Seasonal, Authentic Italian Cuisine at Accanto in Easton

by

The Taste

Located in Talbot Town Shopping Center in Easton, Accanto features the cuisine of Italy in a warm, welcoming environment. The restaurant, which celebrated its grand opening in February 2026, was inspired by Piazza Italian Market, its sister establishment. Conveniently located next door, Piazza, a curated pantry, grocery store, and deli, opened in 2008. 

“Opening a restaurant for dinner was a natural progression for our business,” says Emily Chandler, owner of both establishments. “Piazza serves breakfast and lunch, so I thought we should also serve dinner. Since our customers love our carry-out foods, our wine dinners, and our catered events, a full-service setting made sense.” To learn more, we spoke to Chandler.

How does Accanto complement Piazza? Accanto picks up where Piazza leaves off. Piazza closes at 6 p.m., and Accanto opens at 5 p.m. Piazza sells Italian provisions, while Accanto offers dishes that incorporate these groceries. For example, I love the fact that we’re using the same bottles of Agrumato lemon olive oil from Piazza on our grilled artichokes. This dish is so simple: artichokes and lemon olive oil. But it’s become a runaway hit because the oil is so good!

Tell us about your background in the restaurant industry before owning these establishments. Prior to opening Piazza, I lived in Rome, and that set my career path in motion. Like so many others, I fell hard for the Italian food culture and lifestyle, and I’ve made it my goal to keep that as my North Star and try to share that experience with people on the Eastern Shore.

Why did you name your new restaurant Accanto? When we began work on the restaurant, our customers kept asking, ‘What’s happening next door?’ So, we just took the casual name of ‘next to’ and translated it: Accanto! 

What are some of your top-selling dishes? Oh my gosh! So many of our dishes are customer favorites! Our Crab Tonnarelli features pasta made fresh in-house and paired with local crab meat from the Choptank River. It’s emblematic of everything we’re trying to do. It’s fresh and simple, but it’s more than the sum of its parts.

You also can’t go wrong with our pizzas. We’ve worked on our dough recipe for almost 20 years, and it’s right where we want it to be—tender and light, thanks to a long fermentation with very little yeast. Half of the flour is whole wheat, so it’s also healthy.

Tell us about your selection of beverages, including Italian wines. We have a full bar with a curated selection of brands and a top-notch wine list. We make a mean Negroni, but we’re in Easton, so we also serve bourbon! Our wine list is all Italian, but our servers and general manager make ordering something you’ll like easy. We love ‘talking wine’ and helping people find the right bottle.

Tell us about your variety of pizzas. We serve Neapolitan-style pizza, which we cook at 900 degrees in our wood-burning oven. Our dough recipe was developed for many years as a passion project, and then we started selling pizzas to-go during the summer at Piazza. It was a seasonal item because our old pizza oven was outdoors. Now our pizzas have a permanent home at Accanto!

We also make American favorites like cheese pizza and pepperoni as well as Italian-leaning menu items, such as Margherita made with buffalo milk mozzarella and Rapini e Salsiccia with house-made sausage and braised broccoli rabe.

Where do you source your ingredients? The majority of our produce, including radicchio, lettuce, beets, Swiss chard, tomatoes, basil, mushrooms, and zucchini, is grown locally. Our anchovies are from Cetara, Italy, which is south of Naples. The cheese we grate over every pasta is Valserena Parmigiano Reggiano, which is made by a fifth-generation farm in Italy that uses heritage breed cow’s milk from their own herd. We are dedicated to supporting the producers and sharing their amazing food with our customers. Many items you see on the menu at Accanto are also sourced by me for Piazza.

Describe the ambience and dining experience at Accanto. Our dining room is open and airy with earth-tone gold walls, light-stained wood floors, and honey- colored tables. The farmhouse table in the center was my family’s table when I was growing up, and the vase on top holds dried hydrangeas from my parent’s house. Our long marble-topped bar faces the pizza oven, so you can have dinner or a drink while watching the ‘pizza action.’

Some customers come in to grab a beer and share a pizza after a day on the boat; others order many courses to celebrate a birthday or anniversary. We’re also getting more phone-in/take-out orders. Some of these orders are from customers who took their pet to the dog park and want a bite to eat but can’t stay or who are picking up their kids from practice and just need to scoot. We’re here for all occasions!

Farewell to Arms Cocktail

Ingredients

  • 1.75 oz Lyon white rum 
  • .5 oz Lyon blackberry rum
  • .5 oz Alkemil Rosolio di Bergamotto
  • .75 oz fresh Meyer lemon
  • or bergamot orange juice
  • .75 oz Meyer lemon cardamom
  • simple syrup

Directions

Shake until well chilled, double strain into a frozen coupe glass, garnish with lime.