Lobster agnolotti.
While many restaurants on the East End are closed until the springtime, one new locale is bucking the trend. Manna, a modern European restaurant in the heart of Water Mill, started serving in late 2015.
“My whole family is in cooking,” says chef Marco Barrila, who opened the restaurant with his wife, Sheila Minkel Barrila. “My uncle owns a pastry shop, my cousin cooks, my grandmother owned an osteria.” Barrila says his international style of cooking doesn’t have a cookie cutter style. “My flavor is more genuine.”
He is inspired by the fresh style of Sicilian cooking. When he first moved to New York at 24, he was shocked to find the flavor of staple ingredients, like tomatoes, lacking. “In Italy, you taste the tomatoes and make excellent spaghetti,” he says, adding that in America, there wasn’t as much flavor because “things come from a greenhouse, not a garden.”
Mussels Mediterranean style with cream of saffron and fennel.
That was the 1990s, so the organic food movement was just beginning. Now, he finds it much easier to source local, fresh ingredients, especially on the East End. He buys most of their leafy, salad ingredients from Satur Farms and uses Cor-J Seafood Market for all seafood. The chef looks forward to the summertime when local bounty will be even more plentiful.
The Sicilian has worked on the East End for more than 10 years. Most recently he and his wife operated a catering company focused on whole foods and flavors, Insatiable Eats., which he view as a test ground for the brick and mortar restaurant at the former Mirko’s.
Since February 1, the restaurant has been open seven days a week for lunch and dinner. It is important to the owners that the restaurant not close during the wintertime. He says, “I want to become the Water Mill restaurant.”
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