Business of the Month: Travelers Poets & Friends, 457 6th Avenue

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The name of their tomato sauce is “This is not Just a Tomato Sauce.” You can find it at our February Business of the Month, Travelers Poets & Friends (457 6th Avenue at 11th Street), a restaurant that is most certainly not just a restaurant. Each jar of sauce contains not just sauce, but also the passion that an Italian family puts into its recipe over generations. The restaurant sells not just food, but also a food ethos that implicates our relationship to our neighborhood, to the land, to the planet, and to each other. So think of what a bargain you’re getting whenever you buy one of their already reasonably priced cornetti!

Travelers Poets & Friends aims to abide by a traditional Italian food philosophy that is increasingly anachronistic even in Italy. As co-owner Emanuele Nigro puts it:

We’re not about efficiency and yield, but about uniqueness, flavors, hard work, treating ingredients with respect… So that if my grandfather came in, he’d be proud of me and ask himself, what year is this?

The year was 2023 when Travelers Poets & Friends launched. It joined a small, existing constellation of nearby restaurants established by Emanuele and his partners at One More Hospitality and marked the realization of a long simmering business vision. Emanuele moved to New York to pursue acting and ended up taking a job in the food industry. Along the way, he realized that his typically Italian passion for food and his knowledge of it — both developed during a childhood that involved procuring fresh milk at an aunt’s Sardinian farm and peeling tomatoes with cousins to make sauce in the Tuscan countryside — were assets in this country. He decided to put those assets to use and, at the same time, prove that he could build a successful restaurant around healthful food and environmentally responsible choices. The result was Osteria 57, a sustainable pescatarian restaurant that he opened with his partners in 2017. The encouraging response from customers soon convinced the partners to expand. So they decided to acquire from a friend — in the middle of a pandemic no less — the former Gradisca and turn it into a more casual version of Osteria 57 called Alice. They then followed that with a gelateria, Pamina, and finally with Travelers Poets & Friends. This latest addition contains a cafe, a market, and a restaurant (i.e. Alla Luna). Perhaps most importantly, it also serves as a hub for what has, in short order, become one of the largest food operations in the neighborhood. Emanuele (perhaps fittingly, given his background) thinks of the entire enterprise as a four act production. 

The Set Up

The story of any food business begins with food producers and with the choices that those producers make. Emanuele abides by rigorous criteria in sourcing food for his restaurants. He feels that agricultural practices should benefit not just producers, but end-point consumers, farm workers, and people who live nearby. That rules out intensive farming operations. Instead, Emanuele procures all his meats and produce from small heritage farms and sustainable fisheries. The size of these food producers allows Emanuele to sometimes exert an unexpected influence on their business decisions. A few summers ago, Norwich Meadows Farm developed a small, delicious, golden tomato. The market for them, however, was so limited the farm decided to stop their harvesting, unless a customer took an interest in them. Emanuele became that customer and saved that tomato! 

Outside of meats and produce, Emanuele sources food from small Italian producers that export to the U.S. and that meet a basic condition: The ingredients of their products must be pronounceable by a kid. If they’re not, according to him, they’re not food.

The Rising Action 

The journey from the farm to your table is a treacherous one that presents restaurants with another range of choices. Those made by Emanuele reflect telling priorities. He works with meat and produce providers located within a hundred miles of his restaurants so as to reduce his ecological footprint. The food served at the café and at the restaurants are made on-site from scratch. In fact, the partners decided to locate their businesses in such close proximity to one another despite the risk of competing with themselves, so that multiple outlets would facilitate this kind of production. In practice that means while Travelers Poets & Friends opens its doors at 8:00am, its bakers start making bread at 2:00am. Its pasta makers prepare pasta throughout the day. They used to do so in the kitchens of Osteria 57 and Alice. Now you can see them at work through the windows of Travelers Poets & Friends. The gelato makers, you can’t see. But know that they’re there, making gelato from scratch and with real ingredients (at 99% of gelaterias, “made in house” only means that that’s where powders are mixed with liquids).

The ingredient procurement and food preparation constitutes only part of the process of getting the food to your table. Another part involves actually having tables to put it on and a place to put those tables in. At Travelers Poets & Friends, Emanuele and his partners have created a welcoming, multi-functional space that operates as market, bar, bakery, café, and restaurant. This has resulted in a convivial gathering space that is bustling with activity throughout the day and has enlivened what had become a desolate stretch of 6th Avenue. Some show up early; some show up later; and some do both. As one customer told Emanuele: 

We come here for breakfast; we come here for lunch; and we come here for dinner; and if you did yoga classes, we’d come here to do yoga classes with you, too.

The Climax

The food journey reaches its apogee when it enters your mouth. Travelers Poets & Friends offer a wide variety of options well prepared to cross that threshold. It could be a freshly made cornetto and a cappuccino at the bar, a trout burger at the cafe, or an item from the “100 Miles” tasting menu at the ristorante, (so named, because of the radius of the sourcing area), like the seafood charcuterie plate. You get to pick the protagonist of this epic food drama. 

The Resolution 

The climax is followed by the resolution. This is where you resolve to become a regular at Travelers Poets & Friends.

The name One More Hospitality is, at once, 1) a challenge to the excuse that a single person’s decisions won’t make a difference, 2) a declared intention to be among the ones making ethical choices, and 3) an invitation for others to do likewise. Emanuele believes in the food revolution—the view that a return to traditional food practices can make the world a better place. 

For serving delicious food and making food choices that would make a grandfather proud, we are thrilled to name Travelers Poets & Friends our February 2025 Business of the Month. 

What special small business would you like to see featured next? Just click here to nominate our next one. Thank you! #shoplocalnyc

Here is a map of all our Businesses of the Month: