Slideshow

First Look at Rucola, Bringing Northern-Italian-Style Vegetables to Boerum Hill Next Week

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Photo: Michael Allin / New York Magazine

Before venturing into the restaurant business, Henry Moynahan Rich co-founded Oral Fixation mints, a brand known as much for its sleek retro packaging as for its breath-freshening properties. There is a similar emphasis on style at Rucola, the Boerum Hill brownstone-cum-Piedmontese farmhouse Rich opens next week with his cousin Julian Brizzi, a veteran of Hotel Delmano and Prime Meats. The wine list is primarily Northern Italian, the cocktails laced with amari and bitters, and the room itself clad with reclaimed Pennsylvania barn wood and rustic farm implements. To stand out from the meat-centric competition, chef Joe Pasqualetto (late of Gilt) has devised a vegetable-focused menu of salads and housemade pastas, many incorporating locally grown produce that will also be available for retail in a sort of customizable CSA. Daytime café service will offer morning espresso and pastry, and sandwiches like roasted pork and broccoli rabe on housebaked bread. But dinner launches first, with such seasonal selections as frisée with pancetta and peas, charred spring onions, and potato gnocchi with green-garlic pesto. Mint, anyone?

Rucola, 190 Dean St., at Bond St.; Boerum Hill; 646-389-1317

First Look at Rucola, Bringing Northern-Italian-Style Vegetables to Boerum Hill