Restaurant of the 12 months: BOSA Meals & Drink | The Supply Weekly

While you received’t discover us whipping out a flowery rubric to attain our contenders for the Supply Weekly’s Restaurant of the 12 months, we do are likely to search for just a few key issues when our foodie group makes its choice: Nice meals, in fact, but in addition a welcoming and enticing ambiance, a little bit of neighborhood buzz, and an amazing back-story of native homeowners dedicated to bringing one thing helpful to the scene.

BOSA Meals & Drink checks all these bins, incomes it the Restaurant of the 12 months on this yr’s Supply Weekly Restaurant Information.

Throughout our latest go to, BOSA’s homeowners reiterated a narrative they’d advised the Supply in 2021, when Donna Britt wrote our story concerning the opening of what she referred to as a “neighborhood Italian restaurant”: two chef-friends meet in Aspen, get alongside nice and dream of opening up their very own spot collectively in the future.

The product of that dream is a buzzing restaurant on Galveston Avenue the place fresh-made pasta is at all times on the menu, the place there’s an amazing wine record, a cool modern-meets-rustic inside and the place neighbors like to stomach as much as the bar and greet a pleasant face. Chef-owners Invoice Dockter and Nate King, together with front-of-house supervisor Jenny King, exude a welcoming, pleasant vibe, and appear genuinely joyful about all the things from the pending summer time busy season to the act of twisting pasta round a fork in an effort to please the journalists and photographer stopping in for a photograph shoot throughout prep time.

BOSA’s homeowners aimed for an Italian-French model to the menu, combining the best hits of Italian delicacies — Cacio E Pepe and Rigatoni, for instance – with French gadgets akin to snails and pommes frites with truffles and shaved parmesan.

“Once we have been opening this place, the preliminary idea was, eating places that have been like what we noticed in many various cities that we didn’t see in Bend – which is a straightforward, primarily Italian restaurant,” Nate King advised the Supply Weekly. “We didn’t need to shrink back from French meals both. It was primarily simply to do a neighborhood model.”

Bendites have undoubtedly responded to that idea; final yr, in our annual “Better of Central Oregon” readers’ ballot, readers voted BOSA because the Finest New Restaurant and likewise voted it Finest Pasta.

“The assist we’ve gotten has been actually overwhelming,” Dockter stated. “To know that we put our coronary heart and souls into this and to see that response mirrored again is sort of wonderful.”

And whereas the aim for these two cooks has been to create a welcoming – and scrumptious —neighborhood place, additionally they get one thing out of it, too.

“The uncooked power of the restaurant – we needed to create that, however when it’s only a clean empty constructing you don’t know what it’s going to become,” Nate King stated. “But it surely’s wonderful being in that open kitchen and simply feeling the power of individuals strolling in.”