Figata is Saint-Henri's New Italian-American Red Sauce Temple

Two restaurants closed, and one opened is the shorthand version of how Figata, a new Italian-American spot in Saint-Henri, came to be in the space that housed Tequila Bar for nearly a decade.

The longer version, however, involves four people and their shared appetite for something new (plus a lot of 6 a.m. phone calls): Steve Marcone, who spent over a decade building Bistro Amerigo into an NDG institution where regulars wait outside for table of two and a plate of carbonara; Viral Patel, who owned Tequila Bar, gutting it from scratch years ago by dynamiting river rocks out of the basement; and Rani Agha, the chef-owner of the now-closed 30-seat Entre-Deux in NDG.