Fabrizio Facchini presides over a Nassau County culinary empire — two restaurants, two cafes, a candy shop, a wine bar and a pizzeria — but Stellina Ristorante was his first beachhead. In 2022, the chef and his partners, Tom and Adriana Milana, took over Osteria Leana and buffed that hidden gem (the entrance faces a municipal parking lot) until it gleamed. And it's a jewel box too--the tiny room, chicly decorated in shades of ivory and Adriatic blue, has 10 tables, an open kitchen and a wood-burning pizza oven.
The menu, on the other hand, is enormous and sprawls all over Italy and beyond. A native Italian with roots in Calabria and Umbria, Facchini strives for real Italian flavors but is not hemmed in by one region. "When I do pasta Amatriciana, it’s with imported bucatini and guanciale [cured pig jowl] the way it’s done in Rome," he said.
"Our cannoli are stuffed with sheep ricotta like in Palermo." Pappardelle ragu and bone-in ribeye at Stellina in Oyster Bay. Credit: Yvonne Albinowski But many of Facchini’s best dishes evince a fanciful creativity.
He transforms pinzimonio, the rustic Italian crudité platter, into a refined salad of shaved raw vegetables; paccheri (big, floppy rigatoni) luxuriate in saffron sauce with Sicilian pistachio pesto; the generous lasagna combines the meat ragù and béchamel of the classic Bolognese rendition, but also the gooey mozzarella that’s more common here; veal Parmesan involves a 16-ounce pounded chop that’s breaded, b.