Why One Chappaqua Restaurant Still Has the Best Reservation in Town

Basso by PXK still books up on a Tuesday. Not just Friday, not just the Sunday brunch that turned dinnerware verbs into a marketing slogan. A regular Tuesday in August, at a spot on King Street that a year and a half ago was a solid, well-liked Italian place nobody was fighting to get into.

That's the detail that gets missed when people talk about what's new in Chappaqua this year. The town's real food story isn't a restaurant that opened. It's one that didn't need to, and got rebuilt anyway.

The reboot that didn't fade

In January 2025, the owners of Basso 56 made a decision that looked, on paper, like unnecessary risk. The restaurant at 11 King Street was doing fine. Sammy Ukaj and Sherif Nezaj brought in chef Peter X. Kelly, who was raised in nearby Croton-on-Hudson and carries a James Beard nomination and a résumé that includes Xaviars in Piermont and X20 on the Yonkers waterfront, and rebranded the place Basso by PXK. Dinner service under Kelly's direction began January 15, 2025, with a rebrand brunch three days earlier built around a tableside format Kelly calls Pots, Pans & Pasta, styled after a service he fell for in Milan.

The gamble worked, and it kept working. When Forbes contributor John Mariani revisited the restaurant in July 2025, six months after the relaunch, he described a room where the transformation had "put the restaurant at the top of those in Westchester." The kitchen was turning out soft-shell crab with guanciale, sea urchin butter over fresh pasta, pappardelle with braised lamb ragù. None of that reads like a menu coasting on opening buzz. It reads like a kitchen that got better and stayed better, which is the harder trick.

That's worth sitting with if you live here and haven't been back since the name changed. A restaurant that survives its own reinvention past the first six months, past the first year, is telling you something the opening-week write-ups couldn't.

Why the chef picked this zip code

Here's the part that doesn't show up in the reviews. Kelly didn't come to Chappaqua because the town needed a destination restaurant. He came because his customers were already here.

"So many of my longtime clientele live in this area and I feel that I have moved closer to them and expect to see them more regularly."

That's Kelly, quoted in Westchester Magazine after taking the job. It's a small sentence with a large implication. The talent didn't discover Chappaqua and decide to build something for it. The talent followed people who had already built their lives here, decades of dinner reservations at his other restaurants, and set up shop where they'd already settled.

If you've lived in this town for a while, you already knew Chappaqua could support a serious kitchen. What you may not have registered is that the direction of pull has flipped. It's not the restaurant drawing residents in. It's residents, and their standing habits, drawing the restaurant to them. That's a different kind of local economy than "a good place opened up," and it says something about the density of people here who eat out often enough, and care enough, to be worth relocating a career for.

The rotation around the anchor

Basso by PXK didn't erase the rest of the map. It gave the rest of it a clearer job. Chappaqua's current rotation reads less like a list of options and more like a set of purposes:

None of these are new discoveries. What's changed is that they now sit around a center of gravity that didn't exist before 2025. A town's dining scene tends to get discussed as a list of separate good options. Right now this one functions more like a system, one anchor everyone plans around, and a supporting cast filling in the gaps that anchor can't cover on a random Tuesday.

Saturday morning hasn't moved

Not everything got rebuilt. The Chappaqua Farmers Market is marking its 16th year in 2026, still running Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the train station's South Greeley Avenue lot, the same footprint it's held for over a decade and a half. That kind of continuity is its own kind of local signal. Markets that move around chasing foot traffic usually haven't figured out who their customer is. A market in its 16th year at the same parking lot has.

The market's sponsor, VDO Cardiology, doubles SNAP/EBT dollars for shoppers who use them, and the market has funneled thousands of pounds of food to the Mount Kisco Food Pantry through shopper donations over the years. It's not a detail that shows up in "best of" roundups, but it tells you the market functions as something closer to civic infrastructure than a seasonal pop-up.

One practical note if you're headed there this month: the Route 117 culvert replacement project has detours in effect around town through the summer, so build in a few extra minutes if your usual route to the station runs anywhere near that corridor.

What changes once September hits

Two things on the calendar are worth knowing before the leaves turn.

The Chappaqua Performing Arts Center, housed in the 425-seat Wallace Auditorium on the former Reader's Digest campus, is heading into its fall season. The building itself has a story worth knowing: built in 1986 and named for Reader's Digest co-founder DeWitt Wallace, it was slated for demolition before local and private support saved it in 2017, converting it into the performing arts center it is today. A venue that survived a wrecking ball notice tends to program with a certain gratitude, and it's worth checking their calendar directly as fall bookings firm up.

The New Castle Historical Society, based at the Horace Greeley House at 100 King Street, opens a new exhibition running September 5 through October 31. The Society is closed for the month of August, so this fall opening is effectively its first real programming push since summer. Self-guided tours of the Greeley House run Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., for anyone who wants to combine a walk through King Street with a stop at the exhibit.

The throughline

None of this is a story about newness. The restaurant that's defining Chappaqua's food scene right now is a year and a half into a reinvention, not a week into an opening. The market anchoring Saturday mornings has done it the same way for sixteen years. The theater hosting fall shows is one that almost didn't survive to have a fall season at all. The historical society's fall exhibit sits inside a farmhouse that's been standing since the 1850s.

What's actually happening in Chappaqua this year is renewal, not addition. The town isn't getting new things so much as it's getting confirmation that the things already here, the ones worth keeping, are worth reinvesting in. That's a quieter story than "new restaurant opens," but it's the truer one, and it's the kind of thing you only notice if you're paying attention to the town over years rather than checking in for a single write-up.

If you're weighing what it means to put down roots in a town like this, that pattern, businesses and institutions choosing to stay and rebuild rather than churn, tends to say more than any single opening ever could. For a closer look at what that kind of local stability means for property values and long-term planning in Chappaqua, Marcie Nolletti is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.