Soho Favorite Gets a Younger Point of View

Piccolo Morini brings a younger perspective to a Soho dining institution that has stood for over a decade. The Altamarea Group closed the original Osteria Morini on June 1, 2024, after a ten-year run as a Northern Italian staple. The group confirmed plans to relocate a new, “refreshed” version of the spot shortly after the closure. That new arrival opened in June at 40 Kenmare Street, just a short walk from the former location.

A Shift in Atmosphere

The 92-seat restaurant trades some of its predecessor’s formality for a more social, energetic approach centered on handmade pasta, martinis, and shareable plates. This evolution aligns with the group’s broader strategy of diversifying its portfolio while honoring its roots. The shift extends to the interiors, where Alsun Keogh of Nusla Design led the project. Keogh describes the concept as an Italian grandmother’s living room, reimagined by her cool grandchild. “We didn’t erase the old identity to create the new one,” she says. “We literally layered the new generation onto it.”

Keogh explains that the goal was to “loosen it up.” This meant keeping pieces with a genuine connection to the original restaurant, including solid-wood butcher-block tables, restored multi-colored trattoria chairs, vintage mirrors, and Il Fanale Murano-shade lighting. The designer threw out the traditional rules for using them. Those familiar items now sit against oxblood walls, a dark ceiling, forest green banquettes, linen café curtains, raw concrete, contemporary art, and unexpected patterns and textures.

Keogh kept thinking of Piccolo as the younger generation taking possession of something they genuinely love. “They’re not throwing out their grandmother’s furniture—they’re putting their own things next to it, changing the music, and inviting their friends over.” Just as a real grandmother’s living room might contain pieces that are inherited, practical, or even “slightly questionable,” Keogh sourced items from previous Morini restaurants, auctions, vintage dealers, flea markets, and garage sales, even from her own collection.

Old and New Coexist

The dining room features a hutch in the corner containing an old Morini wine-cork bucket next to antique books, family silver, vintage Italian signs, a new lamp, a Le Creuset pot, and a live plant. Elsewhere, an intentionally unstructured gallery wall brings frames, photographs, maps, needlepoint, and decorative plates together without the formality of a grid. Color was another way Keogh signaled that Piccolo belonged to a different generation.

A palette of deep oxblood burgundy, forest green, amber, burnt orange, coral, and flashes of yellow could belong in an older Italian interior, but the saturation is amped up to feel more contemporary. The clearest expression of this generational shift is outside. The sign features Morini in the original large orange letters, with Piccolo added above in loose yellow neon script. “Piccolo is lighter and cheekier, almost as though someone came along afterward and wrote their name above it,” the designer says. “In a way, that’s the entire project in two typefaces.”

Back inside, the restaurant is divided into two distinct moods: a warm, intimate dining room and a lively neighborhood bar. The designs suit different kinds of evenings, but both work together. Keogh imagines the dining room as a place to bring your parents, have a long dinner, and order a “serious” bottle of wine, while the bar is darker, younger, and a “little less behaved.” At 40 Kenmare Street, the answer isn’t a replica of Osteria Morini or a complete break from it. The old tables, chairs, mirrors, lights, and even the name remain recognizable, but they’re surrounded by enough new personalities to give Piccolo an identity of its own.