"Aqua opens today in Flatiron, a new 24,000 square-foot restaurant from the family of restaurants behind Chinese blockbuster, Hutong. This sprawling stunner, much like its London sibling that debuted over a decade ago, ushers in the most trendy pairing of the season, offering both Italian cuisine and Japanese fare. Debuting at 902 Broadway between East 20th and 21st streets, Aqua seats a whopping 432 diners. Yet it isn’t serving the kind of fusion we’re seeing all over the city — in places like Itameshi restaurant Kimika that opened in 2020, the upcoming Japanese pizzeria from Chicago-based Moody Tongue, and Japanese Italian Jane Doe that opened last year in Jersey City. Instead, the restaurant offers two different menus. The first, which they’re calling Aqua Roma, has dishes like arancini, salumi, small pizzas, pasta, and larger items like a spicy chicken with chanterelles prepared in a designated Italian kitchen on the main level. The second is Aqua Kyoto, featuring robata-grilled dishes, rice and noodles, maki, sushi, and sashimi from a separate Japanese kitchen. It’s the latest huge restaurant to open in the city, following the same-sized Grand Brasserie housed in what had been the Great Northern Food Hall in Grand Central, with about the same number of seats. It’s housed on a corridor that’s seeing an explosion of trendy restaurants, including Indian restaurant Passerine; regional italian restaurant, Massara, along with the newly opened seafood steakhouse Time and Tide from the Kent Hospitality Group. Founded by David Yeo of Aqua Restaurant Group, Aqua is sibling to high-roller Hutong, the Northern Chinese restaurant with a home base in Hong Kong that opened in 2019 in Midtown in the former home of the storied Le Cirque. The group first opened its Japanese Italian restaurant over a decade ago in England; it’s also behind places like Aqua Shard in the tallest building in the U.K.; Aqua Kyoto; and Spanish Aqua Nueva, among nearly 20 restaurants worldwide. The space spans two floors, includes three private dining rooms, and a private lounge space that could serve as a future speakeasy. The 22-seat sushi bar — an eventual destination for an omakase menu — is longer than a 60-foot regulation bowling lane, at 77 feet. Toward the center of the space, the bar is all drama, dubbed Aqua Spirit, with its 44-seat bar around a massive hemp-rope sculpture that is the focal point of a room designed by Yeo and designer Robert Angell. It has a killer sound system. The cocktails skew toward Italian or Japanese concoctions. The Italian menu features raw bar items ($28 to $140), burrata and arancini antipasti ($19 to $32), pizzette with lobster ($35), linguine with clams ($27), entrees like pollo alla diavola ($48), and sides like fried zucchini ($15). The Japanese menu ranges from wings and pork belly from the robata section of the menu ($14 to $68), seafood fried rice or Japanese mushroom udon ($34 to $44), a 12-piece sashimi platter ($72), and “crystal sushi,” its signature served with seafood and a flavored jelly, like scallop, caviar, and kimchi jelly ($21). Aqua is open for dinner every day for dinner only for now." - Melissa McCart
