Why I Opened Bartolo
In 2023, I wrote down my dream of opening a Spanish restaurant in the West Village. In 2025, I opened Bartolo. Here is why I did it and how.
When it comes to the second album an artist or a band puts out after the success of their first, there is always a set of challenges. The same goes for a sequel to a first film. It is no different for a second restaurant.
Opening one restaurant in New York City is arduous enough. Opening a second is harder. That first restaurant was opened at a different place and time. You put everything you had known working in the field up to that point into your first endeavor. There was so much to show. So much to prove. So much you had compiled and saved and kept in your own back pocket until you were ready to make your debut and tell your story.
That place was Ernesto’s. I opened the restaurant with my wife, Davitta Niakani and her sister Alexandra. The three of us have been partners since the beginning. We went live with Ernesto’s in December 2019. Three months before COVID. Six years later it is still here. I’m very proud and happy to say that. There is nothing else like it, and I don’t see anything else coming close that tries to be like it. There is not much to compare it to. It is it’s own entity and identity.
How do you do that all over again?
If you live or have visited New York, you have probably spent time in the West Village. It is compelling and special. It draws you in. It is unlike any other neighborhood. It’s beautiful and there is a lot of money there. Old and new.
I’m not going to go over all of the history of the neighborhood and how it came to be. I don’t need to list all the many famous people and artists that have inhabited it over the last 70 years. There are books for that. Movies have been made. You can certainly look it all up if you haven’t already or didn’t already know.
I have lived in New York for almost twenty years. The first fifteen of them were spent living in the Lower East Side. My first restaurant (Ernesto’s) is located there. As much as the Lower East Side was and still is a part of me, so is the West Village.
Over the years, I opened and operated a few different restaurants in the West Village for other restaurateurs. As time went on, I was recognized for the work I did. I developed long lasting relationships with many of these businesses’ customers. I became familiar with the neighborhood and its various haunts. All the corners. I would stare at all the homes and houses on my walk to and from work and wonder how different it was to live like that. Hudson street was a far cry from Hester street.
Time passed and the romanticism really started to kick in. I had my West Village friends. My West Village bars. Shop owners I knew. Restaurants I frequented and would eat at late into the night when I got off my shift.
The only thing I didn’t have to complete the package was a restaurant of my own.
I was still working for other people. Say what you will but every chef or restaurateur’s dream is to have a small restaurant on a charming block in the West Village.
In 2017, the concept of Ernesto’s became concrete. I left the West Village. Yet I knew I’d return when the time was right.
Years go by and it is 2023. Ernesto’s is three years old. We are well known as a Basque restaurant. Citywide, nationally, and internationally.
The term Basque starts to be thrown around in describing other restaurant’s cuisine or dishes. Basque cheesecake is as much at home on the dessert menu at Ernesto’s as it is at a natural wine bar in Williamsburg. Restaurateurs that are in town from some other city for three days to dine always have Ernesto’s on their hit list. Then I’d see some time later these same people are opening a Spanish or Basque restaurant of their own in their neck of the woods. People watch my instagram stories and ask how I make a dish, or where they can source a certain anchovy or olive. Sometimes I answered. Sometimes I didn’t.
All in all these situations cemented the understanding that Ernesto’s was a place that people looked at when it came to a standard of what it meant to open a Basque restaurant. In 2023, I was satisfied. Yet I wasn’t completely comfortable or content. I had more to do and say.
I knew then it was time for the next project.
Even though I lived and worked in San Sebastián, my connection to Spain spread well beyond the Basque Country. I’d always go to my flatmate’s family home in Cordoba when we were on holiday. It was a total change in atmosphere and attitude from up North.
On other occasions I’d spend long weekends at friend’s houses in Catalunya, Galicia, Rioja, or Madrid. Sometimes we would take day trips from San Sebastián and cross the border into France and explore Gascony or Bearn.
One thing that I made a point to do no matter where I went was to take in and try the best of the local cuisine. Whether I was at one of my buddy’s houses in Palencia and his mother was cooking, or at a small family owned tavern in Aragon, I was taking notes. I was looking at the menus. The room itself. The silverware. The product. Most importantly, I was enjoying, and I saw that everyone else was too.
As proud as I was being part of the Basque culinary community, I was starting to see how all of Spain had rich and diverse traditions of their own that were centered around the dining room table. No matter the place, home or restaurant, the hospitality was always warm. To me, there was something magical and mythical about these small restaurants with small rooms and great food. They were different than the pintxo & tapas bars you’d see in San Sebastián or Barcelona. These restaurants were intimate. Even if they were casual, there was a level of elegance. The tables were covered in tablecloth or linen, and they were always set properly with the appropriate utensils, vessels, terracotta, china, etc.
The small restaurants existed in every town in Spain. Yet a lot of times they weren’t as widely recognized as a pintxo bar or a steak house or a Michelin spot. I liked the fact that they weren’t on everyone’s radar.
The reality is, this was the way that most Spaniards truly ate.
Knowing what I knew, I was certain that I wanted to continue my story with a restaurant that contained all these elements that I admired and gravitated towards. I wanted to showcase the best of what I liked about Spanish food, but not be pigeonholed to one type of cuisine.
Madrid is the hub of Spain. It has had restaurants that have populated the city where the cuisine is from different regions of the country. Not unlike Paris, or New York, some of these restaurants over time start to rub shoulders and you are left with what I’d consider a “Madrid style” restaurant or taverna. There might be a dish of Madrid style tripe, which is a local recipe, sitting next to a dish of Galician style clams or a Basque stew of calamari in ink sauce.
Just like when I opened Ernesto’s, I had all the notes, research, and experience. Now it was about telling the story. It had to be a little jewel box of a restaurant. Something that reminded me of the hobbit style rooms that would captivate me when I’d be sitting in Madrid eating suckling pig from Segovia and red shrimp from La Costa Brava.
The restaurant had to be in the West Village. It needed to be on that charming block amongst the brownstones. There once was a small population of Spanish and Galician restaurants in the area and I felt we could pay homage to that.
I had the idea in my head. My partners and I knew we wanted to open a place slightly more elegant and adult than our first restaurant. In true Spanish vein, never stuffy or pretentious, yet iconic, classic, and chic.
We had been on the hunt looking at spaces throughout the end of 2023. In early 2024 we were tipped off about a space that was available. Once I saw the location it checked off all the boxes. Before we even went in I realized I knew the space. I had walked past it hundreds of times. It had been a few different businesses over the years. It was one of those places that I used to think to myself that it would be perfect if it was my own.
The entrance was a few steps below street level. Inside, the first room contained a tiny bar area of six seats. I envisioned it as the elegant sala I’d see in the old Madrid restaurants I admired so much. You could start with a martini or a glass of sherry. There would be jamón, anchovies, and almonds to snack on.
Past the bar there was a tiny hallway which led into a front dining room. It could sit around 20 people. There was another dining room in the back which sat about the same. Both cozy. Behind both tiny dining rooms was a small kitchen. It needed a ton of work but I knew it was possible to make it functional.
Within days we were bidding on the space. By summer of 2024 we took over the lease.
It was time to go to work.
Ohhhh this is good… What about how you designed it next
I've lived around the corner from Ernesto's since its opening -- love to see you & the team having family meal when I take my afternoon walks :) Can't wait to visit at Bartolo!