Il Buco

Well before every pasta joint in town put suckling pig on their menus and hung antique farm implements from their rafters, Donna Lennard and her partner Alberto Avalle were holding pig roasts and virgin–olive oil tastings at this wildly imitated rustico Italian restaurant–cum–antique store down on Bond Street. It’s possible to argue, as we might, that the newer sister market restaurant, Alimentari, up the street, is more in tune with the times, but the roster of alumni chefs who’ve passed through the kitchen (Jody Williams and Ignacio Mattos to name just a few) reads like a who’s who in the annals of the New York rustico movement.