The chef Andrew Carmellini DM’ed me on Instagram (!) to say that he had made some renovations to Locanda Verde, the Tribeca stalwart and the first restaurant in what is now a constellation for him, and would I like to come check it out. I took the occasion to chat for a bit about his time there, and it morphed into a Spotlight feature — reserved for businesses in the neighborhood that predate the TC. (In actual fact, the two were born the same time.)

Andrew has made a real mark on the neighborhood, not just with Locanda Verde, which opened in the Greenwich Hotel in 2009, but with Little Park and Evening Bar, which sadly closed along with the first iteration of the Smyth Hotel, and Carne Mare and Mister Dips at the Seaport; within walking distance you’ve got Bar Primi, Lafayette, The Dutch, and the two restaurants at the Public. His NoHo Hospitality Group has 20 restaurants altogether, including four in Detroit, plus one about to go online.

So what’s new around here?
We finally removed the pizza oven from when this space was Ago — for nine months in 2008. And we put a million dollars into the kitchen — we desperately needed to fix some things up after 15 years. Plus we bought new tables, new chairs, refinished some of the woodwork. It’s the same DNA, just refreshed. We also have new fall and brunch menus that we are developing now.

We’ve been very blessed and always very busy, so we pushed off the renovation as long as we could. To do it, we had to close half the restaurant and operate for a month out of downstairs, where we have a second kitchen.

How did you decide to open here?
When Ago didn’t work out — they were an outfit from LA that Bob brought in — Bob asked me and my partners to open in the hotel. [They settled in quick — receiving two stars from The Times and the Best New Restaurant from the James Beard Foundation.]

I don’t even remember Ago!
Good! I love that this is the only restaurant people remember in this space.

So of all your restaurants, isn’t Locanda your favorite?
Well, it was my first, so that’s special, but every child has its own merits. Some, of course, are more troublesome than others.

How do you share your time?
I am always around at one of the restaurants — every night’s different depending on menu changes or parties going on.

What made you want to cook?
My family is from just north of Venice in the foothills of the Alps, and I went when I was young with my uncles. They were a hard bunch — tough people. They were all in the terrazzo business and even after they came here, they worked in that industry. My father was a terrazzo artisan.

I grew up in Ohio, and after culinary school [at the CIA] I went to cook in Italy. [The path from there is remarkable: He landed at the two-star San Domenico in Emilia-Romagna in 1990; then came to NYC to be the chef de partie at the legendary four-star French restaurant, Lespinasse; moved to Paris to train at three-Michelin-star L’Arpège; and was back in NYC in 1997 as an opening sous chef at Le Cirque; opened Café Boulud as chef de cuisine in 1998 and A Voce in 2006, earning one Michelin Star and a three-star review from The New York Times.]

How did you end up with restaurants in Detroit?
My business partner Josh Pickard is from there. Detroit has been good to us — we do New York numbers there. People in the suburbs there, they love their town. It’s a robust place. Beautiful architecture. Evening Bar is now in the Shinola Hotel there, along with The Brakeman and Penny Red’s.

Do you do the cooking in your house?
On the weekends, I cook at home — especially in my house on the North Fork, we cook a lot. (We lived in Tribeca for a while, but when we opened in Hudson Yards, we moved to Chelsea to be kind of halfway between the two neighborhoods.) It’s just me and my wife [Gwen Hyman, who was a humanities professor at Cooper Union and who now has Workshop, a specialized writing tutoring company, and with whom he has written two books — “Urban Italian” and “American Flavor”]. We have a very good system where I cook and she cleans. That’s been running efficiently for 25 years.

My pantry at home is like Noah’s ark — I’ve got two of everything. If we want to make paella, I have everything. If we want to make a Muslim Chinese dish, I have all kinds of stuff for that. I like to have a lot of my fingertips. I stock all kinds of Thai noodles and all the curry pastes and probably even have some Mole in the back. What I make just depends on the mood. Is it cold outside? Are we entertaining? Is it just the two of us?

Where do you like to eat in the city?
I’m usually the last person to get to the new restaurant. I know how hard it is to open, so I like to give them time, even when it’s a friend’s new place. During the week, we go to Thai Diner, to Miznon in the Chelsea Market for felafel; we go to Los Tacos a lot — it’s very good even if it’s a chain, and I’ve been to Mexico a lot, so I know what’s good.

We also love what we call Secret Sushi — Azabu [on Greenwich]. You can go for sushi and easily spend $500. This is once-every-two-weeks sushi, not once-a-year sushi, and it’s great.

So what’s next?
We are going to announce a new project at 50 Hudson Yards — a second Locanda Verde in the Black Rock headquarters there, on the bottom floor. [He also just opened Café Carmellini and The Portrait Bar in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in NoMad last year, and will open a second Bar Primi to the Penn Plaza District this year.] Hudson Yards got so much hate when it opened but it’s actually very busy up there. It has very high occupancy rates in the commercial buildings. And from the outside it’s a lot different than it was 10 years ago. If you’re a diehard Tribeca person, that’s probably not your spot. But there’s this whole other New York that goes there and doesn’t care.