Serata by King Umberto opens in Elmont

King Umberto might be Long Island’s quintessential Italian American eatery but, if its owners set out to create a restaurant that would subvert every element of that tradition, they could hardly do better than Serata, the new concept that has opened in the old dining room. Here, plates overflowing with clams oreganata, penne alla vodka and chicken Parm have been replaced with jewellike presentations of fluke crudo with winter citrus and almonds, agnolotti with fennel and razor clams, brioche-stuffed heritage chicken with farro and maitake mushrooms, lush ingots of sablefish with a celery and potato-chip crust.

"We want to create something special on Long Island," said partner Ciro Cesarano, who also runs the dining room and wine service. "We asked ourselves, ‘Why should people have to go into Manhattan to eat this way?’ "  — "this way" meaning tasting menus (five courses for $145, eight courses for $175, plus $125-$150 for wine pairings) that owe more to Per Se and 11 Madison Park than to King Umberto.

You enter Serata through the wine cellar, and the dining room is swanky with a wink: coffered ceilings, Persian carpeting, hushed lighting, two layers of heavy white cloths on the well-spaced tables, claret-jacketed servers and plush crimson velvet on the chairs, banquettes and low hassocks (for purses and phones). The patterns on the fine china change with each course and, if you order the dry-aged beef strip loin with parsnips and sweet potato puree, you’ll be offered a choice of knives from a cedar box.

Ciro, who was always in a suit at King Umberto’s, now wears a tuxedo.

The dining room’s focal point is the gleaming open kitchen, where chef Nick Beck leads small army of cooks through their paces: artfully tweezering a single daikon cress leaf on each chunk of lobster in the bisque, sanding the edges of a tiny tart shell destined for a filling of honey-nut squash, breaking deep-fried sunchoke skin into garnish-worthy frills.

It’s a far cry from grandma pizza, the Long Island icon invented at Umberto’s of New Hyde Park but first sold at its satellite location, King Umberto’s (which opened in 1975 and declared its independence a year later). Ciro and his brother, Giovanni, grew up at King Umberto; their father, Ciro Sr., was one of the original pizzaioli. As the business expanded beyond the pizza counter into a full-scale restaurant, Ciro Jr. gravitated toward the dining room while Giovanni became one of Long Island’s most innovative pizza chefs. At Serata, the two brothers are partners with Rosario Fuschetto, an original owner, and his cousin Pietro Fuschetto, King Umberto’s executive chef.

The seeds of the transition from old-school Italian to upscale New American were sown during the pandemic. The restaurant had bought the lot directly behind it with the intention of building a catering hall but, once COVID-19 hit, they came up with a plan in line with the new social distancing guidelines: a vast, glass-enclosed pavilion with glittering chandeliers and roll-up garage doors that opened onto a marble-floored terrace. The opulent new spaces accommodate almost 400 diners and, Ciro said, "outside was crushing it. Everyone wanted to eat there — the only people ‘inside’ were people who wanted absolute quiet with no scene."

The team began thinking about how to breathe new life into the old dining room. The first idea was "make it like Carbone," the spectacularly successful Manhattan restaurant that, since 2013, has elevated Italian American cuisine (and the prices thereof) into the stratosphere. The problem was that while Carbone presented a nostalgic/ironic shock to the city’s jaded restaurant system, it was riffing (barely) "on a style that never went out of style on Long Island," Ciro noted. "For us, that concept felt like moving backward not forward — but we did try for that ‘old school’ feeling when we redesigned the dining room."

Authentic regional Italian? "We considered it. We looked at the kinds of things my dad ate in Naples before he came here. And the food was almost too simple to make special," Ciro said.

It was a member of the older generation, Rosario, who first suggested "a New York City-style tasting menu like you’d get at Daniel, Le Bernardin or Jean-Georges." And that carried the day. They chose the name Serata ("evening" in Italian) to evoke the glamour of "a special night out."

It so happened that one of King Umberto’s longtime customers was Larry Forgione, a legendary chef whose Manhattan restaurant, An American Place, helped to launch the New American movement in the 1980s. Forgione began working on the concept a year ago with the Cesaranos and Fuschettos, and hired a Hudson Valley chef who had cooked at Noma in Denmark, among other vaunted spots.

Meanwhile, in a newly excavated subterranean kitchen, pizzaiolo Giovanni was expanding his repertoire beyond pizza into the world of traditional Italian breads. He hired Luca Cascella, a graduate of Italy’s ALMA International School of Italian Cooking near Parma, and started turning out superlative focaccia, baguettes, pane rustico and "nodini," which are knots made from flaky croissant dough. Three of these items now make up Serata’s bread course — between the antipasti and the pasta — accompanied by homemade butter, whipped lardo (pork fat) and olive oil from Abruzzo. They are also responsible for the three desserts that conclude every meal.

The launch was scheduled for October — until the chef abruptly quit. It took the rest of the fall to get Beck (formerly of 11 Madison Park) and his deputy, Oneil Gonzales (a veteran of Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe), in place. Serata opened very softly last month, accepting no more than 30 reservations per night. This week, the training wheels came off and Open Table is poised to fill every one of the 60 seats.

Serata’s prices are at least half what they’d be in the city but Ciro is well aware that they are steep for Long Island. Nor have tasting-menu-only restaurants gained much traction here.

He prefers to see these challenges are opportunities, not problems. "We are at the forefront of something that is going to happen here eventually," he said. And Serata is in it for the long haul. "We’ve got the pizzeria and the patio that keeps us busy, and we own the building," he said. "It may be 10 years before it turns out I’m right, but we can wait."

Serata by King Umberto, 1339 Hempstead Tpke., Elmont, 516-737-2826, serata6.com. Open Wednesday to Saturday 5 to 10 p.m., Sunday 3 to 9 p.m.