The next name over the door at 9 Nassau Boulevard belongs to two families that have been feeding New Yorkers red sauce for generations. Anthony Vitolo, executive chef of Manhattan's Emilio's Ballato, is partnering with Long Island chef Salvatore Sorrentino to open Vitolo & Sorrentino Italian Kitchen in the Garden City South space that ITA Kitchen left dark this year. They are aiming to open in late October.

The hardest table in SoHo gets a Nassau address

Emilio's Ballato has held its corner of East Houston Street since 1956, and the Vitolo family has run it since the early 1990s. The room is small, the walls are crowded with photographs, and the wait on the sidewalk regularly includes people who do not wait anywhere else. Barack Obama has eaten there. So have Taylor Swift, Rihanna and a long roll of athletes, actors and musicians whose visits turned a neighborhood red sauce room into one of the most photographed restaurant facades in Manhattan.

Anthony Vitolo, 35, grew up in that dining room, learning the menu beside his father Emilio. He has taken the family cooking on the road once before, opening a restaurant of his own in Fort Lauderdale a few years ago. The Garden City South project brings it somewhere closer: the first time the Ballato kitchen's food will have a permanent Long Island home.

For Long Islanders, the other half of the sign may land even harder. Salvatore Sorrentino comes from the family whose name generations here know from Matteo's, the family-style Italian institution where Sunday dinners came on platters meant for eight. The two chefs describe the partnership as two culinary legacies meeting in one kitchen, and the shorthand holds up: one name from the city's most famous red sauce room, one from Long Island's.

A two-night event that refused to stay small

The project started in August as a pop-up. On August 7 and 8, Vitolo and Sorrentino took over the former ITA Kitchen dining room for what they billed as a one-time collaboration, two nights only, with a menu of signature dishes and family recipes from both kitchens. The event came together in about a day of planning, seating was limited, and the nights filled.

The permanent version followed quickly. Sorrentino had sold his stake in ITA Kitchen, the plant-filled Italian spot that ran the address until this year, and the space still had months left on its lease, the chefs told the New York Post. Vitolo has said the decision to go into business together was made over a drink at 2 in the morning. By the time the pop-up dishes were washed, a one-time event had become a restaurant.

Red velvet where the greenery was

ITA Kitchen dressed its dining room in hanging plants and greenery. That look is gone. The partners have cleared out the old furnishings and are building a classic Italian room in its place, red velvet included, with seating for about 120. The brief is the opposite of fast-casual: a room built for long dinners, big tables and the kind of night where the entrees arrive an hour after you meant to leave.

The menu will lean on both benches. From the Ballato side come the chicken scarpariello wings, the veal chop pounded thin, and the meatballs the Houston Street room is known for. Sorrentino brings a fried capellini amatriciana. The kitchen is also building dishes for this room in particular, including a tagliatelle Bolognese and an experiment that crosses chicken cordon bleu with cacio e pepe.

The corner it lands on

The address sits on Nassau Boulevard in Garden City South, just below Garden City village, on a neighborhood strip that mostly feeds its own surrounding blocks. It is an unassuming place for a name this loud, which is roughly the Ballato formula: the Manhattan original has spent seven decades looking like a storefront you might walk past.

The reservation page is already live. Vitolo & Sorrentino Italian Kitchen appears on OpenTable with the address and cuisine listed, though booking is not yet switched on. For anyone who has stood on the Houston Street sidewalk hoping a table opens up, late October moves that wait about 25 miles east, to a corner with parking.