My friend Carla keeps telling people Café Goodfellas is just a pizza place, and I’ve given up correcting her. Yes, there’s pizza. But if you walk in expecting a slice-and-soda operation, you’re going to spend the first ten minutes recalibrating.
Goodfellas sits on Whalley Avenue, closer to Westville than downtown, in a stretch of the street that doesn’t get much editorial attention. The room is small — maybe a dozen tables — with checkered tablecloths that are exactly as Italian-American as you’d expect, but the energy isn’t a caricature. It’s loud in the way that neighborhood restaurants get loud on a Thursday night when half the tables know each other.
The menu is longer than you think it needs to be, and somehow most of it is good. I came in assuming the pasta would be an afterthought behind the pies, and the pappardelle with Bolognese made me quietly embarrassed about that assumption. The sauce has real weight to it — cooked low and slow, not the kind of thing that comes from a jar or a shortcut. Portions are serious. Two people can share an entrée and an appetizer and leave full without trying particularly hard.
The pizza, since Carla insists on it: thin-crusted, a little charred at the edges, with toppings that don’t pile up into a soggy mess. The sausage and roasted pepper combination is the one I keep coming back to. It’s not competing with the apizza institutions a few miles east on Wooster Street, and it doesn’t need to. This is a different thing — more supper-club than pizzeria in its bones.
Service moves at its own pace, which I mean as a neutral observation. The staff is genuinely friendly, and nobody rushes you, but if you’re in a hurry before a show, give yourself a buffer. On weekend evenings the place fills up fast and the kitchen is working at full capacity. I’ve had better luck going on a weeknight, when the room is a little calmer and you can actually hear the table next to you.
Pricing is reasonable without being remarkable — entrées run roughly $16 to $26, appetizers in the $10 to $14 range. A bottle of wine from the short but decent list lands around $35 to $45. You won’t walk out feeling like you overpaid, which in New Haven in 2024 is worth noting.
What I keep coming back to is that Goodfellas occupies a specific and somewhat underserved niche in this city: the kind of Italian place that’s genuinely trying to cook good food for the neighborhood, not curating an Instagram aesthetic or angling for a write-up. It’s been around long enough that the regulars treat it like a living room, and new visitors tend to find that either charming or slightly intimidating. I’m in the charming camp.
Go hungry, bring someone you actually want to talk to, and order the pappardelle at least once before you default to the pizza. Carla will tell you I’m wrong. She’s not entirely wrong either.
