There's a particular loneliness to pulling up a stool at a restaurant bar with an even number of seats. You'll either face another solo diner across a narrow counter, or sit next to a couple, or worst of all, notice the empty seat beside you and feel like the odd one out. Paul D'Avino thought about this problem. At Café Mars, his Gowanus Italian restaurant housed in a former pasta factory and grocer, the bar has an intentionally odd number of seats. It's a small architectural argument against the assumption that restaurants should optimize for groups. Solo diners are the default here, not an afterthought.
The space itself reads like a fever dream of mid-century diner meets Italian immigrant memory. Neon tubes cast everything in electric pink and blue. Chunky vinyl booths in acid-bright colors line the room. The bar glows royal blue. It's the kind of place that could feel aggressively trendy, but instead it just feels joyful—purposeful in its refusal to take itself seriously. This is deliberate. A restaurant this committed to oddness in its design is clearly odd in its cooking too.
D'Avino's menu is Italian cooking that has traveled. There's garlic-knot monkey bread with Parmesan butter—a dish that greets you with the comfort of bread and the indulgence of butter, no apologies. The negroni Jell-O with Castelvetrano olives is not a gimmick but a study in texture and bitterness, a cocktail eaten with a spoon. Bucatini naporitan arrives dressed with porcini, nardello peppers, and Japanese pork sausage—a dish that proves Italian technique and Japanese ingredients aren't enemies. A smoked pork rib parm exists here, and it shouldn't work, but it does. Marble olive cake closes things out. These aren't dishes designed to confuse; they're dishes designed to delight by refusing to stay still.
Michelin noticed. Café Mars holds a Bib Gourmand rating and made the inspector's list of favorite restaurant visits in the city in 2024. More pointedly, it was named one of Michelin's top 15 restaurants for solo dining in New York. The recognition feels perfectly calibrated to what D'Avino has actually built—not a fine-dining temple, but a place where you can walk in alone at any hour, sit at that odd-numbered bar, and feel like you belong exactly where you are.
Walk in on a weeknight without a reservation. The bar keeps seats available, and that's where you'll have the best time.