Our Story: Cousins Salvatore Lima
and Enzo Auriuso

Donna Margherita is an authentic Neapolitan restaurant on the Upper East Side, run by cousins Salvatore Lima and Enzo Auriuso. Born in Naples and raised around family tables overflowing with food and laughter, both cousins grew up learning from the women who cooked with love and memory rather than recipe books.

After building careers in the hospitality industry across Italy and New York, Salvatore and Enzo decided to bring what they missed most — real Neapolitan food — to Manhattan. They opened Donna Margherita on Second Avenue and haven't looked back.

Today, Donna Margherita is recognized as one of the best Neapolitan restaurants on the Upper East Side. Guests come for the brick oven pizza, stay for the Genovese, and leave feeling like they've just eaten at someone's home in Naples.

The menu is built around the dishes both cousins grew up eating. Their mothers' recipes, handed down without measurements and written in instinct rather than ink, are the foundation of everything served at Donna Margherita.

Ingredients are imported directly from Italy: San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, Italian wines. The brick oven, central to every Neapolitan kitchen, fires every pizza at the same temperatures used in Naples for generations.

The Neapolitan Genovese, pappardelle pasta with celery, carrots, onion, and short ribs braised for seven hours, is the dish guests come back for again and again. It is slow, patient cooking that cannot be rushed.

"A' Cucina 'e Mammà" — the kitchen of mother — is more than a phrase painted on the wall. It is the philosophy of the restaurant. Dining at Donna Margherita should feel the way it feels to eat at home in Naples: abundant, unhurried, and warm.

Tables are meant to be lingered at. Meals are meant to be shared. The staff treats every guest as an extension of the family. This is the Neapolitan way, and it is the standard Salvatore and Enzo hold themselves to every service.

New York has hundreds of Italian restaurants, and the Upper East Side Italian restaurants alone number in the dozens — but only a handful are Upper East Side Neapolitan restaurants, and very few of them feel like the ones in Italy. Donna Margherita does. The room is warm. The food is generous. The owners know your name. Regulars sit at the same table every week. First-timers are welcomed the same way.

This is not a performance of Italian culture. It is a genuine extension of it, carried across the Atlantic by two cousins who grew up inside it and could not imagine offering anything less.