You won’t find any pizza at Marcellino Pane & Vino, the small plates, contemporary Italian restaurant and wine bar in NoMa from the owners of Stellina Pizzeria.

Instead, expect to find some of the cuisine that owners Matteo Venini and Antonio Matarazzo grew up eating in their native Italy — Venini is from Mandello Del Lario near Lake Como, while Matarazzo hails from Avellini, a town between Naples and the Amalfi Coast.

There’s the uova purgatorio, a “super simple,” Napolitano-style baked egg cooked in tomato sauce and served with rustic bread and extra virgin olive oil.

“That’s the most basic thing, but then when you eat it with bread, you just dip the bread, you break the egg yolk, you mix it up, and then you eat it and the combination is just so good,” Venini said.

Then there’s the panini porchetta, a sandwich stuffed with garlic confit, arugula, roasted potatoes, and pork that Venini butchers himself. As part of the process, he debones a 25–30-pound suckling pig and stuffs it with cured pork belly.

“We had a family butcher shop we closed maybe eight years ago,” Venini said. “My mother taught me how to do like small animals like chickens, quails, or rabbits, that kind of stuff. But my dad, he taught me how to do like cows and pigs. So porchetta for me is a lot of work, because you have to butcher and everything, but it’s a peace of mind. Like in there, I do my thing. I come there to relax.”

“Pane” and “vino” are Italian for bread and wine, and they are represented on the menu too, with focaccia bread made in-house, rustic, sourdough bread they buy locally, and a list of more than 50 bottles of wine from all over the world. Matarazzo rounds out the aperitivo bar drinks menu with a short cocktail list that includes a Marcellino Negroni and a “Paper Plane Flying to DC,” both of which use bitter spirits from local distiller Don Ciccio & Figli.

The duo named the restaurant after Venini’s 13-year-old son, Marcellino — their pizzeria bears the name of Matarazzo’s daughter, Stellina. The 1955 Spanish movie, Marcelino, Pan y Vino also inspired the name of their new restaurant.

“The name is really combined from a movie with wine and food, and then (my son) just happened … to have that name, which is a perfect coincidence,” Venini said.

The owners made their name in NoMa with the neo-Neapolitan style pies they started serving in 2019 from the pizzeria’s first location near Union Market. They have gone on to open two more stores — one in Arlington’s Shirlington neighborhood at the end of 2020, and the other one earlier this summer on K Street NW. The pizzeria earned a Bib Gourmand award — reserved for lower-cost restaurants of exceptional quality — in the 2020 and 2021 Michelin Guide.

So what prompted the pair to open a second restaurant in the neighborhood around Union Market? As many deals do, it started with a real estate broker. D.C. retail power broker John Asadoorian, who has handled leasing for big developments like the Wharf and the Yards, and tenants like Le Diplomate and others, had been following Venini and Matarazzo’s success from afar for years, he says.

Developer Carmel Partners had hired him to secure retailers for The Gantry luxury apartment building it was developing near Union Market. Asadoorian asked the duo to open a restaurant in a 1,200 square-foot space on the ground floor that’s tucked into a corner near train tracks.

“I purposely sought them out to create a vibe that made the building more interesting to the people who live there and made the neighborhood more unpredictable so that Union Market didn’t look like Dupont Circle, Clarendon and Tysons Corner,” Asadoorian said. “It was the special sauce of how I think, how they operate, and what the landlord was looking for.”

The building was still under construction, but Venini and Matarazzo wanted in. They dreamed up a wine bar with small plates, because they knew the small space wouldn’t have room for a full kitchen. They built the menu to accommodate that, which is why most of the dishes are served cold, and why the menu is loaded with crudo, meats and cheeses.

The duo quietly opened Marcellino in September without a website or Instagram page, in part because they had launched the K Street location of their pizzeria a few months before that. They were also short staffed, and didn’t want to get slammed with diners. They, like other restaurants in the area, continue to struggle with staffing.

Marcellino seats 36 people inside, including at the bar, and 20 diners on the patio. The restaurateurs collaborated with the building’s management on the design and and decor, keeping things subdued with an earthy color palate.  There are lots of browns, oranges, taupes and blacks, a departure from how things look at Stellina.

“Stellina’s very bright,” Venini said. “A lot of white and red …  so this one is more like northern, like mountain feeling, the colors and everything,  warmer feeling. Stellina’s more like Naples, Amalfi Coast, like the beach, sun.”

Meanwhile, operating a restaurant that doesn’t rely on pizza represents a welcome change for the duo.

“We need a place where we can go and eat something different,” Venini said. “Like sometimes at night … I come here I just sit down, have a slice of prosciutto, a little plate or whatever, a glass of wine and I go home. Sometimes I want something different. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt.”

And if they’re ever craving pizza, they can always walk to Stellina — it’s less than a block away.

Marcellino Pane & Vino is located at 300 Morse St. NE, and open Tuesdays through Sundays for lunch from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; for dinner from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.; and for brunch Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Happy hour runs Tuesdays through Fridays from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.