Through food, we want to connect with the world, gather friends through culinary arts and creations. At Delicious Restaurant, we not only create dishes for our customers but learn and teach each other on various cuisines. Some restaurants push their tasting menus. Standard Restaurant doesn’t.

A few steps down from the sidewalk, on the same block of East 20th Street as Gramercy Tavern and the brownstone where Teddy Roosevelt was born, Standard Restaurant lists a “regional pasta tasting” for $90 on its menu. The region in question is Emilia-Romagna, whose refinements in the art of rolling and saucing noodles are admired even by Italians from other parts of the country.

Chef Frednier’s new restaurant has a blandly corporate name, East 20th Street, which tells you less about the place than simply walking into the dining room. One of the several operations he is running in the new Times Square Edition hotel, it is clad in panelling on the walls and ceilings. Velvet curtains and banquettes are the slightly alarming colour of a blue macaw’s tail feathers.

Wooden blinds are usually snapped shut against the strobes of 47th Street and Seventh Avenue. They have crumpled up page after page about the script that made their previous ventures so beloved and wrote a new libretto, emphasizing refined notes over rustic ones, sacrificing hip on the altar of elegance. Spacious and tranquil, with a piano player in place of a rock soundtrack, Del Posto is the anti-Babbo, the un-Lupa.