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A South Boston Enoteca Is Among Eater’s Best New Restaurants of 2019

Karen Akunowicz’s Fox and the Knife makes the list

A hand pulls away a triangle of taleggio-stuffed focaccia bread from a plate of it.
Taleggio-stuffed focaccia at Fox and the Knife
Sarah Storrer/Eater

Today, Eater Boston’s big sibling Eater.com released its list of the 16 best new restaurants in America, from a walk-up window serving fried jerk wings in San Antonio to a Korean tasting menu restaurant in New York City.

Boston snagged one spot on the list, thanks to chef Karen Akunowicz’s love letter to Italy, Fox and the Knife, a South Boston enoteca that opened in February and pays homage to the time Akunowicz spent learning pasta-making in Modena, in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region.

The restaurant is the first solo venture for Akunowicz, a 2018 James Beard award winner and Top Chef alum, who was previously the longtime executive chef and partner at Myers + Chang in Boston’s South End.

The Fox and the Knife “has always been something inside of [Akunowicz],” she previously told Eater, and it’s meant to be a casual neighborhood joint that draws influences not just from Emilia-Romagna but from elsewhere around Italy. Though multiple regions are represented, the restaurant dials into some hyper-specific regional specialties in a way that much of Boston’s vast Italian and Italian-American food scene doesn’t.

Take the tigelle, for example, a Modena-style bread cooked in special cast-iron pans, or the pasta with a pistachio pesto, a nod to the herb-rich coastal Liguria region. (At opening, this dish featured a typical Ligurian pasta shape, too — trofie. But Akunowicz changes up the pastas now and then, and it’s currently served with campanelle.)

Two pieces of tigelle, a round bread from Modena, Italy, that’s made in a special cast-iron pan
Tigelle at Fox and the Knife
Overhead view of a round white plate filled with bright green twists of pasta.
Campanelle al pesto di pistacchio at Fox and the Knife
Closeup portrait of a woman with a slight smile, looking toward a sunny window to the right. Her hair is bright pink and secured with a red bandana headband. She stands in front of shelves of wine in a restaurant and wears an apron.
Karen Akunowicz, chef and owner of Fox and the Knife

Find out what else landed on the 2019 list here, including a Laotian restaurant in Dallas, a Malaysian all-day cafe in New York, a butcher shop and restaurant in Detroit, and more.

The 16 Best New Restaurants in America [E]
Fox and the Knife Coverage on Eater [EBOS]

Fox & The Knife

28 West Broadway, , MA 02127 (617) 766-8630 Visit Website

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