Felice Opens Flagship Restaurant on NY’s Fifth Avenue

Felice (New York) has opened a new flagship restaurant in a historic building in its home city’s Flatiron District. The restaurant’s debut at 220 Fifth Avenue “brings the family-run Italian brand to one of Manhattan’s most design- and culture-driven neighborhoods with a space built around a simple idea: a restaurant designed to feel like part of daily life, not just a place for occasion,” the company said in a news release.

Founded in 2007, Felice now has 14 locations in New York, Connecticut and Florida. Overseeing the creation of the brand’s latest iteration, in the first floor of a 114-year-old neo-Gothic tower overlooking Madison Square Park, was Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture (New York).

“We wanted the space to feel instantly familiar but elevated in every detail, Tuscany in its materials, New York in its energy,” said Enrico Bonetti, that firm’s Co-Founder.

Some specific ways the space reflects that mission include:

• 18-foot ceilings that amplify the openness and light of the space throughout the day. Windows wrapping three sides of the dining room further reinforcing both the scale of the restaurant and its connection to Madison Square Park and Fifth Avenue below.

• A bar at the center of the main dining room serves as both the visual and social anchor of the restaurant. Wrapped in Grigio Versilia marble inspired by traditional Tuscan enotecas and backed by Chianti terracotta sourced from Tuscany, the bar was designed to function as an all-day gathering place, equally suited for coffee, wine, cocktails, or a full meal.

• A 30-foot-wide illuminated wine wall further anchors the dining room, while custom Italian oak millwork crafted in Florence grounds the interiors in material authenticity while maintaining a distinctly New York sensibility.

• Lighting and spatial transitions follow the cadence of the day, shifting the room from bright and open in the afternoon to warmer and more intimate by evening.

The Fifth Avenue project marks the first time the brand has worked at this scale architecturally, the restaurateur said in its release, establishing the Flatiron restaurant as “its flagship location and introducing a new level of intentionality and refinement to the Felice experience.”