Restaurant Reminiscent of the Amalfi Coast
It was 2018 when Sasha Bikoff made a splash at her first ever Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse in New York, turning the staid spiral stairway into a vivid and memorable journey of chromatic pattern play. Since that, her residential practice took off—and, more recently, so has her commercial work, as witnessed in Il Totano, located a couple dozen blocks south of that fateful showhouse.
The 1,900-square-foot, 85-seat restaurant is an ode to all things southern Italian, from the seafood-focused cuisine (chef Harold Dieterle is of Sicilian heritage; il totano means flying squid) to the décor, its luminous, saturated palette inspired by the “sunset-colored beach umbrellas, terra-cotta ceramics, and calypso-blue grottos,” Bikoff admires on her frequent visits to the Amalfi Coast. Among the highlights are the dining room’s massive rattan light fixtures reminiscent of fishing baskets, the restroom’s octopus-spangled wallpaper, and the bar’s lemon-yellow table lamps, fittingly sourced from Flos.
For the main dining room at Il Totano restaurant in downtown Manhattan, Sasha Bikoff Interior Design channeled coastal Italy through 60-inch-wide basketlike rattan ceiling fixtures from Visual Comfort, Maharam’s sunset-toned felt banquette upholstery, and grotto-inspired wall paint in a custom limewash finish conceived with Little Greene.
This dining area is reminiscent of sunset-colored beach umbrellas that are seen on the Amalfi Coast.
