Bufalina is good for sipping wine, eating Neapolitan pizza, and feeling cool - Review - Austin - The Infatuation

"Don’t fill up on bread at Bufalina. Sure, the housemade pane rustico and fancy butter is something special, but it's a trap. Bufalina has firmly established itself as a definitive East Side institution where Austin willingly waits in a hot parking lot for pizza, pasta, good wine, and a good time. But don't miss out on what this place does best. Bufalina has been Austin’s original cool kid pizza-and-natural-wine spot ever since it opened in its original location in 2013 on Cesar Chavez. With bare Edison bulbs and unfinished walls, it always felt homey and bootstrapped, kind of like an underground clubhouse but with esoteric wines alongside classic and sometimes unconventional Neapolitan pies. (Do note there’s also Bufalina Due, a slightly more sanitized second location in a strip mall up in Brentwood that’s nearly as good.) After closing temporarily in 2021, the trailblazer reopened in late 2022, in a different space not far from the original in East Austin, but with the same scrappy vibes, but now with (lucky you) incredible pastas. While just as irrepressibly charming, the whole operation feels a little bit more grown up and focused, like a friend who’s in a band who finally got a real job, but still somehow regularly books shows. photo credit: Richard Casteel Bufalina has always been the dependable source of gently mounded simple salads, fun and obscure wines, and Neapolitan pizzas with a pillowy crust, charred by the wood-fired oven. And with its rebirth comes new dishes: a rotating crudo, a pane rustico that’s basically a half loaf of very good country bread (which, again, you should skip, if only to save room), and a seasonally shifting stracciatella on crusty bread that you should order every time. There are also devastatingly excellent handmade pastas that transform Bufalina from a mere pizza joint into a fully functioning Italian restaurant. Usually, you’ll find three to four of them on the menu, and sometimes even an off-menu one (you just need to know the secret pasta handshake). The pasta here is not delicate. The pasta here means business, and you should just go ahead and order all of them. Again, we told you to not fill up on bread. It’s hard not to be spellbound by Bufalina. The staff are genuine and quietly cool, probably dressed better than you, and probably know more about wine than you do. Yes, it can get a little loud. It is possible you'll be seated at a communal table. And yes, there can be a wait at peak dinner hours. But sometimes, when you show up a little early, maybe for their best-in-class Happy Hour with half-off bottles of wine, you’re seated at the bar right away, the sun sets at just the right angle to make your orange wine glow, and the pastas come out in a slow and glamorous procession, all is momentarily right with the world. But whether you’re here when it’s buzzing or on a quiet afternoon, when the check hits the table, (tucked into an old pulp novel) it’s always, always worth it. Just don’t fill up on bread. photo credit: Richard Casteel photo credit: Richard Casteel Pause Unmute RESERVE A TABLE WITH RESERVE A TABLE Food Rundown Bibb Salad The bibb salad will not blow your mind or anything, but that’s not the point. You should be eating vegetables, and this is one of them. photo credit: Richard Casteel Stracciatella The seasonally changing dish takes grilled housemade focaccia and layers it with stracciatella and toppings like artichokes and tomatoes. photo credit: Richard Casteel Pane Rustico If you’re really looking to carb-load in advance of all the pizza and pasta you’re going to eat, there’s the pane rustico with fancy butter which is basically a half loaf of very good country bread. Pizza Textbook Neapolitan, the pizzas come out hot and you should probably give them a minute before you burn the roof of your mouth. They’re so pretty, but exercise restraint. Happens to the best of us. photo credit: Richard Casteel Pastas It’s the kind of pasta you could probably make as a project, if you spent an entire Sunday procuring the right flour and eggs and laboriously rolling out the dough and shaping and forming and twisting and stuffing and making a mess of your kitchen and getting flour everywhere, and after all that effort, congratulations, you’ve got one kind of ravioli. Here there are at least three kinds of pasta. It’s a little weird that it’s still called Bufalina Pizza, because really sometimes it feels like it should be called Bufalina Pasta. photo credit: Richard Casteel Vanilla Ice Cream And Sherry The classic OG Bufalina dessert is the vanilla ice cream and sherry, in which the sherry gets poured tableside over the ice cream. We like to order a glass of the sherry on its own to go along with it, but any aperitif will do. photo credit: Richard Casteel" - Raphael Brion