by TM Petaccia

When we initially spoke with B-Side Hospitality culinary director Vince Giancarlo about Lady Funari in May, the hope was to open the pasta bar and café by the end of June. That date has come and gone, as often the case of restaurant construction/remodeling, but the former Futo Buta space along the lightrail now looks much closer to the restaurant the group has been describing.

Lady Funari is an homage to Giancarlo’s grandmother, Claire Teresa Funari, and is the latest concept from B-Side partners Kamal Patel, Ankoor Patel (no relation) and Richard Williams, along with beverage director Henry Schmulling.

The bar and counters are in place. A chef’s counter faces the open kitchen, a deep-red dining room is taking shape, and a plush corner “boss’s booth” will overlook it all. Some of the most important pieces of kitchen equipment, however, were only arriving as the B-Side team showed off the space.

For now, the official opening remains simply “fall.” The restaurant is waiting on key equipment and inspections, while changes to the state ABC permitting process have stretched what the team says was once a quick turnaround to four to six weeks. No one is putting a date on the door just yet.

Kamal Patel is less concerned with opening-day predictions than with making sure the pieces eventually fit. “Location matters, the landlord matters more so than people realize, and building matters, the footprint matters,” he says. “So we try to find something that fits what we want, concepts wise.”

Lady Funari will join Vinyl and The Story of Mi Cariño in the B-Side portfolio, but Kamal says the connective tissue among the three is not a particular cuisine or design style. It is the way each place is meant to register as a complete experience. “These concepts are supposed to be all an experience,” he says. “Food, beverage, lighting, seating, music, the smells, the colors, everything.”

The aim, he adds, is for guests to leave “not knowing why they enjoyed themselves so much,” only that all those elements worked together.

That approach helps explain why Lady Funari is neither a large, family-style Italian restaurant nor a conventional neighborhood pasta shop. When the team began developing the idea with culinary director Vince Giancarlo, Ankoor Patel says the direction was clear: “We just don’t want to be family-style Italian. What can we do that’s going to be unique?”

The answer starts with a small menu and an unusually close view of the people making it. Ankoor calls the chef’s counter the restaurant’s focal point, giving guests a view of “all the cooking happening, all the drama … basically all the fireworks.” The other side of the room will offer a more intimate bar experience, with windows looking toward South End and the light rail.

The room will seat approximately 40 people, with room for another 40 on the patio. Giancarlo expects the indoor space to feel tight, lively, and filled with the kind of controlled commotion he remembers from the Sunday meals of his childhood.

Giancarlo envisions Lady Funari as creating the same vibe “Mom-Mom” Claire delivered with her weekly family dinners, often beginning with preparations in the middle of the week and continue from Sunday morning “until the last relative went home.” Giancarlo remembers her cooking all day and watching everyone else eat all night, feeding an extended family that grew and contracted around her table.

“It always all centered around food, and the food always centered around bold flavors, and it all came back to family,” he says.

Giancarlo’s own career has repeatedly returned to Italian cooking, including time with Frank Scibelli and Mama Ricotta’s and opening The Jimmy for Noble Food & Pursuits. Lady Funari, he says, will not duplicate either of those restaurants, nor the nearby North Italia.

In this one, pasta production is part of the show. An Emilio Miti pasta sheeter and other equipment will allow the kitchen to make extruded and sheeted pastas, fresh and dried noodles, lasagna, filled shapes such as agnolotti and ravioli, and hand-shaped pastas such as orecchiette.

“You won’t get a pasta that’s not house-made in this building,” Giancarlo says.

The opening menu is expected to include roughly seven pastas, three appetizers, and a couple of desserts. It will change frequently, but Giancarlo says brevity is part of the discipline. “I’ve redone the menu at least ten times so far,” he says. “We want every single item on the menu to be a banger,” he says. “So we’re not going to waste time with twenty-plus items.”

One dish discussed early in Lady Funari’s development, Giancarlo’s family spaghetti with blue crabs, illustrates how those ideas have evolved. He has tested versions with Alaskan king crab, canned crab, and other alternatives, but none completely captures his mother’s dish.

“There’s only one real way to emulate the way mon-mom made the dish,” he says.

That requires live blue crabs, which Giancarlo expects he can source from North Carolina for only about three months of the year unless he brings them down from New Jersey. He has developed other versions of crab pasta for the months when live blue crabs are unavailable, leaving the family preparation as a seasonal dish rather than forcing a year-round imitation.

As with B-Side’s other restaurants, Giancarlo says the kitchen will try to source 75% to 85% of the menu locally, including proteins. During peak produce season, he expects to continue his relationships with area farms such as Boy & Girl Farm and Harmony Ridge Farms, as well as the local farm aggregator Freshlist.

Beverage director Henry Schmulling has a family connection to the concept as well: his partner is Giancarlo’s sister. He plans to carry the restaurant’s combination of family tradition and B-Side personality into a beverage program built around a tightly edited, rotating wine selection.

Italian classics will be available, Schmulling says, but “we’re going to put our own B-Side spin on things.” That means several spritzes and Negronis, house cocktails, house-made Italian-style liqueurs, and, as the program develops, special-order Italian gins, vodkas, and amari.

A wine window inspired by the small buchette del vino of Florence is planned between the restaurant, the patio, and the lightrail side of the building. The team is still working out exactly how it will operate, but Schmulling envisions starting with a simple glass of red or white and expanding from there. A full espresso machine will be used during dinner service before Lady Funari eventually adds daytime café hours.

That phased approach is deliberate. The team wants to open the restaurant, establish the dinner menu and bar program, and then add the wine-window and cafe pieces as the space and neighborhood reveal how they should work. “We’re going to slow-play it,” Schmulling says. “We’ll be releasing things in a manner this space provides us. It’s the perfect opportunity to do things little-by-little. We’re going to have some fun.”

The building itself provides a useful connection between old and new. Futo Buta operated there for 13 years, and both Kamal and Giancarlo speak respectfully of the energy its late founder, Michael Shortino, brought to the room. In a nod to the past and present, Kamal Patel notes “we will still have an imposing chef standing back there.” Some equipment and back-of-house infrastructure remain, but the narrow dining room has been reorganized around an open kitchen and the interaction between cooks, bartenders, and guests.

“You’re not going to know where to look, whether it’s the bartender making something or the chef making something,” Giancarlo says. “You’ll be entertained the entire time.”

That may be the most concise description of what Kamal Patel wants Lady Funari to become: not merely another Italian restaurant competing in an increasingly crowded category, but a room whose food, drinks, movement, sound, and personality make their case together.

“We don’t live in anybody else’s lane,” he says. “We create our own lanes.”

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