The highly anticipated Aventino and AP Pizza in downtown Bethesda will host grand openings on Wednesday, according to their Instagram accounts.
Want to taste the Italian cuisine before then? Aventino is accepting dinner reservations for Tuesday night on its website, and AP Pizza opened for lunch and dinner last week.
Aventino’s hours are 5 to 9 p.m. from Sunday to Thursday and 5 to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. AP Pizza Shop is open 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Sunday to Thursday and 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. from Friday to Saturday.
Aventino, an upscale Italian eatery, is located at 747 Bethesda Ave., and AP Pizza, a casual spot to grab a slice, is adjacent to it.
These restaurants will open nearly three years after D.C. star chef Mike Friedman and his team announced plans to open them.
“[Friedman] and our exceptional team are bringing to life the flavors of traditional Roman cuisine with a nod to Jewish heritage,” the restaurant said in an Instagram post. “Prepare to savor Chef Mikey’s delightful aperitivo, antipasti, handcrafted pastas, and much more.”
Friedman, along with Colin McDonough, Gareth Croke and Mike O’Malley — the team in charge of Washington, D.C., restaurants All-Purpose Pizzeria, The Red Hen and Boundary Stone Public House — announced in April 2021 that they planned to open the two restaurants.
The opening date was originally supposed to be in mid-2022, but it was pushed back to early-winter 2023 and then to spring 2023. Spokesperson Molly Hippolitus did not address the cause of the delays.
Hippolitus described Aventino as “…an airy and vibrant 130-seat bi-level restaurant that will showcase traditional Roman cuisine with nods to the Jewish ghetto neighborhood and chef Mike’s Italian-Jewish background.”
The Roman eatery will serve a variety of pasta dishes, including tonnarelli, tortellini, spaghetti rigatoni, lumache and pappardelle. They also offer a plethora of other appetizers and entrees, like risotto fritters, ribs, NY strip steak, roasted acorn squash and buttermilk-fried veal sweetbreads.
“All of our extruded pastas [spaghetti, ziti, fusilli, etc.] are homemade,” Friedman said in a 2022 interview with Bethesda Magazine. “We don’t dry them. We refrigerate them first, then freeze them for a day. This way, they cook to al dente in a minute and don’t retain a lot of water. And we don’t salt the pasta water.”
The dessert menu features numerous options, including gelato, sorbet, Amalfi lemon float, almond panna cotta and dessert cocktails, like espresso martinis.
Also, the restaurant will serve classic cocktails, including a variety of spritzes and negronis and a large Italian-leaning wine list, which can be enjoyed at the “stunning” green marble bar, Hippolitus said.
Next door, the take-out pizza counter will be “a love letter to the pizzerias of Chef Friedman’s youth in New York and New Jersey, which will offer deck oven slices, as well as innovative pizzas and Italian American antipasti,” Hippolitus said.
It will also serve Italian coffee and pastries in the morning and paninis and salads for lunch.
In the 2022 interview, Friedman said the eatery would be: “Coney Island meets Jersey Shore.”