In Bronxville, the Newest Restaurant in Town Started as Someone's First Job Down the Street

As Forbes reported, Randall Restiano poured wine for tips at Il Bacio Trattoria on Kraft Avenue twenty five years ago. That was before Gramercy Tavern, before running the beverage program at Eataly Flatiron, before any of the résumé lines that would eventually let him open a place of his own. This past December, he did open one, and he did it three blocks from where he started. La Chitarra Pasta Bar & Wine Studio now fills a storefront at 4 Cedar Street, with his cousin Peter Diana behind the bar and chef John Poiarkoff, who spent time in the kitchens at The Modern and Maialino, running service. The wine list runs to roughly 200 labels, mostly Italian, and the pasta comes off the machine on site.

If you have lived in Bronxville long enough to remember when Il Bacio was the new place, this is not really a story about a new restaurant. It is a story about someone coming back.

The Village Keeps Recycling Its Own Cooks

Bronxville is small enough that this kind of return is close to the norm rather than the exception. The village holds about 6,500 residents on a stretch of land 35 minutes from Grand Central, and its restaurant district amounts to a handful of blocks along Pondfield Road, Kraft Avenue, and Cedar Street. There is not much room for a chef to open something new without it landing near where they already worked, ate, or lived.

Poiarkoff is a case in point. He moved to Bronxville during the pandemic to start a family, well before La Chitarra existed as an idea, and worked for a stretch as culinary director for a regional restaurant group before landing in the kitchen at 4 Cedar Street. The chef found the village first. The restaurant came second.

Same Address, Different Restaurant, Same Owner

The clearest version of this pattern sits at 7 Pondfield Road, a building with a longer history than most of its current diners realize. It was once the Gramatan Hotel, a spot with a reputation for hosting Broadway actors on quiet getaways. More recently it has housed La Casa, a family-style Mexican restaurant known for a posole thick with hominy, pork, and cabbage, opened by Spencer Pingel.

Pingel did not leave when he wanted to try something else. He built out the space next door. La Maison and its companion, Ma Maison, are Pingel's new French bistro pair, and Ma Maison in particular has been on his mind since he spent three years living in Paris. When the adjoining space became available, he combined the two new restaurants' oversized kitchens into one operation, right beside the La Casa dining room he already ran. One owner, one address, three concepts running at once.

French Cooking Returns to a Room It Left Decades Ago

Ma Maison is being described locally as the village's first French bistro in decades, and that detail carries more weight once you learn what used to occupy the space that is now the Urban Hamlet. Back in the 1970s, that building held Le Bon Viveur, Bronxville's French restaurant of its era. French cooking left the village for roughly fifty years and came back a few doors down, inside a kitchen built for a Mexican restaurant that decided to expand rather than relocate.

None of this means Bronxville's food scene is standing still. It means the growth is happening inside a small number of names, in a small number of buildings, rather than through outside chains setting up shop for the first time.

Recent Openings, Specifically

For anyone keeping track of what is actually new on the ground right now, the list is short and worth naming directly:

• La Chitarra Pasta Bar & Wine Studio, 4 Cedar Street. Opened at the end of December. Hand-rolled pasta made on premises, a wine list of roughly 200 mostly Italian labels, and seasonal specials that have included wild mushrooms foraged from the Hudson Valley.
• La Maison and Ma Maison, 7 Pondfield Road. Pingel's French bistro pair, built from a combined kitchen and opened alongside the existing La Casa in the same building.

That is the current wave. Everything else on the block predates it by years, sometimes decades.

The Anchors Are Still Doing the Work

New openings get the attention, but most weeknight dinners in Bronxville still happen at places that were already there. Scalini Osteria, run by Angelo and Elio DiRosa, has held its Tuscan menu and courtyard seating for years. Tredici Social carries the name of a small local restaurant group that also runs tredici, tredici STEAK, and tredici NORTH, with a kitchen built around handmade pastas and steaks. Il Bacio and Rosie's Bistro Italiano round out a stretch of Italian dining that predates most of this year's headlines.

Then there is the Bronxville Diner, which sits slightly outside all of this because it is not competing with any of it. Olga and Teddy Giapoutzis opened it on August 22, 2016, styled after the original 1947 Post Road Diner they still run in Norwalk, Connecticut. It is the same retro look, the same extended menu, the same milkshake list, just transplanted north into a village that had never had a diner before. A decade later it is still the place people mean when they say they are getting breakfast in town.

Saturday Morning Still Belongs to Stone Place

If restaurants in Bronxville rotate through the same small set of owners and buildings, the Farmers' Market is the one thing that does not. It runs every Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., May through the third week of November, at Stone Place off Paxton Avenue, a five-minute walk from the train station. It is a producer-only market, meaning every vendor has to grow or make what they are selling within 150 miles of the village, and the lineup changes week to week with live music and coffee running the whole morning.

The market does not have an owner deciding to open a second concept next door or a kitchen changing hands to a cousin. It is the same rhythm every week, regardless of which restaurant just opened or which one has quietly been there since before most of the current residents moved in. If the restaurant scene in Bronxville is a story about a handful of names circulating through a handful of buildings, the market is the one Saturday constant that holds the whole village together while that circulation happens.

That contrast is worth sitting with the next time you are deciding where to eat this weekend. The newest name on the menu almost certainly belongs to someone who already had a Bronxville address, a Bronxville job, or a Bronxville kitchen years before the sign went up.

If you spend time in this village and want to talk about any of it, the food, the neighborhoods behind it, or anything else that makes Bronxville feel like home, Christine Naber is always glad to connect.