Sixty Three Clinton – a pizzeria shell turned one-star tasting room on the LES

On the corner of Clinton and Rivington, inside the hundred-year-old shell of what used to be a Brooklyn pizzeria, Sam Clonts and Raymond Trinh have built one of the Lower East Side's most quietly confident dining rooms. The two met as teenagers in Arizona, cooked side by side at three-starred Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare and at Bar Uchū, and in July 2021 opened Sixty Three Clinton as partners for the first time, with Clonts in the kitchen and Trinh running the floor and the wine list. It holds One MICHELIN Star, awarded within its first year and held every year since in the New York guide. The cooking is personal rather than showy: a seven-course tasting menu that returns again and again to the Sonoran flavours of the two chefs' childhoods, filtered through French and Japanese technique and a wood-burning oven inherited from the building's pizzeria days.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant sits inside the old Speedy Romeo space on Clinton Street, a hundred-year-old room whose original wood-burning oven and grill shaped the kitchen's whole approach to cooking. The dining area is split across two distinct rooms finished in wrought iron, wood and marble, warm with glowing sconces, custom tables by designer Dylan Mellinger and colourful vintage flatware on each cover. A u-shaped chef's counter wraps the open kitchen, giving a handful of diners a direct view of the pass.

The restaurant seats around sixty across its two rooms, a scale that keeps the evening feeling closer to a neighbourhood dinner than a formal tasting-menu set piece, which has always been the point for its owners.

02The chefs

Sam Clonts grew up in Tucson, began as a high-school dishwasher and was running kitchen stations at The Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain before he had graduated. He moved to New York to study at the Institute of Culinary Education, trained for five years at three-MICHELIN-starred Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, and in 2017 became executive chef of the eight-seat Bar Uchū, where his cooking earned a Michelin star that October when he was 26 — the youngest starred American chef at the time.

Insider tip

Open Tuesday–Saturday, dinner only; book through Resy; allergy restrictions apply.

Raymond Trinh, the son of Vietnamese refugees, grew up partly in Santa Barbara and partly in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where his family ran a convenience store. He met Clonts through a culinary-school visit to Clonts's high school class, and when Brooklyn Fare's then-chef needed another cook, Clonts called Trinh, who sold his belongings in Arizona and moved to New York to join him. Trinh later ran the front of house and beverage programme at Bar Uchū before the two opened Sixty Three Clinton together, and in 2025 the pair opened a second project, the Rivington Street wine bar Cactus Wren.

03The cooking

The tasting menu is rewritten by season and is built, by the kitchen's own description, on the Sonoran flavours of Clonts and Trinh's shared Southeastern Arizona upbringing, thoughtful whole-animal butchery and seasonal American ingredients, balancing familiar references against more refined technique. The MICHELIN inspectors have noted the precision of the kitchen's work — a Hokkaido scallop course for balance, soft scrambled eggs with shio-koji butter, a composed short rib — building to a goat milk ice cream that closes the meal on a study in texture.

One dish has stayed on every seasonal menu since the restaurant opened: a breakfast taco built on an ajitama egg, with salsa verde or, in the current Fall 2026 version, hash brown and smoked trout roe — a signature that reads as playful but is executed with real finesse.

04What to order

The Fall 2026 menu, updated in October, runs a delicata squash fritter with white truffle and agua fresca into the breakfast taco (or a seasonal taco of cabbage tostada with hazelnut nori salsa), a bread course of pão de queijo and Sonoran flour pretzel with hatch chili queso and whipped tofu, hatch chili agnolotti with Jimmy Nardello pepper and epazote, and a main course of dry-aged duck breast with candy roaster squash and pepita mole alongside a kabocha squash tamale with hoja santa and massaman. Dessert is a tres leches cake with crème fraîche ice cream and dulce de leche, followed by a choco taco and pumpkin pie.

Diners can add the restaurant's caviar hand roll for $55 on top of the $130 tasting menu — the one extravagance the kitchen keeps entirely optional.

05Wine and drinks

Trinh's list leans on producers chosen for pure, mineral-driven wines and responsible farming, running from old-world names such as Moussé Fils, Château Yvonne and Ciro Picariello to new-world growers including Arnot Roberts, Massican and Hermann J. Wiemer — a list built to match a menu that moves between Sonoran, French and Japanese reference points course by course.

06When to go and booking

Sixty Three Clinton serves dinner Tuesday to Saturday from 6pm to 11pm, with reservations taken through Resy. The kitchen cannot accommodate vegan diners or guests with egg, coconut or soybean allergies, and vegetarians can only be served if they eat eggs and dairy — details worth checking before booking a table for a group.

07The neighbourhood

Clinton Street sits in the heart of the Lower East Side, a few streets from the chefs' earlier kitchen at Bar Uchū on Eldridge Street, and close enough to home that in 2025 Clonts and Trinh opened their second project, the wine bar Cactus Wren, a short walk away at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.