Which is what brought us into Emmy’s sparkly, tinsel- and string light–bedecked dining room on a recent Friday night. The restaurant was only one or two weeks into its new late-night offerings, but the prospect of good red sauce Italian after 10 p.m. had a gravitational pull too heavy for us to resist.
Maybe the most impressive thing about Emmy’s is how the restaurant has been a master of capturing so many different demographics. We arrived a few minutes before it shifted over to the late-night menu, and the dining room was a multicultural mix of all different types of parties: young couples, older couples, families with exceptionally hungry teenagers, and swagged-out college kids pregaming on their way to the club.
Emmy’s is known as one of the city’s most family-friendly restaurants, with a longstanding “kids eat free” deal on Tuesdays. It’s also an enormously popular date-night spot — and just doubled down by launching a $60 “Monday Is for Lovers” prix-fixe for two that comes with a bottle of wine. In many ways, then, the new late-night hours are just the latest extension of the restaurant’s ongoing effort to provide things the community really wants — which, in this case, happens to be hearty red sauce Italian at midnight.
Because we arrived a little early, we were able to try the new “Cadillac lasagna” from the regular dinner menu. It was kind of a “deconstructed” version, the pasta sheets arranged in a loose pile rather than cut into a neatly layered square. But the combination of flavors — the rich vodka meat sauce, dollops of sunflower seed pesto and cool ricotta — were just as homey and nostalgic as we’d hoped.
As it turns out, though, it’s easy enough to cobble together a delicious meal ordering exclusively off the new late-night menu, which offers a mix of new dishes and Emmy’s classics. We started with a standard (and perfectly satisfying) version of shrimp cocktail and the crowd favorite cauliflower balls — oozy, stretchy, spherical mozzarella sticks, essentially, with bits of cauliflower mixed in for health (?) and textural interest.
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