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Victoria Blamey Is Heading to Il Buco
Photo: Daniel Krieger
Victoria Blamey is back on Bond Street. The chef, late of Blanca, has taken on the job of culinary director of Donna Lennard’s family of Il Buco restaurants. Along with the original namesake, this includes Il Buco Alimentari (a block north on Great Jones), and Il Buco al Mare in Amagansett. (Lennard also runs a home-goods store, Il Buco Vita, where you can buy the chicest pig-shaped casserole dishes anyone has ever seen.)
The original Il Buco has been open for 31 years, and both of the Manhattan restaurants remain popular places that don’t need to be messed with much, but the company keeps expanding: “Out East, we’re in our fifth summer at al Mare, and last year we took over a commissary kitchen and have a wholesale bakery,” Lennard says. “We’re looking to expand into doing something CPG with farmers, doing more extensive events off-premise and on-premise.” She adds, “We found that we really needed more help and guidance.”
Il Buco is a change of pace from Blanca, where Blamey served a high-caliber tasting menu to just 25 people a night. (Last year, that restaurant was named the second-best restaurant in the city by former New York Times critic Pete Wells; it closed in the spring.) Before Blanca, Blamey opened the short-lived Mena in Tribeca and ran the kitchens at Gotham Bar & Grill and Chumley’s. This is a homecoming of sorts for Blamey, who worked at Il Buco about a decade ago. And while the food is rustic and simple, the Il Bucoverse has been home to some of the city’s top chefs — Justin Smillie, Ignacio Mattos, and Jody Williams, to name three — over the years.
For now, Il Buco’s kitchen will still be run by Roger Martinez, its chef of a decade, and Alimentari is headed by Amelia Kirk. Blamey’s job will be more oversight, and developing deeper relationships with farmers more than the chefs, who are busy running the kitchens, can. “I’m not going to be in the kitchen day-to-day. One of the things I’ll be doing out east is working on the off-site events, developing the menus for that,” Blamey says. “I think al Mare needs maybe a little bit of seasonality, but just a touch, and I think Alimentari, it’s, you know, redesigning the menu and just giving it more like a fresh look.”
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