MIDWEST
Inside Piccolo Buco: Cooper’s Hawk’s New Trattoria Experiment
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By Eric Barton | Aug. 18, 2025
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Plenty of Americans come back from Italy with daydreams: a vow to drink more espresso, maybe a resolution to finally learn pasta from scratch. Tim McEnery returned from Rome with something bigger. Wandering through trattorias a few years ago, the Cooper’s Hawk founder and CEO discovered a small spot called Piccolo Buco, famous for its crownlike pizzas. Most tourists tuck away memories. McEnery decided to build a restaurant chain.
That impulse has now grown into a spinoff concept within Cooper’s Hawk’s growing empire. The company already operates 73 restaurants and commands what may be the world’s largest wine club, with 800,000 members. Piccolo Buco, launched in Oak Brook in 2023, became its first major step outside the flagship brand. On August 25, the second U.S. location will open in Naperville, expanding what McEnery has described as a way of giving wine club members global flavors without leaving the suburbs.
Piccolo Buco’s crown-like pizza
The new space, a 195-seat restaurant inside Naperville’s Block 59 development, is meant to feel Roman but filtered through American polish. Guests walk past a tasting bar into a dining room decorated with ceiling stencils and murals of Roman landmarks. An enclosed patio glows with string lights and greenery, designed to evoke a piazza in miniature.
The menu leans on chef Luca Issa, who runs the original Piccolo Buco in Rome and partnered with McEnery to bring the concept stateside. His pizzas come in red, yellow, or white versions, each built on a dough that bakes into a lofty crust—airy, chewy, and more bread sculpture than flat disc. The supporting cast includes Mama Luca’s meatballs, cacio e pepe, truffle-stuffed cappellacci, and a dessert list that ends with tiramisu and gelato. Wine comes both from Italy and Cooper’s Hawk’s own labels, keeping the parent brand front and center.
Chopped salad
For lunch, Naperville adds a twist: Sardinian sandwiches layered on pizza dough, a debut menu item. Cooper’s Hawk wine club members can apply their perks here as easily as at the flagship restaurants. A ribbon-cutting with local officials, McEnery, and Issa is scheduled for August 23, two days before opening.
Baked eggplant Parm
Tiramisu
The move shows how McEnery continues to extend the Cooper’s Hawk ecosystem beyond the original winery-restaurant model. As he explained in an interview with The Adventurist, McEnery credited the success of Cooper’s Hawk to building a loyal following. Piccolo Buco is about expanding that following into a new concept, paring the wines that have become familiar. The idea is that those loyal Cooper’s Hawk customers might have a new favorite Italian spot coming soon to their corner of the suburbs.
