About Us
Our Story
Lita is an Iberian restaurant in Aberdeen Township, New Jersey, opening this spring. It is the third restaurant from Neilly Robinson and Chef David Viana: the duo behind the beloved restaurant and cooking school Heirloom Kitchen, and the award-winning Heirloom at The St Laurent.
Lita is the story of David’s family. Named for his mother, Rosa Lita, it’s a celebration of the culinary legacy of his family, who immigrated from Portugal to Newark, New Jersey in the 1970s. David was born into this bustling Portuguese neighborhood and first learned a love of food from his grandmother, Isaura. They spent afternoons together after school, and David watched and helped her prepare Portuguese classics like fejauda, rissóis de camarão and fideo.
In the 20th century Newark was known as Little Lisboa for the vitality of its Portuguese immigrant community. With Lita, David and the team are excited to be revisiting this history with a modern Iberian menu, a robust regional wine program, and the warm hospitality Rosa Lita and Isaura always provided.
Food
Many of Isaura’s dishes take center stage on the menu at Lita, with David and Chef de Cuisine Brian Lopes at the helm. Most of the menu is prepared in the open fire hearth oven that anchors the restaurant–it sits in the middle of the dining room.
Guests will start with ‘Essenciais’, a highly shareable collection of Spanish and Portuguese light bites and tapas, before diving into a bevy of charred vegetables, rich stews, fresh seafood and iconic meat dishes including piri piri chicken and bitoque. Lita’s signature paellas are classically prepared in the hearth oven for the very best crispy crunchy socarrat.
Dessert
The dessert menu, developed by Chef David Viana and our pastry chef Jessica Gasparo is short and sweet. It features comforting but perfectly executed classics like flan, pastel de nata, and serradura (David’s favorite). But the showstopper is an indulgent, mahogany brown basque cake with hot sherry cream.
Drinks
Cocktails
Lita’s cocktail menu is inspired by Iberian spirits but celebrates ingredients from around the world.
Bar Manager Ricardo Rodriguez (formerly of Miami’s Broken Shaker) has crafted 16 cocktails across 4 categories: Highballs, Classico, Casiero and Martinis.
Signatures include:
Tinto De Verano | a spin on a Spanish specialty,
made with red table wine and citrus soda
Caipirinha | the Latin classic, updated with citrus oil
Membrillo y Queso | gin, vermouth, quince and cheese foam
Gardineria Martini | a love letter to Jersey
Wine
The wine list at Lita features exclusively Iberian selections from a range of old and young producers across Spain, Portugal and the peninsula’s neighboring islands.
La Otra
Next door to Lita is La Otra, an intimate neighborhood cocktail bar. Bar Manager Ricardo Rodriguez has developed a collection of globally inspired cocktails, veering away from the strictly Iberian inspiration driving the drinks program at Lita.
Guests can swing by for a cocktail before dinner, or spend an evening just at La Otra.
This summer, La Otra will also launch cocktail classes created and taught by Ricardo.
Our Team
Lita operates with a unique team structure. Every team member is fully cross trained and rotates between front of house and back of house positions on a weekly basis. All non-management team members start at the same base salary, and split tips evenly. This model prioritizes equity across the team by ensuring equal pay, and by eliminating the industry’s outdated FOH vs. BOH hierarchy.
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David was born and raised in Little Lisboa: Newark, New Jersey’s Portuguese immigrant community. Growing up, he spent afternoons with his grandmother, Isaura, who introduced him to many of the dishes that grace Lita’s menu today.
He turned his early love of food into a storied career, rising through the ranks at Mesa Grill, Eleven Madison Park, Marea and Villa Joya in Portugal. He joined the team at Heirloom Kitchen in 2016, where he received three-and-a-half stars from The Star-Ledger within weeks. In 2018 he was nominated as Best Chef Mid Atlantic by The James Beard Foundation, shortly before competing on Top Chef’s 16th season.
In addition to leading the culinary helm at Lita, he is the Executive Chef at Heirloom Kitchen and Heirloom Kitchen at The St Laurent. When he’s not working he is spending time with his son, Cole, teaching him to make fejauda and taking him to Chuck E Cheese.
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Neilly is the Managing Director of Lita, Heirloom Kitchen and Heirloom Kitchen at The St Laurent.
A self taught entrepreneur, Neilly founded Heirloom Kitchen–the group’s first restaurant–in 2013 with her mom, Judy. Growing up, their family dinner table was always beautiful and bountiful. So, after a decade working in fashion in New York City she decided to return to her Jersey roots, creating a restaurant and cooking school. Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Heirloom Kitchen has grown into one of the east coast’s most beloved restaurants, with Chef David Viana leading the kitchen.
In the summer of 2022, on the heels of a wildly successful pop up in Philadelphia, Neilly and David launched Heirloom at The St. Laurent in Asbury Park: an upscale restaurant and bar in a restored historic hotel. Lita is the duo’s third concept.
Neilly supervises everything across Heirloom Hospitality. She oversees people and culture, marketing and creative, and number crunching, all the while ensuring that no detail gets overlooked.
When she isn’t working she’s busy researching where she’s traveling to next!
*Neilly is 2024 James Beard Foundation Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership Fellow
David Viana
Neilly Robinson
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Danny is an east coast hospitality veteran who supervises all the day-to-day operations at Lita and Heirloom at The St. Laurent.
He joins Lita’s team as a lifelong friend of David’s, and as an expert in service. He has spent more than a decade with Mark Daniel Hospitality, overseeing three 100+ seat restaurants with robust bar programs across New Jersey.
At Lita, he is spearheading the restaurant’s unique team structure. Every team member is cross trained in front of house and back of house operations, a model that prioritizes equity and elevates each guest’s experience.
Brian Lopes
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Brian Lopes was born and raised in Bellville, New Jersey, but his heart lies in Portugal. The son of immigrants from Gafanha do Carmo and Peso da Régua in the Douro, his fondest memories are of his summers spent in Portugal.
Brian has spent time at kitchens in Spain working for the highly esteemed Parador Hotels. He has also worked at Aldea and Lupulo in Manhattan, the latter where he went on to become the Junior Sous for Gerorge Mendes, whom at a young age, was awarded Best New Restaurant in the LES according to Refinery29 Magazine and Eater.
Brian leads the team at Lita as our Chef de Cuisine where he gets to share his love with Portuguese cuisine not only with his collegues but with all of you. When Brian isn’t leading the team at Lita, you’ll find him spending time with his wife Denise and his two young children Kaiden and Maddox.
Jillian Parisi
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Jillian Parisi was born and raised in Staten Island, NY…as she likes to call it, “Staten Italy”. From a young age Jillian always loved food, particularly the creativity and memory that each bite could encapsulate. At 10, Jillian started cooking with her Aunt while summering down the Jersey Shore, learning new skills and recipes passed down from her Late Nanny.
At 18, she attended the CIA, Culinary Institute of America, and landed an externship with Del Posto. After two months at Del Posto, Chef Mark Ladner offered Jillian her first professional cooking job where she worked at each station—finally earning the role of Chef de Partie. After Del Posto, Jillian spent some time as meat Sous Chef at Guy Savoy in Caesars Palace.
At the end of 2019, Jillian moved back to NY and began cooking with USHG at Marta and Vini Fritti. Then in 2020, Jillian began cooking at Semolina Restaurant, and was lucky enough to put some new staples on their menu and really get creative. In 2023, she left Semolina to pursue something new and exciting, and that's when she met Chef David. It has been a dream come true to work with people so hungry and passionate about this industry, at Lita. She now holds the title of Executive Sous Chef and is humbled to be a part of something great.
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Born and raised in Miami, Ricardo is a Cuban American who found his way into the beverage industry via restaurant kitchens. He kick started his career at James Beard nominated Cacao and 190 before moving behind the bar.
He has trained with award winning bartender Julio Cabrera and was a finalist in The Bacardi Legacy Cocktail Competition. Before joining the team at Lita he was a bartender at Broken Shaker and the Bar Manager of its sister restaurant, Twenty-Seven Restaurant.
Jessica Gaspero
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Jessica Gaspero was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. She studied pastry at the French Culinary Institute and started her career primarily working in Philadelphia. She honed her skills in bakeries and restaurants like Rae and R2L where she worked under Executive Pastry Chef Peter Scarola. She then worked under James Beard nominated Chef Josh Lawler and Chef Todd Fuller at both iterations of The Farm and Fisherman Tavern as the executive pastry chef for 10 years before joining the team at Lita. She is passionate about developing desserts that complement a vision, and her creativity shines through at Lita with her Iberian spin on classic pastries.
When Jess is not at work, she is spending time with her fiancée Laura, and their three kids, Natalie, Aidan, and Louis, at home in Millstone, NJ.