Danilo Mongillo, the chef-owner of Strega, can’t stop repping Italy. The collar of his chef’s whites are emblazoned with the red, white, and green of il Tricolore. Even his Onitsuka Tigers are Italy-colored.
Strega means “witch” in Italian, after the witches of Benevento, his hometown province. But there’s nothing witchy about this sleek restaurant along Chapel Street—unless you count the bust of a woman atop the cabinet of Italian wines, painted black from the lips down and white up to her baubled hair. Mongillo once explained to the New Haven Independent that the witches back home are really the “women who keep us strong with the herbs, the roots, the simple natural ingredients that are seasonal and healthy.”
Mongillo only buys what he needs for the day and picks up his (organic) ingredients at small markets each morning. It’s the Italian way, he says, of stockpiling less and going to the market more. The menu also features Italian classics such as carbonara and cacio e pepe, but there are also more creative dishes which could be made with Bull-Dog Tonkatsu sauce, Lee Kum Kee Pure Sesame Oil, and Kikkoman Ponzu Citrus Seasoning & Sauce—all bottles you’d find in the kitchen. According to its website, Strega is a “deeply authentic Italian experience” that claims a “progressive culinary approach”: this explains why the pork collar comes with Chinese broccoli and salmon’s sauce is infused with dashi.
“Far from authentic,” grumbles a peeved Google review. But if Gambero Rosso, the Italian magazine famous for its global guide to Italian restaurants, cares about Strega’s seeming nonauthenticity, it doesn’t show it. Earlier in 2025, they awarded the restaurant two out of three “forks” (or, as they insist, “forchette”). Said forks are printed green-and-red on a white paper certificate, framed and hung in the restaurant, proclaiming Strega to be among the “TOP ITALIAN RESTAURANTS 2025.”
So Mongillo has to wave the flag high. “I have this desire to talk about Italy, about where I come from,” he says. His eyes go somewhere I can’t follow: to his hometown, populated with small houses made of volcanic brick amidst flat fields green as far as the eye can see. They travel to the Italian alps, where he spent three years as a soldier; then to the sparkling waters of Cinque Terre, where he spent six years as a forest ranger, saving amphibians and catching counterfeit winemakers. Those years Mongillo spent tasting, drinking, and exploring, shaped the restaurant to where it is today.
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Long before the Italian states showed their Austrian rulers the boot in 1861, forest rangers were roaming Italy’s woodland terrain. By royal patent in 1822, King Charles Felix of Sardinia established the Forestry Administration for the Protection and Supervision of Forests. The seed of the State Forestry Corps, il Corpo Forestale dello Stato, was planted then. Subsumed under the Ministry of Agriculture in 1910, the corps sent capable young men with police powers across Italy’s vast timbers to protect la terra: reforesting, supervision of hunting and fishing, saving endangered species, forest-hydraulic management, keeping out poachers and, rivetingly, busting counterfeit food operations.
The State Forestry Corps was a highly selective program, only recruiting a hundred people in the region. At age 18, Mongillo’s father pushed him to apply. That is how Mongillo, fresh from studying tourism in high school, saw snow for the first time in the Dolomites, learning how to be a soldier in subzero climes.
Being a soldier took him all over Italy, which ended up being more of a gastronomic tour for him. (“I was a soldier,” he explains. “I was hungry all the time.”) It was there that he learnt firsthand just how regionally varied Italian cuisine is. “In Piemonte, you don’t ask for food they cook in Naples,” he says. Of course, every region also has its own wine. Cool Alpine climates in the north, for instance, produce a light and dry wine, often paired with rich, creamy food.
Wine was Mongillo’s specialty when he finally became a forest ranger in Cinque Terre Natural Park, which buttresses the strip of five coastal towns along the Italian riviera. There, he also worked to stop the sale of counterfeit wine within the Cinque Terre DOC, or Designation of Controlled Origin, a complex classification system of Italian wines whose definitions remain nebulous to anyone who’s not an aficionado.
The system of DOC—denomination di origine controllata—sets out strict rules about where and how wine can be made to secure the quality of the wine. If you see the label DOC on a wine bottle, accompanied by the crest of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies, you will be able to say that the wine was made within a marked-out territory. This is important for palate-sensitive oenophiles because the flavour of each wine will be vastly shaped by a combination of soil type, climate, and elevation we group under the term terroir. DOC will also tell you that the wine was made with strict rules about grape composition, yields, and winemaking techniques associated with that territory.
In Cinque Terre DOC, where Mongillo worked from 2008 to 2014, winemakers can only claim the DOC label if all their grapes are harvested within the National Park, and if the resulting wine is made with at least 40 percent of the Bosco grape—one of three grapes which grow in the region, alongside Albarola and Vermentino. The highest quality wines get the label DOCG, or denomination di origine controllata e garantita, where the quality of the wine is “guaranteed” with further government tasting checks.
Wines can be made anywhere in Italy with all kinds of grapes; some of them just won’t receive the DOC label. But tricksters will always be quick to slap on a DOC label on such wines, and they’re not all masked delinquents sneaking in the shadows. In 2008, Italian police nabbed 17 producers of the famed Tuscan wine, Brunello di Montalcino, for using grapes other than Sangiovese in blatant flagration of DOCG rules. (The scandal was called “Brunellopoli” in the Italian press. Its English transliteration would be something like “Brunellogate.”)
Busting counterfeit wine operations like these was Mongillo’s bread and butter (or, if you prefer, bread and wine). His night patrols intercepting truckloads of foreign grapes might sound swashbuckling, but most of his job was making sure that winemakers’ documentation was in order, that they were labeling their wines correctly and following the rules of the DOC, and that they weren’t selling their goods undercover. In a country that has made wine its national pride, there couldn’t be anything graver than a common table wine posing as a seductive vino.
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As a soldier, Mongillo went on missions in Afghanistan. As a ranger, he was a first responder in the floods that devastated Cinque Terre in 2011. He had seen war. He had seen death. He was only getting paid 26,000 euros a year. He had to do something more.
Mongillo had always loved North America. He has family in Toronto, where he’s spent some time with many a maple tree, stunning him with their towering statures and bright red leaves. “Oh my God, I want this,” he remembers thinking.
In 2015, he signed his dismissal from the State Forestry Corps and moved to Connecticut. He was already married to his wife, Rosanna Merenda, who was on a student visa at Gateway Community College. For a while, neither of them could obtain a work visa. Then a friend of Mongillo’s told him about the Immigrant Investor Visa, which grants residence privileges for any investment that creates jobs for at least ten US citizens or permanent residents.
The idea for a restaurant came to Mongillo then. There was just this one problem: Mongillo had never run a restaurant. He’d only ever cooked for family gatherings, where he would feed everyone big lasagnas and barbecue. His two brothers were the real chefs. But something compelled him—the need to represent a culture colored red, white, and green.
In 2016, Mongillo opened the first Strega in Branford, a Neapolitan pizzeria, with the help of chefs from Italy. Here, Mongillo learned how to cook in a professional kitchen, which seemed to pay off: in 2019, Gambero Rosso first took notice of Mongillo and awarded the restaurant with two “forchette” and two “spicchi” (slices) for its pizza. When he moved the restaurant to Milford in 2021, Gambero Rosso once again offered him the “due spicchi.”
There were ninety seats in the Branford outpost and sixty in Milford. In 2024, Mongillo opened Strega in New Haven, where there are only twenty-five seats. There would be no bartenders mixing cocktails—in fact, there would be no bar at all. There would only be a kitchen and a small dining room, filled with fancy plates and delicate wine glasses.
His wife, Merenda, became the restaurant manager. Meanwhile, Mongillo created dishes with fresh techniques while remaining unmistakably Italian. A lover of Asian cuisines, Mongillo has experimented with adding curry to pumpkin and dousing beef carpaccio with a Japanese sesame and yuzu vinaigrette. He is fully aware that there are some people who don’t like his restaurant because it’s “not authentic.”
“I’m still an Italian chef,” he says in defence. “Whatever is on the menu is my personal journey.” Mongillo is careful not to turn his dishes into something totally unrecognizable, but he appreciates a good adventure. He changes the menu often, challenging himself to be unconventional.
“If I want to use furikkake on the fish, why not? We use sage, we use basil—fuck it, why can’t we use other ingredients?” he says.
There’s one other way Mongillo keeps his food grounded in Italian tradition: the wine. With expertise bolstered by six years in counterfeit operations, he packed Strega’s wine list with vinos across Italy. Every so often, he invites a guest chef to the restaurant to cook up a wine pairing dinner. He even comes up with his dishes after he tries the wines.
“I wish people would drink a little bit more wine here,” he says. He is sorry to see people order an espresso martini as soon as they sit down. He is even sorrier to see Italian-Americans refuse Italian wine. “They’ll come in and say, ‘Oh, my grandparents are from Calabria,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, so you are drinking a nice Calabrian wine?’ And they’ll say, ‘No, I want a Macallan.’ What the—? Bro, come on. Do it for your grandfather. Forget about the Macallan, you have it at home. Not here, not today.”
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Dare to drink cappuccino past eleven in the morning or add heavy cream to carbonara, and you might be met with the thwack of a disapproving nonna’s spatula, which should teach you the meaning of “tradition” and “authenticity.” But to understand how Italy tries to protect the authenticity of its culinary culture, including the DOC system, one needs to do what Italians hate the most: look to France as an example.
From the mid-19th century, European aristocrats fizzed at the mouth for champagne. The problem was that the phylloxera louse had decimated Champagne’s vines, and in the mêlée, not only did rich production houses start importing foreign grapes—to the detriment of vignerons, the small, local vine growers—fraudsters also infested the region, passing off poor imitations. The vignerons pressured the government to mandate that a certain percentage of locally-grown grapes had to be used in champagne production. The government agreed, marking out the areas authorized to make the coveted mousseux—with the conspicuous exclusion of Aube, a major district on the edge of the province. Riots broke out in 1911 like overexcited bubbles in a glass. Aube would only become a full part of the recognized production region in 1927. In 1935, the French government took these lessons to heart with a new and comprehensive system of classification, the appellation d’origine contrôlée.
By 1963, Italy, looking for a more comprehensive way of protecting its wine, modelled its DOC system after its Gallic counterpart. Decades later in 1992, on the cusp of the European Union’s creation, the European Community subsumed DOC under a larger label called “protected designation of origin,” which makers of cheese, cured meats, and other delicacies across Europe could claim.
The Italians and the Europeans knew what the vignerons of Aube did, which was that these labels do not just confer quality. “Consumers are tending to attach greater importance to the quality of foodstuffs rather than to quantity,” the law of 1992 reads. “This quest for specific products generates a growing demand for agricultural products or foodstuffs with an identifiable geographic origin.” Being able to say that this cheese is from Emilia-Romagna or this wine from Bordeaux transforms the food product into an expression of cultural and national identity. When you drink Algianico del Taburno, a wine produced around Mount Taburno near Mongillo’s hometown, you are drinking the mountains of Campania, and hence, you are drinking Italy.
In-between all this talk about origin, it’s all too easy to imagine an “authentic” way of making wine, or an “authentic” cuisine. This is what Alberto Grandi gets at in his book titled, almost too perfectly, Invented Designation of Origin. In it, Grandi argues that previously untouchable paragons of Italian cuisine, including carbonara and tiramisu, are recent 20th-century inventions marketed as authentic to create an Italian identity. Needless to say, culinary purists and proponents routinely throw tomatoes at Grandi. But even tomatoes, so central to southern Italian cuisine, only reached the country’s Mediterranean shores in the 16th century, travelling from the Americas on Spanish ships. So who, really, gets to decide what is authentic?
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Mongillo sits me down and promises that he will feed me. Soon enough, Merenda emerges, armed with bottles of wine and plates of food.
There’s the cuttlefish, lightly cooked and cut to resemble pasta, tossed in a fresh, green parsley sauce that reminds me of the grass that cattle graze on. It sings with a Ceretto Arneis Blange, a white from Langhe Arneis DOC that refreshes my palate with a mineral acidity. There’s the rabbit, which meets a bright Tenuta dei Sette Cieli 2023 bursting with fruit.
Then comes the tiramisu, which many have declared the best they have ever tasted. Merenda says that’s because they’ve prepared the tiramisu while “respecting tradition, and everything tradition asks of us.” Which is why I’m a little shocked to hear that each tiramisu is prepared to order. Shouldn’t it be resting in the fridge so that the Savoiardi biscuits have time to soak in its bath of espresso and mascarpone? That’s true, Merenda says, and her family does it like that too. At Strega, they don’t prefer it. So I spoon into a seemingly bottomless cloud of mascarpone and a little bit of still-crisp biscuit, espresso pooling in the cavity I’ve just made. As I lift the spoon to my mouth, I can almost hear the agonized groan (in coloratura vibrato) of chefs, epicureans, and nonnas wagging their spatulas in fury.
But the dish I remember most is the spaghetti al pomodoro. It’s an off-menu item that Mongillo has made just for me. He invites me to the kitchen, where the timer on the wall has just gone off: the handmade pasta has been cooked al dente, and it’s ready to go into the sauce of tomatoes, basil, and garlic.
“I kept wondering, what should I cook for this guy? How can I show you Italy?” he says as he mixes the pasta with a pair of kitchen tweezers, tossing the pan on the flame. He throws in heaps of Parmigiano Reggiano and drizzles basil oil into the mix. On the counter, he swirls his tweezers around the spaghetti to plate a neat, narrow cylinder, spooning all the excess sauce on top.
“This is Italy,” he says with a flourish.
At the table, the pasta glistens. The generous handfuls of cheese have tempered the vivid red of the tomatoes into a mellow rust red, thickening and texturing the sauce with aplomb. Fresh from the pan, the smoke carries the sultry umami of the tomatoes and the freshness of the basil to my nose. Twirling my fork at the edge, I lift up the spaghetti to my lips. Each strand resists my teeth with an al dente resilience. Coated in olive oil and burst tomato, the pasta blankets each nerve ending on my tongue with a simple, rustic comfort, filling my nose and palate with its aromas. The wine, a Primitivo di Manduria from Puglia, prolongs the experience with bracing tannins and a touch of mushroom. Just then, I almost see it. The small houses made of volcanic brick, the flat terrain, green, green as far as the eye can see. The Old Country.
