Bicchiere opens on the Upper East Side with house-made bigoli and Venetian plates

On East 81st Street, Bicchiere has turned a 400-square-foot storefront into a distinctly Northern Italian destination, opening at 450 East 81st Street, between First and York avenues, with a grand opening on May 21 at 5 p.m. The name means “glass” in Italian, and that emphasis on wine is not an afterthought. It is the point.

Bicchiere comes from the team behind Madame Bonté, the Parisian-style cafe group that already has three Upper East Side locations, including spots on 2nd Avenue, East 66th Street and East 84th Street. That neighborhood footprint matters here. The operators know a part of Manhattan that rewards polished, easygoing places, and Bicchiere feels built for residents who want a restaurant that can handle a weeknight glass of wine, a plate of pasta, or a slower, more social dinner.

The menu makes the concept even clearer. The kitchen centers on house-made bigoli, the thick Venetian pasta made fresh daily, and pairs it with Venetian-style cicchetti divided into seafood, meat, vegetable and cheese sections. Opening dishes include smoked salmon tarama, shrimp with whipped ricotta and tomato salsa, prosciutto with peach and balsamic, homemade meatballs in marinara, roasted eggplant, wild mushrooms, gorgonzola with pear and honey, and whipped ricotta with fig and pistachio. Cicchetti run from $13 to $18, salads from $16 to $17, and bigoli dishes from $19 to $25.

That pricing and format place Bicchiere in a sweet spot for the Upper East Side: more focused than a standard Italian restaurant, but not so formal that it feels like a special-occasion splurge. Community-board filings also showed plans for a wine, beer and cider license and a sidewalk cafe, reinforcing the idea that Bicchiere was designed as a neighborhood hangout as much as a dinner reservation.

The address itself has already lived a short restaurant life. The space previously held 81st Street Bodega, which opened in November 2023 and appeared to have closed earlier in 2025. Bicchiere’s lease, for the small storefront, was reported at an asking rent of $150 per foot, or about $60,000 a year. In a neighborhood that the NYU Furman Center says was the city’s sixth-largest by population in 2023, with the fourth-highest median household income and the fourth-most expensive rents, that kind of bet fits the block.

Bicchiere arrives as a compact but pointed addition to an Upper East Side dining scene that already has plenty of Italian options. What it adds is a sharper identity: Northern Italian, wine-first, and built around bigoli that make the pasta the headline, not the supporting act.