Reopenings

Luca Bar Reopens and Plans to Go Back to Basics

The original Luca Lounge.
The original Luca Lounge. Photo: Shanna Ravindra

Vito DiTomaso tells us he reopened Luca Bar yesterday and chalks the seizure owing to non-payment of taxes up to “bad accounting.” “New York City is a very tough market,” he says. “You don’t get bills, you get bills, you don’t get bills, and bills get piled up.” He says he plans to “give it more than we were giving before,” starting with a new menu in the coming weeks that will be more like the one that the original Luca Lounge on Avenue B offered in 1997. “We were the first place to bring a Neapolitan personal pizza to the neighborhood,” says DiTomaso. Though he wants the new pizza-focused menu to be “a little bit of a surprise,” he plans to forgo the fancier food he’s been serving lately (“It’s very hard to run a kitchen and hire chefs and cooks and dishwashers—it takes a toll on business”) and “take it back to how we started — very basic, very loving, caring food.”

Luca Bar Reopens and Plans to Go Back to Basics