Even though we’ve been doing a lot of traveling this summer, we’ve also made time to explore our own city – including some cool restaurants that are new to us.  Today we’re going to feature two spots that we visited recently and enjoyed and want to highlight.  Both are in Manhattan, so they’re easy to get to, and they both serve up some delicious Italian food – in fact, we ended up ordering similar appetizers at each restaurant.  So check out our two latest New York restaurant recommendations, but just be warned that we have one image of meat in this post.

First, over in Chelsea, we visited Bottino, which specializes in Tuscan dishes and was named as one of the ten best restaurants in Manhattan by USA Today.  We started our meal there by sharing an order of the fried artichokes, which are topped with mint and some lightly spicy chili flakes.

Then we split an order of the cacio e pepe, made with bavette pasta …

… and a special for that day:  stinging nettle agnolotti stuffed with lemon ricotta.

On the Upper West Side we also got to try Osteria Accademia, which opened last year and has already earned praise from Forbes.  We clearly are really into artichokes this summer because we also decided to start here with their fried artichoke hearts.

Then Miriam had this mafalde pasta made with a mint and pistachio pesto, topped with Parmesan and some greens.

And Cyril tried the tabliolini neri, which is a squid ink pasta in lobster sauce served with shrimp and eggplant.

We really enjoyed the food we got at both of these spots – and it seems that we’re on an artichoke kick.  At Bottino we got an excellent version of a classic plus a really tasty and unique special made with stinging nettles, which we’d never tried before.  And at Osteria Accademia we got an interesting take on pesto plus a seafood-packed pasta dish.  We’ve written about tons of other Italian food in New York, and the options for this cuisine are truly endless, but consider these places to be two more entries in our ever-expanding list of good places to eat in the city.