Help Our Neighborhood Restaurants: Vinatería Remains Harlem’s Living Room—At A Distance

There are restaurants that feel like family gatherings, and then there’s Vinatería, where—before coronavirus—owner Yvette Leeper-Bueno’s mother could be found bobbing from table to table, as much a mainstay as any of its delectable menu items.

“She’s the connector,” says Leeper-Bueno. “She is really the one that is just that wave of hospitality as you walk in the door.”

Though the Spanish-influenced Italian joint debuted on 119^th Street and Frederick Douglass in 2013, Leeper-Bueno’s familial ties to the area date back decades: as a child, she’d often visit her grandparents in Harlem or pop into her parents’ clothing boutique on 104^th Street. Years later, she went to college up the hill at Barnard, and now lives just a few blocks from the restaurant; her husband runs a mindfulness center around the corner.

Harlem was already changing when Vinatería’s doors first opened seven years ago. Down the street on Cathedral Parkway, a glassy condo with park views sprouted in an abandoned lot that used to be a gas station; up on 125^th, a new Whole Foods opened down the street from Jimmy Jazz. As the neighborhood wrestled with gentrification amid renewed prosperity, Leeper-Bueno aimed to recreate the feeling of an inclusive dinner party in her living room.

“I wanted it to be the place that was comfortable for longtime residents that had been here for 40 years, as well as a new influx of people coming in,” she says. “That it would be the place that could be welcoming and feel relevant to all.”

Before the shutdown, Vinatería’s menu and ambience simultaneously exuded comfort and sophistication. It was a place that offered homemade pasta alongside rare Argentinian reds (and a waitstaff that would top you off on the house). But atmosphere can’t really be taken out or delivered.

So Leeper-Bueno has focused on adapting her cuisine to the current moment: a new range of $15 pastas joins chimichurri skirt steak and whole-roasted branzino with Calabrian chili. Vinatería’s cocktail bar, one of the finest in Harlem—if not the entire city—rivals the kitchen with its inventiveness (try the herbaceous Basilisk, or its smokier off-menu cousin, the Fleur de Harlem).

Like many restaurants in Manhattan, Vinatería remains open in large part to serve a greater purpose: providing jobs (albeit a reduced number) and feeding first responders. The restaurant delivered nearly 800 such meals in the last two weeks, a mix of donations by customers and by Leeper-Bueno herself.

“Opening, and continuing to stay open,” she says, “was, in my mind, where we could make the most impact.”

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