I dropped in on Rafi Bildner, chef and owner of Hilltown Restaurant in Egremont, on a snowy Tuesday morning—one of the two days each week the restaurant is not open for service. But it was plenty lively inside with sous chef Lonny Geller working on a long-simmering Genovese (a beef and onion sauce for pasta) and his tomato-laced rabbit ragout all while keeping an eye on one young cook who was pulling warm, fresh mozzarella while another longtime employee was carving generous logs of dense cheese for their addictive mozzarella fritti with homemade marinara sauce. As a former restaurant chef myself, I could recognize and enjoy the uniquely calm qualities of time and space that a restaurant enjoys during its off days when the cooks can fully settle into their craft without the impending deadline of the doors opening promptly at 5 p.m. and seats filling up soon thereafter.
My conversation with Bildner has been edited for length and clarity.
KATY SPARKS
Rafi, what gave you the confidence and ambition to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant after years of doing pop-ups as a pizza nomad in the Berkshires?
RAFI BILDNER
It comes down to a few things. First, we’re sitting next to this wall of photos that show my family history, and you can see that I come from a long lineage of food entrepreneurs. I dug up a bunch of these old photos from the Rutgers archives where my grandfather had donated them, as well as other memorabilia from my family’s many generations in the supermarket and food-distribution business in New Jersey. And my grandmother on my mom’s side was always the consummate host. She was a Jewish historian by profession and a renowned home entertainer and chef who taught me how to bake challah.
Long story short, food has been in my blood and in my soul and in my family. Providing hospitality and connecting people through food just feels natural to me. At Hilltown we aim to practice a ‘joyful hospitality.’ Our craft is serious, but we also get at the end of the day it’s just pizza, and we want it to feel fun and approachable. In the Berkshires, we need places that can be casual but feel elevated through the dedication to thoughtful local sourcing that supports our local food system. So, Hilltown is all those things at once.
SPARKS
How did you land in this historic space? The former John Andrews restaurant was a beloved restaurant auspiciously sited to attract customers from the nexus where Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York meet.
BILDNER
I started looking for a property in 2019 and was really scouring the region from the Hudson Valley to southern Vermont. But my heart and home has always been in the Berkshires, so when Dan Smith (the former owner of John Andrews) and I started talking about this property, it became clear to me that this was the place for my restaurant. And I definitely feel like a part of a younger generation of food entrepreneurs in this post-COVID-era, building on what the previous generations have created with their amazing runs.
I’m 33 years old with no kids yet, so it felt like the perfect time to jump into this industry. I love to see how people are experiencing this space—the same couple that comes in on a Friday for a date night comes back a week later at 5 p.m. when we open for a meal with their kids. I think we need more places like this where people can be deliberate and flexible about how they spend their money.
SPARKS
Tell us about your journey to educating yourself about the ingredients, culinary training, and traditions of southern Italy so you could then translate them to the Berkshires?
BILDNER
The culinary traditions of Southern Italy are very important to me. In 2021 and 2022, I went back to embark on a bike trip literally called ‘Pedaling for Pizza’ launching from Naples to all over the south meeting farmers and winemakers. And my adopted Italian family, the Di Pietro family of the super rural, small village of Melito Irpino in the hills of the Campania region, taught me so much over five years of various apprenticeships with them at their legendary trattoria. But they also ultimately encouraged me to return home to support my own local food economy as they do theirs. Cooking for a community means really being a part of the fabric of your local agricultural system. Building strong relationships, like my mentor Enzo Di Pietro does with his providers and suppliers, is super important to me here in the Berkshires. And there is a common sensibility at work between Southern Italy and this area. I tell Enzo, jokingly, that the Berkshires is very similar to Campania but without olives, wine, or hard cheese like a pecorino, and his response is: ‘That sounds terrible—why would we ever go there?!’ But when I tell them about the extraordinary meat purveyors we have, the small-scale vegetable farms, incredible cheese makers all over the region, and the flour we source from Ground Up Grain in the Pioneer Valley, then he agrees it sounds very similar to their sensibility in Campania.
SPARKS
And you draw on farmers and artisan food makers from all over New England and Upstate New York, not just the Berkshires, right?
BILDNER
Yes, absolutely. Lonny, my friend and sous chef, is also deeply bought in to this time-intensive commitment to local food sourcing. Our ordering takes hours and hours each week, but it is so worth it to me to get amazing products from local makers. So, what are we putting on our pizza this winter? We have sausage from Raven and Boar, winter greens from Indian Line Farm and Deep Roots Farm, and maple syrup from Turner Farm right around the corner.
SPARKS
Tell us about your interest and even excitement about taking BerkShares as a brand new and super bustling food business.
BILDNER
I started reading about BerkShares back when I was in high school, and there was just something really appealing about its mission to keep money in the local economy. And I remember getting my first BerkShares notes at that time from the local Coop Bank in Great Barrington. Being able to hold up that BerkShares banner in front of my restaurant is very fulfilling for me. It’s a big rite of passage, and I’m honored to take BerkShares at Hilltown.
