By Contributor,Gary Stern

Copyright forbes

Ginger New York, a restaurant with Italian roots, is opening in October and bringing Blue Zone food to midtown Manhattan.
Courtesy of Ginger New York

New York City has a countless number of Italian eateries strewn throughout the city, so many that at times it feels like Rome. But owner Darios Asara, who is bringing his Rome-based restaurant Ginger to New York City on October 1, 2025 to 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in proximity to Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hill, with a style of Italian food that few others contain: Blue Zone diet.

A Netflix documentary “Live To Be 100: Secrets of the Blue Zone” showed how people in five geographic areas lived longer than average with many living to be 100 years old including: Ikaria Greece, Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Loma Linda, California and Nicoya, Costa Rica, due to several factors not just a particular diet.

And this Ginger restaurant, which seats 160 guests inside and about 35 at outdoor tables or almost 200, in the heart of Manhattan follows the 3 Ginger eateries that the family owns in Rome. All are in the city’s center near the Pantheon, the Piazza Di Spagna and the Corte Laica.

It opens officially on October 1 but it’s a soft opening only for dinner, then gradually will add lunch for the first month and finally in November it will add breakfast.

Going To Be A Breakfast To Dinner Eatery—But Not Quite Yet

Hence, Asara describes Ginger as an “all-day café-to-cocktail experience” including breakfasts with juices, smoothies, espresso and pastries, lunches with pizza, and dinner, and a curated wine list and bar.

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He says its prime location enables it to appeal to several audiences including tourists, office workers from the many financial and media offices nearby, and residents nearby and throughout New York City.

Diet Is Only One Part of the Blue Zone

But the Blue Zone lifestyle transcends just following a certain diet, notes Marion Nestle, a retired professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University and author of the well-respected book Food Politics. People in the Blue Zones, she cites, “eat real food, get plenty of physical activity, sleep well, don’t drink or smoke much, and have lots of social connections,” which all contribute to living a longer life.

Nestle hasn’t studied Ginger’s menu or dined there but notes that “If they’re making healthy meals from minimally processed foods that tastes good, it’s hard to argue with that.”

Its menu that stems from Sardinia in Italy with lots of vegetables, fruits, legumes and lean meats, to Nestle, is “nutrient-dense.”

But how can a menu filled with high-calories pizza and pasta be considered part of a Blue Zone menu that will extend people’s lives? Asara replies that “Pizza and pasta can be part of the Blue Zone diet if they’re made with whole grain organic flour or durum-wheat and using condiments such as extra virgin olive oil, cheese, organic vegetables and lean protein.”

But those dishes can still be high-calorie and add to someone’s weight? The Blue Zone diet, he retorts, doesn’t revolve around calories, but the “integrity of the ingredients, the proportion between vegetables, grains, fruit and proteins on the plates and quantities, which are always in moderation,” he replies.

Quality, Healthy Ingredients Drive the Menu

Asara was raised near Sardinia, so the Blue Zone diet fits his upbringing, and it includes vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, but also lean vegetables, raw-milk cheese, white fish and lean meat. Ginger’s menu mirrors those foods with its juices, smoothies, acai and salad sections.

Despite Asara’s opening his eatery in one of Manhattan’s priciest areas, he says the entire project is self-funded by the Asara family without any external partners or angel investors, so the Asara family owns 100% of it.

Asara is very balanced about the Blue Zone diet. He doesn’t expect anyone to dine on Blue Zone food, or at Ginger, for that matter, every night of the week. He says that at his eatery “less is more,” so he keeps the dishes straightforward, including simple sauces and quality ingredients.

But he underscores that it’s not a vegetarian restaurant that appeals to 3% of the population, and he wants it to appeal to everyone.

When this reporter dined at Ginger for a soft opening with a friend, he ordered a simple, tasty grilled chicken breast with black rice, which Asara says is one of the healthier rice’s, and his friend ordered salmon, and we shared a lavish fruit platter for dessert. It was tasty, simple and felt healthy.

Asara isn’t a Blue Zone purist. “We serve cocktails,” he acknowledges, in order to stay competitive and clearly that’s not part of the Blue Zone diet.

Asara says he was used to a thick bureaucracy in Rome. Then he encountered the bureaucracy of New York City and said it was more entrenched. Opening the restaurant due to its landlord’s renovation of the building took over two years.

A year from today, he expects Ginger to be a very “consistent restaurant, a place where residents and office workers frequent, and tourists too, to have a different kind of meal.”

He pinpoints the keys to its future success as: 1) Maintaining the quality of its ingredients, 2) Its location will attract a wide range of guests, 3) Its airy, light design will make it appealing to many guests.

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