone neighborhood institution.
The sisters, 40, who named Raf’s in honor of their grandmother, and Nicole Vitagliano’s daughter, also own and operate the Musket Room, a Michelin-starred restaurant one block south, and the Levantine-inspired Cafe Zaffri in the newly opened Twenty-Two hotel and private members club.
While Jennifer Vitagliano has spent most of her career in food and restaurants, her twin sister previously pursued fashion, working at BlackBook magazine and as a stylist. “A lot of our friends are still in fashion,” she said. It’s a loyal crowd, she attests, albeit one with high aesthetic standards.
Jennifer Vitagliano also credits a steadfast sisterhood with the restaurant’s success. “Because we’re women running this restaurant, which still feels kind of unique to our industry, there’s been a lot of support from female designers in particular.”
Maria McManus, who says she believes supporting socially conscious female-founded businesses is “more important than ever,” is one such designer. “I see the dinner table as the female equivalent of the men-only golf course, and the Raf’s women embody this,” she said.
Maintaining a female-led business is uppermost in the sisters’ vision. “We think that should be more commonplace,” Nicole Vitagliano said. Mary Attea and Camari Mick, the chefs at Raf’s, lead their other restaurants as well, and 75 percent of their managerial positions are currently held by women.
How long can an establishment with a fashionable following really remain inconspicuous? Ms. Isbiroglu, from Khaite, has already noticed a shift. “It is funny, because now when I have breakfast meetings, I’ll walk in and see someone, and it’s like, Oh, normally we bump into each other at Sant Ambroeus, but now we’re finding ourselves here.”
At the i-D party, Mr. Bettridge brushed off concern. “It’s not this runway vibe, with everyone watching when you walk in,” he said.
To some extent, seeing familiar faces is an intentional aspect of the restaurant’s charm. “When you come here, you know you’re going to run into people,” Jennifer Vitagliano said. She and her sister still oversee the nightly bookings to ensure a healthy balance of regulars and new faces.
But she dismissed the notion of being SoHo’s latest hot spot. “We’re trying to create something more timeless,” she said. “Calling us a trendy place would be the worst thing.”
