Plado Tasting Bar opens in Glen Cove

It's been a long culinary journey for German Rizzo from his native Italy to Glen Cove. Born near Turin, he started cooking at age 17 and worked in Venice, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Astoria, Toronto, Miami, Manhasset (he was briefly the chef at Cipollini in the Americana) and Manhattan before opening Plado Tasting Bar in Glen Cove last month.

Along the way Rizzo developed a global repertoire that is reflected in the name that he and his wife-partner Kristen O’Donnell chose for their venture: "Plado" means "plate" in Esperanto, the "universal language" created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887.

Plado’s menu aims for another type of universality. "When there is a large party," Rizzo said, "not everyone is on the same page. I wanted a place where vegans and vegetarians can eat. You want pasta? Fish? A big steak? We want to please everyone."

The menu offers a few big-ticket meat items (Angus beef sirloin, $46, Berkshire pork chop, $45, bone-in rib-eye, $125, cowboy steak, $180) but, otherwise, it is composed of small plates dominated by vegetables ($12 to $20). Here’s where you’ll find charred cauliflower with Kalamata olives, pickled onions and tahini yogurt; Mexican street corn salad with ricotta salata; roasted beets with pistachio, pickled shallot and feta cheese. Plado is the rare example of a Long Island restaurant that uses fresh baby artichokes raw (in a salad with avocado and stracciatella) and fried whole (with smoked paprika aioli).

Meat-based small plates ($17 to $29) include beef tartare, brisket croquette, duck confit with sweet-potato hash and roasted carrots) and roasted half chicken with porcini mushrooms and cipollini onions. From the sea ($16 to $29): sautéed mussels and clams, charred octopus with romesco and crushed potatoes, cured salmon with pistachio crumb and dill cream, seafood paella.

Of course there’s pasta ($19 to $25). Plado makes an inventive gnocchi with taro root instead of potatoes (sauced with oyster mushrooms and truffle cream), burrata-lemon tortellini with fava-bean pesto, spinach-ricotta lasagna.

The restaurant, which took over Riviera Grill, has been totally renovated and given a casual-contemporary look. Sit at a table inside or on the patio, or at the bar, or at one of the half-dozen seats that looks directly into the kitchen.

This is Rizzo and O’Donnell’s second Plado. The first one opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 2019 (and was followed shortly by his L’Artista Italian Kitchen & Bar in Hamilton Heights). The couple now live in Glen Cove and noted that many of their customers at the original Plado were from Long Island. "We started to look in Oyster Bay, Huntington, Rockville Centre, Farmingdale because we weren’t sure about Glen Cove as a destination," he said.

But Glen Cove is on a definite culinary upswing — the last two years have seen the opening of Tocolo Cantina, Pio Pio, Oak & Vine.

So far, so good. "We have customers coming back a few times a week," Rizzo said, "because they want to taste everything before the menu changes for fall."

Plado Tasting Bar, 274 Glen St., Glen Cove, 516-277-1288, pladohospitality.com. Open Monday to Wednesday 3 to 11 p.m., Thursday 3 p.m. to midnight, Friday and Saturday noon to midnight, Sunday noon to 10 p.m.