Dinner at Caruso’s Grocery in the Hill East neighborhood made me fall hard for the red sauce, which ticks all the expected boxes but contains nothing like Buca di Beppo, or for that matter, Italian-American stage decor like Carbone in New York City, where the price of veal is like a Broadway show. The creators of Caruso’s Grocery-Michael Babin, founder of Neighborhood Restaurant Group, and Chef Matt Adler, a veteran of the upscale Osteria Morini-were aiming for something that was neither cheesy nor tasty in their intimate dining room next to the sprawling NRG Roost restaurant hall.

Babin says he had been trying for years to get someone in his company to come up with a homemade Italian menu. The problem? “It doesn’t seem challenging enough” for some chefs, the restaurateur says. He found a buyer in 39-year-old Adler, whom he brought on as a consultant in 2019 and who grew up in the very place Babin hoped to realize. It turns out that Adler’s father, also a chef, ran an Italian kitchen called Scoozi in upstate New York, where his son started washing dishes and then cooked while studying at the Culinary Institute of America. Caruso’s Bakery, Babin’s most personal statement, is named after a store opened in Baton Rouge by Babin’s Sicilian great-great-great-grandfather in 1920. The restaurateur’s uncle and grandmother took over the business the following decade;

Chef Matt Adler. (Scott Suchman/for The Washington Post)
It’s a striking restaurant at first glance, decorated with marinara-colored banquettes and, in keeping with the “grocery” theme, high shelves are lined with bottles of wine and more.

One thing Babin and Adler noticed during their research trips to Philadelphia and New York before the pandemic was the strategically placed bar in some of their favorite restaurants. Customers at Caruso’s stroll in to find a small watering hole to the right of the host stand and a drink list that makes some of us wipe our eyes at the sight of the coveted $10 cocktails. The drinks, created by NRG’s head of liquor, Nick Farrell, are also good to the last drop. “The Godfather Manhattan, garnished with amaretto, is, like most of the drinks here, an improved version of its previous self. The original Godfather, based on scotch, became popular when the Godfather debuted. On a hot day, a margarita filled with red orange puree and sweetened with homemade orange cello is the most refreshing.

Guests in the dining room look up to see black-and-white photographs in family albums, many of them of the Babin family, some from the Internet. One of the few nods to modernity is the semi-open kitchen, where the sizzle of hot pans sometimes breaks through the background music and Adler inspects the plates before they come out.