Esca restaurant NYC. Created by James Beard award-winning chef Dave Pasternack, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich in 2000, ESCA is revered for its less-is-more approach to cooking.

Its elegant simplicity. In his 3-star New York Times canonization of ESCA as the ultimate Italian seafood destination, Frank Bruni coined Dave “an honest-to-God fisherman, in love with the ocean, and ESCA is his ongoing ode to it.”