Bar Ferdinando shall be a real all-day café, with pastries, espresso, drinks, sandwiches, and, after all, panelle.
Picture: Noah Fecks/Courtesy of Bar Ferdinando
When Francesco “Frank” Buffa, the proprietor and operator of the 121-year-old Ferdinando’s Focacceria, out of the blue closed up store for good final winter, the collective response from followers, locals, and anybody involved with vanishing New York was grief, rapidly adopted by questions round what would occur to the house. There was loads of curiosity: Buffa, who owns the constructing, was getting presents slipped underneath the restaurant’s unusually slender doorways. Sal Lamboglia, who owns Café Spaghetti throughout the road and two different eating places shut by, received a name from a neighborhood good friend and sat down with Buffa for a two-hour afternoon chat with the lights off at Ferdinando’s, “speaking about household, life expertise, upbringings, children,” Lamboglia says. Quickly after, in the course of dinner service, his telephone rang. “Frank mentioned, ‘Sal, are you prepared?’ That was it.” He had the keys the next weekend.
“I’m not resurrecting Ferdinando’s,” Lamboglia is fast to make clear. “I’m not doing that.” After a yr of sifting by way of the photographs, relics, dishware, and bottles of vintage amari that have been left behind, enterprise some obligatory upgrades and renovations, putting in a correct bar, and giving the house a number of coats of paint, Lamboglia will as a substitute open Bar Ferdinando on April 15. There’s a not-negligible quantity of outdoor strain that comes with opening in a spot with over a century of historical past related to core reminiscences of crispy chickpea panelle sandwiches and Manhattan Particular on draft. Lamboglia has heard the issues: yellow partitions and maroon beadboard stay, a lot of the art work stays, and the mismatched tiles stay. However slightly than Buffa’s previous household photographs, there now grasp Lamboglia’s previous household photographs. Nonetheless, the place carries an analogous spirit as earlier than. “Being in right here makes you understand this man, Frank, spent 53 years in right here, in a single place, proper?” says Lamboglia. “You don’t discover that.”
Jackie De La Barrera is accountable for pastries and baked items.
The house has gotten a refresh, however all within the service of honoring its earlier tenant.
Espresso and pastries will give option to drinks and snacks because the day goes on.
The mismatched tile ground stays.
Panelle have been essential on the menu.
Images Noah Fecks/Courtesy of Bar Ferdinando
Buffa’s household is Sicilian, Lamboglia’s background — he grew up in an immigrant household in Bensonhurst — is from Naples, and the meals at Bar Ferdinando shall be regionally agnostic. To begin, it is going to be a real all-day bar, opening at 11 a.m. with baked items from pastry chef Jackie De La Barrera (who has led pastry applications at Agi’s Counter and Radio Bakery) like bomboloni crammed with banana or pistachio cream, semolina cake, and prosciutto-and-Parm scones. De La Barrera’s focaccia shall be served in the course of the day, together with Lamboglia’s neighborhood-famous seafood salad with octopus, calamari, lobster, potatoes, parsley, lemon, and olive oil. And anticipate panelle and rice balls that may be sliced, grilled, and served with marinara. (The dinner menu, which continues to be underneath development, shall be a continuation of the identical.)
The marble café tables shall be obtainable for a fast shot of espresso or for lingering. However as a substitute of Manhattan Particular on faucet, a hand-crafted model with contemporary espresso and seltzer will come from Ricardo Echeverri’s bar program. Echeverri, at the moment the final supervisor at Lamboglia’s Swoony’s across the nook, has been making drinks across the metropolis for years — at spots together with Fireplace, Minetta Tavern, and Frenchette. He’s developed an inventory of lighter aperitivi, a limoncello spritz, a Milan-esque Campari and soda, and a fennel-forward highball, in addition to classics just like the Little Italy (a Cynar-inflected Manhattan), a home martini served on the rocks, and an Italian espresso martini.
Because the climate warms, visitors will be capable to get pleasure from these drinks within the yard underneath two fig bushes, the sounds of the BQE dashing previous within the distance, for so long as they’d like. “Need to pop in for a cocktail or for a espresso? Go forward, all day,” Lamboglia says. “We don’t shut.”
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Should you desire to learn in print, you can even discover this text within the March 23, 2026, difficulty of
New York Journal.
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New York Journal.
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