Inside Nathalie Hudson’s Dante Aperitivo: The West Village Restaurant Redefining Aperitivo Culture

Photo Credit: Hana Le Van

Nathalie Hudson built a haven around a feeling most people can’t even name. Turns out, New York was starving for it.

By Laura Schreffler

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

The light at Dante Aperitivo does something to people.

Nathalie Hudson will tell you it’s champagne-tinted — which is exactly right, and also not an accident. She designed it that way because she’d felt it before, in the room that existed here before this one: a Champagne-and-oyster bar called The Riddler, where she and her husband, Linden Pride, used to slip in during the small, suspended hours of new parenthood. Their second daughter was still young enough to fall asleep against her chest on walks through the West Village. On the rare, perfect occasions when the baby stayed asleep — that particular miracle you hold your breath through, terrified to break it — they’d take a table, order oysters and Champagne, and let the room hold them for a while. In a city that runs on urgency, the room somehow didn’t.

“There’s something about oysters and Champagne when your world has just expanded,” she says. “It feels like both a celebration and a deep exhale.”

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

That room doesn’t exist anymore — The Riddler closed, the space sat, and then one day Hudson walked back into it. Not as a guest this time.

As its future.

“Spaces carry memory,” she says, simply, like this is something everyone knows. “It felt like stepping into a story mid-sentence and being asked to continue writing it.”

That story is now Dante Aperitivo, which opened at 51 Bank Street in October 2025 and is already doing exactly what Hudson designed it to do — making people forget what time it is. It is, she says, her love letter to New York. Not the obvious version of the city. The one you only find if you’ve lived here long enough to know where to look.

To understand Dante Aperitivo, you have to understand something about the woman who made it: Nathalie Hudson is not, at her core, a restaurateur. Or rather, she didn’t start out as one.

Born in Canada to a German mother and a British father, raised across Australia, the U.K., Germany, and Zimbabwe, Hudson came to New York the way many of the city’s most interesting people do: from somewhere else entirely, shaped by too many places to claim just one. Before restaurants, before Dante, before the awards and the global expansion and the Claridge’s residency, there was a decade at the United Nations, where she worked in international law and human rights supporting asylum seekers. A life defined by framework. By structure. By purpose so clearly mapped it practically had a legend.

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

Then she walked into Caffe Dante.

“There was an immediacy to it,” she says. “A kind of aliveness where emotion, creativity, and human connection became the currency.”

That’s the romanticized version. The real one involves a man, a city, and the specific kind of stubbornness that looks like courage in retrospect. She was deeply, inconveniently in love with Linden Pride, and after years of long distance she made the kind of decision that looks insane on paper and inevitable everywhere else.

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

“So I said: let’s build something together,” she recalls. “Let’s leave the structure behind and create our own.”

Reader, they did. Under their partnership, Caffe Dante — a Greenwich Village institution founded in 1915 — became Dante: The World’s Best Bar in 2019, North America’s Best Bar in 2019 and 2020, then Dante West Village, then Beverly Hills, then Mayfair at Claridge’s in London, then Caffe Paradiso, and now this — Dante Aperitivo, the one she fought for the hardest, in the room that meant the most.

She’ll tell you that Dante Aperitivo was inspired by a piazza in Ravello — sun-washed, unhurried, the kind of afternoon that stretches in a way that makes you forget you were ever somewhere else. That’s true. But it was also born from something quieter and more personal: the conviction that the city’s pace, as intoxicating as it is, doesn’t have to be the only option on the menu.

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

“Aperitivo wasn’t confined to a window in the early evening,” she says. “It was a feeling, a rhythm, a quiet agreement to be present.”

So she made it all-day — open Friday through Sunday from noon, Monday through Thursday from five — and she made the food as serious as the drinks, which at Dante is saying something. There’s a Lobster Bucatini finished tableside. A Caviar Martini that is not messing around. A Spaghetti Vongole that she describes, without irony, as an Italian coastal dish, which it is, and which also happens to be exactly what you want at 10pm in the West Village when the evening has gone very well. The room holds it all: marble floors, velvet banquettes in charcoal and ivory, photography by David Yarrow, lighting that does what the lighting at The Riddler used to do — makes everyone look like they have somewhere better to be, and makes them not want to go there.

“I always start with feeling,” Hudson says of her design process. “The room is simply the vessel that holds it.”

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

The vessel, for the record, works. I say this not as a compliment but as a report: the night I visited, a group of people who had arrived separately left together. The kind of room where no one checks their phone until they remember they have one. That’s not an accident. That’s the whole point.

There is a version of this story that is about ambition, and it is not incorrect. Hudson leads a team of more than 300 people across multiple continents. She oversaw every element of Dante Aperitivo’s interior herself. The playlist is hers — a deliberate, layered thing that lifts the room and then lets it settle, soft rock to hip hop and back again, calibrated to make people lean in. She pushed for the restaurant when, by any rational assessment, they did not have capacity for another opening.

“I’m not entirely sure Linden would have chosen to open Dante Aperitivo at that moment in time,” she admits, with the particular smile of a woman who knows she was right. They were already stretched — a Nolita opening in the works, Caffe Paradiso weeks out, a summer residency at Claridge’s, Monaco on the horizon. And still she pushed. Quite insistently, she says.

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

“Sometimes the most worthwhile things begin as slightly impossible dreams.”

But the version of this story that I find more interesting is the smaller one. The one about a woman who used to walk through the West Village with a sleeping baby against her chest, slipping into a room for twenty minutes of stillness, and who later decided that room was worth saving — not as a monument, but as a continuation. That she wanted her daughters to see it someday and understand that it came from a moment when they were small, when life felt both chaotic and beautiful, and that chaos and beauty together can be the blueprint for something lasting.

“I want them to see that nothing is too small to matter,” she says. “That fleeting moments can become something lasting.”

When I ask Hudson what the greatest luxury in life is, I expect her to say something about travel, or Italy, or the particular pleasure of a perfectly made Negroni at the end of a long day. She’s built a life and a brand around all of those things. Instead, she says:

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

“Time. Specifically, unhurried time. Time to sit, to talk, to notice, to be present. It’s the one thing you can’t manufacture.”

Which is, of course, exactly what Dante Aperitivo is selling. Not caviar. Not cocktails. Not velvet banquettes and David Yarrow photographs, though all of those are available and none of them are inexpensive.

Time.

The specific kind that stretches when you let it. The kind that made two sleep-deprived new parents feel, for twenty minutes on Bank Street, like the city was holding them instead of running them over. She’s been trying to hold onto that feeling for years. At 51 Bank Street, she’s turned it into something you can walk into — and, if you’re lucky, forget to leave.

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni

DANTE APERITIVO

51 Bank Street, West Village, New York  |  dante-nyc.com/dante-aperitivo  |  @danteaperitivo

Hours: Mon–Thu 5pm–midnight | Fri–Sun noon–midnight

Photo Credit: Giada Paoloni