Journal

Ciabatta Bread: 5 Tips by Sheena Otto, Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria’s Head Baker

"During her time at Il Buco, Otto has developed their bread program to incorporate a slow fermentation process and specialty flours, including one from Sicily. In addition to Il Buco’s classic breads like ciabatta, focaccia fino, and filone, Otto added breads like a naturally fermented buckwheat and a bourbon raisin fennel bread. But Italian breads are still at the root of Il Buco’s bread program, and Otto’s bread wizardry has ensured the restaurant, market, and café serve some of the best bread in New York City."

We are open in Montauk for a season, taking over the restaurant space of Donna's lifelong friends Fernando Trocca & Martin Pittaluga who will be staying in Santa Teresita this summer.  With Chef Justin Smillie at the helm, Donna brings her passion for relaxed and unstudied fine dining to il Buco at Mostrador Marram, offering abundant counter service of savory meats, local seafood, local vegetables, and housemade bread and pastries from il Buco Alimentari. 

From the Wall Street Journal: 

"What is particularly remarkable is how the restaurants have established operations in the East End so quickly, signing lease deals or working out other arrangements just weeks ago.

'It was totally crazy. It was just like, ‘Let’s do this,’ said Donna Lennard, owner of Il Buco and Il Buco Alimentari, who formed a partnership with the Marram hotel in Montauk to bring her Italian-influenced dining concept there this summer. Ms. Lennard said she didn’t even start talking with the property about the idea until late May."

You can read the full article here. See you on the beach! 

Photo Credit: Paul Brissman 

il Buco Alimentari is reopening for pick up and delivery, with an emphasis on our market and Executive Chef Justin Smillie at the helm. Donna is thrilled to be collaborating once again with Justin and adapting the Alimentari model to continue serving the needs of the community.

"At Alimentari, Smillie isn’t looking to reinvent the menu, as many chefs do when they take over a kitchen. Instead, he’ll continue to serve the spit-roasted, peppercorn-rubbed short ribs and bucatini cacio e pepe that put the place on the map." Read the full piece from Kate Krader on Bloomberg here.

Shop our housemade bread, ancient grain pizza, selection of pastas and sauces, wine, cocktails, fully prepared dinner boxes & Mediterranean pantry provisions on Caviar. 

 

 

 

 

 

Florence Fabricant spotlights il Buco Vita's 2nd street showroom in her weekly Front Burner column for the New York Times food section.

"Since 2013, Donna Lennard, the owner of Il Buco and Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria in NoHo, has been selling country-style Italian tableware and home accessories from a loft near the restaurants. Now, Il Buco Vita has a new permanent home nearby. Earth tones dominate the pottery, glass, dinnerware, pitchers and serving pieces. There are rustic cutting boards, soft linens and throws, small paintings of food and landscapes, some vintage items, cookware and twisted beeswax candles with double wicks. Most of what’s on display is also sold online."

“At il Buco everyone takes it for granted that there will be 10 Sagrantinos on the list...the only other place you see that is Montefalco.”

Our beloved Wine Director Roberto Paris speaks about his relationship with the Caprai Vineyard, and the history and cultivation of the tannic Sagrantino grape that (among others) sets il Buco's wine program apart. See the full article on Forbes.

Every year, GQ food critic, Brett Martin, gives a lot of shine to the best new restaurants in America. But this time he turns his attention to the places that have been our go-tos for a couple of decades now. They are too old to be new, too new to be institutions. In other words, eat here now and forever. 

Be sure to read about il Buco, "the sleeping tigre of rustic, regional Italian food" in the full. 

For 25 years, Il Buco has served perfect pasta and Umbrian charm to the loyal customers who have returned again and again to its small cobblestoned block.

"Late one balmy September night, Donna Lennard and the crew from her beloved Italian restaurant Il Buco start to roast a large, plump pig outside their front door on Bond Street. By the next day it will be deeply succulent with just the right crackle, and friends and neighbors will settle down to porchetta sandwiches with blueberry balsamic mostarda, panzanella, ricotta fritters, beer and wine. A pig roast has become something of a ritual to mark special occasions at Il Buco and this is a big one: New York restaurant years are like dog years, and reaching 25 in a city where restaurants open and shut with fatal regularity is no small accomplishment."

Read the full article, written by Reggie Nadelson, online in T Magazine.

The Grub Street Diet: Il Buco’s Donna Lennard Takes Her Drinks to Go

By Chris Crowley 

Donna Lennard’s Bond Street antique store turned restaurant Il Buco is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. That kind of longevity is rare for any restaurant, and nobody is more surprised than Lennard. “It wasn’t what we were setting out to do,” she says. “You just set out to do something that you love and it takes on a life of its own, with your somewhat leadership.” You can see why it worked out for Lennard, who clearly has a firm grasp on how to live the good life: popping by her former Il Buco chef Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant Estela for scallop crudo and chocolate cake, getting a soft serve and margarita to go in the Hamptons, and pairing Pulp Fiction with “meringue extravaganzas” for movie night with her son...

Read the full story on The Grub Street Diet.

il Buco’s very own Founder and Mother, Donna Lennard, spoke to NY Mag about balancing Motherhood and work,"My own philosophy as a busy mom and restaurateur has been to incorporate my motherhood into my work life — Joaquin was quickly at home at the restaurant and found a built-in extended family that’s always ready to greet him." Read the full NYMag article here.

il Buco Alimentari e Vineria in Manhattan is an Italian specialty store and restaurant that has recently developed its own leavened innovation. This ancient grain focaccia is made entirely from ancient Sicilian organic triticum durum whole wheat timilia flour that is specially milled for il Buco by a single producer. Danny Rubin, il Buco's Retail Operations Manager, is the reason it happened, "Two years ago I was in Sicily meeting with our producers, and we met this guy who's using this flour... it grows in these gigantic fields, really, really high... basically when [wheat production] changed and became a chemically processed production, homogenized, the flour deformed and got smaller... all the variation is where flavor comes from in the grain."   

 

Read the full Forbes article here!

Find us in Zagat's roundup of the best places to treat yourself to lunch here.

Read about il Buco Alimentari's in house batteria and 20 year aged balsamic in Jimmy Im's review for CNBC here.

Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop has named our handmade Bevagna serveware as the perfect housewarming gift—"any cheese board setup or dinner entrée looks infinitely better when served on Italian glazed terra-cotta."

 

Read the full gift guide here.

Read about il Buco's Wine Director, Roberto Paris, in Forbes online. 

It’s his fondness for “odd characters,” for wines wrongly disregarded elsewhere but thankfully found here, for the kind of conversations launched by a first sip of something you didn’t know existed just a minute ago. “I love the catch of the day, things that fall into your net while you’re fishing for something else,” he says. Helpfully, to those of us with unquenchable curiosity, Paris makes some of those catches especially handy: on his list there is an extensive selection of Italian wines poured one glass at a time.

"New Yorkers don’t just happen upon apartments. There is always guaranteed to be a wild, unbelievable-if-you-think-too-hard-about-it story that brought person and home together. So unsurprisingly, New York City restaurateur Donna Lennard remembers every last detail of snagging her place. It was 1994, the year she signed the lease for what would become the location of her flagship eatery, Il Buco. It only made sense for her and her partner to live upstairs—the restaurant is here and we should live above it; it’s too noisy for anyone, Donna remembers thinking—but it took months of negotiation, briefly losing the apartment to a higher bidder, and the discovery of a dead neighbor for the apartment to finally be theirs."

Read more about Donna Lennard's home online at Clever by Architectural Digest

Read about Donna Lennard and il Buco in Conde Nast Traveler's story A Food Pilgrimage to Umbria with the Owner of New York's Legendary Il Buco!

"There are a few reasons Il Buco has been on every New Yorker’s short list for the past 23 years: Eating there feels like going to a dinner party in the antique-filled, candlelit home of an eccentric Italian aristocrat. It’s celebrity-studded but devoid of any “scene.” And they serve the kind of simple Mediterranean dishes—grilled fish, handmade pasta, warm fruit tarts with fresh ricotta—that depend upon the absolute best ingredients.

"Il Buco’s casual offshoot—one part winecentric restaurant (Vineria), one part gourmet food pantry (Alimentari)—pulls off the combo more elegantly. The two halves of the former warehouse space share a single uncluttered aesthetic. The retail portion is artfully curated like a miniature Dean & DeLuca, with dangling hams and bespoke hunks of cheese, high-end sauces and condiments arrayed on antique shelves like interior-design baubles..."

TimeOut 100 Best Restaurants in NYC

She's on a roll! Check out Sheena Otto and her work with Anson Mills grains in The New York Times Food section.

Read The Article Here

Please join Donna Lennard, the il Buco family, neighbors & friends to celebrate our annual "Sagra del Maiale!”

This year we will be donating profits from the roast to the Comune di Amatrice in central Italy. The namesake of pasta “Amatriciana,” the city of Amatrice was devastated by the recent earthquake on August 23rd.

Il Buco Pig Roast
Sunday, September 25th
12pm - 6pm
47 Bond St. NYC

il Buco Alimentari & Vineria had the pleasure of hosting Jordan Salcito, founder of Bellus wines for her recent feature with Grub Street!

Photo Credit: Noah Fecks

Architectural Digest included us in their recent round-up of Top Dog-Friendly NYC Restaurants. Check out what they had to say about us below!

" il Buco - Formerly an antiques store, this cozy Bond Street staple has quickly risen to international fame with an authentic menu full of recipes from Italy and Spain. Wood furnishings, brick walls, and dotted candlelight draw in locals and celebrities from all over the world. Dogs can join their owners in the restaurant’s backyard dining area, which offers water bowls and dog treats." - AD