The new Roxanne opens in Queen Village

Most restaurants are the results of team efforts. But in Roxanne’s original Italian Market space, the kitchen was a one-woman show. For two years, chef-owner Alex Holt, 30, prepped, cooked, and cleaned up after each dinner, often an eight-course tasting menu. Even when she enlisted front of house help, she presented each course and explained each dish herself. Holt, a controlled tornado in her 800-square-foot space, was scrappy, charming, frenetic, and self-deprecating.

Holt signed the lease on a new location at 607 S. Second St. in July. While she “really loved our neighbors and the neighborhood,” at Roxanne’s original location, she says that the “building was really falling apart … the floor was literally falling through and the basement kept flooding.”

The new Roxanne, in the former home of game board cafe Queen & Rook, is enormous, at 2,600 square feet. It accommodates 65 seated guests with a row of sunken, built-in seating that is a palimpsest of its even earlier days as a sushi restaurant. The walls are the same shade of lavender as the original Roxanne, and Holt has applied a similar aesthetic throughout.

Holt is truly an artist. She uses food to convey her feelings about the world, from her despair about gender inequality, to lack of gun control, to her personal turmoils. Dinner at the original Roxanne could feel overtly political, vacillating between commenting on dire news and being exasperated by it. Her cakes stared back at you, sometimes weeping, sometimes shaped like guns.

Holt’s daring, offbeat style has paved the way for other chefs. There’s a similar ethos to another one-woman show, Scampi, which opened around the corner from Roxanne and is helmed by Holt’s friend, chef Elizabeth Grothe: significant culinary skill, DIY-scrappiness, a passion for hot dogs and pastel walls, and a communal, supper-club vibe. But no one mixes sorrow, celebration, caviar, and bananas the way Holt does.

“People are more divided now than ever,” Holt said. “I feel like it’s the right time for Roxanne to come back.”

In true Roxanne fashion, Holt did most of the renovations in the new space herself, like painting a wall of artificial lemons and canvases: one with slices of cheese, another with an exhortation to enjoy one’s dinner, but containing an unprintable expletive. Holt’s mother, for whom Roxanne was named, built the tables. “When I have money, I’ll buy barstools,” Holt said.

There’s a lot more to be done: a bank of windows needs curtains, there are unrealized plans for a plant wall, and on a November visit, Holt was working on patching missing pieces of flooring in the kitchen. But the space was already warm and invigorated with Holt’s signature quirky magic. “I sit in here all the time,” she said. “If my cat was here, I would never leave.”

If my cat was here, I would never leave.

With Roxanne’s expansion also comes the end of Holt’s one-man-band ethos. “I don’t have as much of a chip on my shoulder. I don’t feel like I have as much to prove to people. This is more about being happy and building something,” said Holt.

“I’d like there to be more R&D, and process,” Holt said. “There will be more technique, more time-consuming food.” By letting other cooks into the kitchen, Holt will also be opening up her conversations around food.

That isn’t to say she’s leaving her introversion behind. “We didn’t have a friends-and-family, and I don’t think we will. I don’t feel that close with anyone,” she said. Rather, Holt has been months in soft-opening mode, cooking dinners in the new space mostly solo, with another cook in the kitchen, and two servers on the floor.

A few weeks after I visited the construction zone that was the new Roxanne and interviewed Holt, I snagged a seat at a friend’s table for a soft open dinner. The meal started with a silky, chilled, raw fluke dish, topped with translucent slivers of dino melon. Holt plated crispy house-made tater tots on a generous pile of sweet raw bay scallops, the same size as the tots, in a porcelain dish shaped like a flower, and finished with a swoop of olive oil. There was an add-on of a perfectly grilled octopus tentacle ($21), its suckers sublimely crispy, served with a wedge of satsuma for squeezing, and a dollop of sour cream-based onion dip.

After a course of hot rigatoni served with bundles of Vietnamese herbs and shrimp sausage we were instructed to dip into the lingering fire of the buttery, chile-flecked pasta sauce, we were given a “break” or palate cleanser, in the form of a persimmon creamsicle dolloped into a tiny wine glass and layered with toasted marshmallow fluff.

Holt loves to pair humdrum with luxury: the sushi-chain sesame dressing, onion drip, creamsicle, and bananas foster. When it comes to unexpected flavor pairings and dishes she knows not everyone will love, Holt also has no fear.

“I want to have a cold pasta on the menu, like from Massara, Rezdora’s sister restaurant. They had a cold pasta with raw shrimp and the reviews of it were not great. People said it was hit or miss. But I loved it,” she said. (“Like your infamous raw cheesesteak that Craig LaBan was famously not a fan of?” I asked, recalling her most polarizing dish, and one of my personal favorites. “Yes, which I love even more, especially now that we use [ethically raised meat company] Happy Valley for the meat.)

With a larger, more functional restaurant space, Holt is still taking her time with re-opening, but she is determined to recapture the old space’s vibe. “It was a space that forced you to get to your neighbors a little bit, and the fact that we don’t really have a cuisine type – I just draw from all the countries I’ve lived in,” she said. “I feel like a citizen of the world and I just don’t understand why more people don’t feel that way.”

The new Roxanne is in soft open mode from the rest of the year, with dinners that Holt is still cooking solo on Saturday and Monday nights. They are $95 per person, not inclusive of tax and tip and they are mostly sold out (Holt posts last-minute open seats on Instagram). “At the turn of the year, we’ll go into a la carte,” Holt said. There will be more staff brought on, more days open, and there will also be a tasting menu, most likely priced at $120 per person, served in the former sushi seats.

Correction: An original version of this story said the new location was in Old City. It is in Queen Village.