Karen Akunowicz’s Bar Volpe, a South Boston Restaurant, Serves Southern Italian Cuisine

If there’s one dish that embodies the philosophy of Bar Volpe, South Boston’s new southern Italian restaurant and pasta store from chef and restaurateur Karen Akunowicz, it’s the culurgiones, Sardinian stuffed pasta with an intricate seam. It’s all about simplicity on the floor — 4 plump pockets of dough sit in tomato sauce — however lots of effort underneath, and it’s such a regionally particular dish that you just’re unlikely to search out it elsewhere round Boston.

That doesn’t imply that all the things on the menu strictly adheres to the southern Italian repertoire. Whereas Akunowicz is “passionate” (as she says) — or “obsessive” (as she says others say) — about some culinary traditions, she’s additionally “not fairly so staunch” about others, so the menu performs with basic dishes in addition to her personal spins impressed by the flavors of the area.

Bar Volpe is the follow-up to Fox & the Knife, which focuses on northern Italian delicacies, significantly the Emilia-Romagna area. Bar Volpe provides Akunowicz an opportunity to serve dishes that don’t match into the Fox & the Knife idea, and the bigger house additionally permits for the enlargement of the contemporary pasta gross sales she started throughout the pandemic. Actually, her dream of opening a pasta store fueled the opening of the restaurant: A store by itself could be onerous to make financially viable, however it works if it’s connected to a restaurant, she says, and so Bar Volpe is each. A little bit over a decade in the past, Akunowicz was residing in Modena, Italy, waking up at 3 a.m. and studying to make pasta from “little previous women” in a room stuffed with sawhorses topped with plywood; now she’s promoting pasta nationwide via Goldbelly, with a Williams-Sonoma partnership coming quickly.

Right here’s a more in-depth take a look at a number of of the dishes on Bar Volpe’s opening menu.

Pizzetta Bianca

When Akunowicz traveled to Naples, a gaggle of ladies befriended her in a piazza, curious as to why she was there alone. When she defined that she was a prepare dinner and was there to eat pizza, they introduced her round to numerous pizzerias, and that hospitality is a driving pressure behind what she hopes to attain at Bar Volpe. “I need to say, ‘Come hang around. Come eat with us. Allow us to present you this factor.’”

Whereas that reminiscence of consuming pizza with strangers in Naples is an undercurrent at Bar Volpe, the restaurant doesn’t have a pizza oven, so there’s no Neapolitan-style pizza on the menu, however Akunowicz and her staff wished to do one thing within the pizza realm that may make sense for Bar Volpe. They landed on a pizzetta made with laminated dough full of cheese and topped with nigella seeds. “Armenian string cheese has nigella seeds in it,” says Akunowicz, “and I like these flavors collectively. For some purpose the flavors of the cheese saved making me consider that.”

The pizzetta is “tremendous flaky, very crispy, and nice for sharing,” says Akunowicz, noting that Bar Volpe can higher accommodate bigger events than its older sibling, and meant-to-be-shared dishes like these are “the dishes that the restaurant was constructed on.”

Culurgiones

When Akunowicz labored within the pasta store in Modena, the store virtually completely produced tortellini, however the staff would present her easy methods to make completely different pasta shapes, too, like Sardinian culurgiones. “I feel it’s simply such an exquisite, enjoyable form, and I hope that when individuals see them and eat them they know that — on the threat of sounding actually tacky — a variety of love, a variety of effort went into that. It’s actually easy, however there’s a variety of effort, approach, and ability that goes into it.”

Bar Volpe serves a number of different pastas, too, together with bucatini pomodoro with guanciale and spaghetti al limone with Jonah crab.

Fritti Misti

“Ubiquitous, proper?” says Akunowicz. “You possibly can’t go anyplace in Sicily with out having fritti misti.” Whereas creating the dish, she saved coming again to a Rhode Island-style calamari with spicy hots, “and it ended up morphing” into utilizing bomba Calabrese, a spicy pepper unfold, everywhere in the high, balanced with a cooling basil aioli. “It’s a enjoyable illustration of that dish,” she says, noting that it’s one among her favorites on the menu.

One of many restaurant’s antipasti, it joins dishes like farro arancini; porchetta with salsa verde; and grilled artichokes.

Sardinian Paella

Akunowicz inherited a bunch of paella pans with the restaurant. Fascinated about the pans, the wood-fired grill, and her “bizarre obsession” with the Sardinian pasta fregola (little toasted balls sometimes constituted of semolina flour), she determined to make a Sardinian-inspired paella, stuffed with seafood and artichokes, cooked over the wooden fireplace. “It’s one thing we labored on for a really very long time, and I adore it,” she says. “I’m pumped to have the ability to use fregola in that method, the place it’s form of the star of the present, not an afterthought.”

Pollo Arrosto

“I like rooster,” says Akunowicz. At Bar Volpe, it will get brined in buttermilk in a single day after which full of black truffle mayo earlier than firming up and drying out within the walk-in for a day. It’s served with kale — ”I at all times need to eat all the things with braisy, brothy greens,” says Akunowicz.

“We wished the rooster to be easy; we wished the flavors to all actually shine. It’s actually using the wood-fired grill in a method that makes a variety of sense, letting these lovely components shine.”

Desserts

Like Fox & the Knife, Bar Volpe affords an thrilling assortment of amari, and there are a number of desserts to pair with an after-dinner drink, together with gelato en brioche (primarily an Italian ice cream sandwich such as you would possibly discover in Sicily) and a boozy affogato float.

Bar Volpe is at present open for dinner Tuesday by way of Saturday, 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., though Akunowicz hopes to increase the hours sooner or later; the comfy bar/market nook may probably be open for cafe service on weekends. Comply with alongside on Instagram for updates, and make reservations here.