Our Values

Our restaurant is like no other. There’s only one Da Marcella.  Most of our values and inspiration flow down from our two dear Marcellas;  Marcella Moreno and Marcella Polini, one born in Viareggio, Tuscany in 1920, the other in Cesenatico, Emilia Romagna in 1923. They never met, but they both agreed that a Bolognese ragù should not bear that name unless it has been cooking for at least eight hours, otherwise it’s just “meat sauce”; that chickens should always roam free, and that feeding hormones or antibiotics to cows is not only harmful, but outright foolish, that a restaurant should be a

 

place where you “restore” your customers to the best of your abilities, and not just a business in search of a certain Return On Investment.

 

They both were great cooks –at 89-years-old, Polini still is– and their cooking was based on the old principle of using the freshest ingredients found at the farm markets that day and bringing them wholesome to the table.

At Da Marcella we are simply trying to follow into their steps.

 

 

About Us

We are six partners and we have been chefs, managers, bakers and/or waiters in restaurants like Felidia, Bar Pitti, Via Quadronno, Quattro, Plataforma, Da Silvano and many others.

 

In June 2012 we united to open an Italian restaurant that would closely resemble one just opened 100 years ago, before the terms “free-range chickens”, “organic” or “antibiotic/hormone-free beef” were coined,  because then all chickens were free-range, all vegetables were organic and nobody had thought out the great foolishness of administering hormones or antibiotics to livestock.

 

The word “restaurant” comes from the latin “restaurare” –to restore–, as in “Come to our restaurant and we’ll feed you and restore you”.

 

 

We want you to visit, eat with us and participate in our efforts to bring wholesomeness back into our food chain.

 

We source all our meats from Pino’s Prime Meat, located right across the street from Da Marcella since 1903, including the organic free-range chicken in our menu.  All our pastas are made with the best durum wheat using the classic bronze dies that leave the surface of the pasta rough and porous to perfectly absorb our slow cooking sauces.  At the same time, most of our pastas are organic and very soon all of them will be. We believe that great food should be affordably priced and that nobody should get rich feeding thy neighbor.

 

Are we dreamers? We would love to know your answer.