“We did what a lot of people did, we lived in Williamsburg and then moved to Ridgewood nine years ago,” says Lorenzo Pizzoli, who has been busily running the ship at Il Gigante, a trattoria that suddenly opened earlier this month on a once sleepy corner of Catalpa Avenue. The name comes from the enormous Giambologna statue of the god Neptune, erected in the northern Italian city of Bologna in the 1500s. In the centuries since, the locals there have been given to calling it “il Gigante” or al Żigànt in Bolognese dialect, as an Italian sightseeing guide has it.

Of course, iconography from the boot-shaped peninsula is a familiar sight in this corner of Queens, where a few blocks down the street will take you to the sleepy headquarters of the Federazione Italo-Americana di Brooklyn and Queens, which has been putting on a local summer street parade on Fresh Pond Road for decades, to the vocal consternation of some. 

But Pizzoli is not one of those Italian-Americans, he will say. He’s the genuine article, having moved to the U.S. from Bologna. He’s started up his newest spot with a pair of fellow northern Italians: Ed Lombardo, a college buddy, and Jacopo Maffei, formerly a longtime manager at Malaparte in the East Village. The chef is Davide Bugamelli, a man for whom one “doesn’t get more Bolognese than that,” Pizzoli assures me. A few days before opening, Pizzoli tells me that he’s sold his stake in his last business, the Carroll Gardens pizzeria Aromi, described once by the New York Times as “promising.” Before Aromi, Pizzoli had spent a decade eagerly learning everything he knows now about the New York Italian beat at the unassuming South Street Seaport spot Il Brigante. “I did something different before,” he tells me, back in Italy. 

Now, he’s all in at Il Gigante. He had been inspired. 

“I’m one of the guys that just was so thrilled at seeing Rolo’s in the neighborhood because for the first time we got something that was so good,” Pizzoli tells me, unabashed. He says that the hip New American fine dining spot, started just down the block by a handful of Gramercy Tavern employees, has become the “dream.”

“The dream is Rolo’s, you become a destination place, that’s what every restauranter wants to do,” he says. He already has an idea for what kind of destination he wants Il Gigante to be. “We would love to be the neighborhood trattoria.” he says. “An honest trattoria in the heart of Ridgewood,” reads his website. 

This is something new, he says, despite the presence of the pasta spot Joe’s up the street, once featured in an episode of the HBO show “How To With John Wilson,” as well as both Rustico Taverna and Antica Trattoria along nearby Fresh Pond Road, along a handful of pizzerias that do a minimal pasta fare.

“To us, those are Italian-American places,” says Pizzoli. “I say that with the utmost respect. That’s not what we’re going to do.”

A week after opening, Pizzoli is ecstatic. His face is broad, mustached and buzzing. The first weekend, they had sold everything in the kitchen. He had spread news of his new spot through word of mouth, he said, at the school his children go to and in the neighborhood social groups where Pizzoli is often found, where he says he is part of a “community push in Ridgewood,” among people who live in the neighborhood with children in their mid-30s. 

They had shown up, Pizzoli reported. A photo he supplied the foodie blog Eater appeared on the top of a list of restaurant openings the site published, he told me. And there it was, in between John McDonald’s newest Mercer Street bar and the opening of a latest neighborhood restaurant in Red Hook. 

Bugamelli’s menu is about a page in length, along with another page of appetizers. In videos that Pizzoli posts to Il Gigante’s Instagram page, the pasta is handmade, coiled out of little machines and range from a $15 rigatoni to a $20 lasagna. 

“There’s no chicken parms here,” Pizzoli told me when I asked about the differences from nearby Italian-American fare. There’s also no spaghetti and meatballs to be found either. Instead, there’s webs of small curlicue-shaped handmade gramigna pasta and imported balls of burrata cheese on beds of rich green arugula. And then there’s the lasagna, which Bugamelli makes in a particular “Bolognese way,” I’m told, “and it doesn’t get more Bolognese than that,” Pizzoli says.

For Pizzoli, the nuances are personal and particular, even if they were, he freely admitted “silly things.”   

“You don’t put cheese on fish,” he told me, with no disrespect for those who do, he added. “There is definitely no garlic in my sofrito. I don’t do any American stuff. We try to reproduce the food that you would get in Italy.” 

Maffei tells me that the difference is one of portion sizes. An Italian plate is a “powerful meal,” and the pasta doesn’t spill over the plate. Maffei had spent years in the Italian cloth napkin world of the West Village and says debuting in Ridgewood feels different.

“Here, they’re really rooting for you,” he says. It helps that the building the group moved into had some history. For decades, it had been owned by the St. Matthias church next door, before getting developed by Martin Scorcese to shoot some scenes in his Netflix movie The Irishman. Real estate developer Kermit Westergaard ended up with it and opted to keep the massive wood-paneled bar from the movie,  first outfitting it to Mike Stamatelos, a burnt-out McKinsey consultant who ran Porcelain, which he first operated as an Austrian cafe and then as an upscale Asian fusion spot with a kitchen run by Kate Telfeyan, previously from the kitchen at Mission Chinese in Bushwick. Stamatelos had not been as keen on Rolo’s as a neighbor. “They were competing with us willingly in a situation where they didn’t have to,”  Stamatelos griped to New York magazine about this. “I extensively talked about this with Mike,” Pizzoli told me. 

“I know why he left. Poor guy. He left before his [lease] was over,” Pizzoli muses out loud.

“If somebody breaks a lease early, there is usually one reason alone.” Pizzoli is a man who speaks his mind, who interrupts a conversation to exclaim, energetically in Italian, and then apologetically say, “Sorry, just saw an angel coming through the door.”

“I’m really plugged in the neighborhood,” he tells me at one point. Where he lives, he’s president of his building’s local condominium board. He’s always listening to what people are saying. Without prompting, he goes on: “Gentrification, all this stuff. Not that we’re not part of it, not that anyone who lives in his neighborhood is not part of gentrification, cause otherwise they are lying to themselves.”

Il Gigante is located at 880 Woodward Avenue.

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan and Michelle Maier.