New York chef Patrick Miller became besotted with amari—the Italian herbal liqueurs often served as digestifs—during his initial years at Rucola, the Northern Italian restaurant he opened in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill in 2011. He realized that his memories of Italy and of his discerning Italian grandparents, who loved making and sipping spirits, could serve as inspiration for new iterations of the drink. “I wanted to make spirits that were more balanced than what existed, and felt I could make something worthy of a well-stocked bar,” he says. After a few years of tinkering with making bitters, he left the restaurant and launched the spirits company Faccia Brutto—cheekily named after the Italian term for “ugly face”—in 2020, with a distillery in the borough’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.