RESTAURANT NEWS | MASSACHUSETTS
Willie’s Boston Puts Gochujang in the Amatriciana
WILLIE’S | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Maria Rodriguez
6:43 a.m. ET, Aug. 10, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a regular at your favorite restaurant. She’s reviewed restaurants since 2007 in magazines from Spain to Seattle.
Jamie Bissonnette has opened a pizza restaurant in Boston, although calling Willie’s a pizza restaurant leaves out the gochujang, bottarga, yuzu kosho, and occasional pile of very expensive Spanish ham.
Willie’s occupies 28 seats on Charles Street in Beacon Hill, next door to Zurito, the Basque pintxo bar Bissonnette opened with partners Babak Bina and Andy Cartin. Together, the three run BCB3 Hospitality, which also owns the Korean restaurant Somaek and Temple Records downtown. Willie’s takes pieces from those places, adds the Italian-American food Bissonnette grew up eating, and puts much of it into a gas-fired pizza oven.
Bissonnette, Cartin, and Bina
The result looks familiar until it reaches the table. The P.C.T., short for pizza con tomate, arrives without mozzarella, just crushed tomatoes, Spanish olive oil, and parmesan on a crisp, lightly charred crust. The spinach pizza borrows from Korean sesame spinach, adding roasted sesame seeds, soy, garlic, and sesame oil to ricotta and mozzarella. Another pie covers vodka sauce with pepperoni cups, which collect enough grease to make wearing white an act of confidence.
Bissonnette, a 2014 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Northeast, calls Willie’s a “neighborhood pizza joint.” It is, assuming the neighborhood joint near you offers a $37 margherita finished with Cinco Jotas jamón Ibérico de bellota.
The pasta carries the same habit of crossing borders without holding a meeting about it first. Rigatoni amatriciana gets a slow burn from yak-gochujang cooked with guanciale. Hand-cut spaghetti carbonara comes with bottarga, spicy yuzu kosho, and parmesan dashima. The kitchen also makes cavatelli with broccoli sugo and campanelle in a sun-dried tomato vodka sauce.
Caesar with anchovy migas
Then there is Calabrian karaage: Japanese fried chicken dressed with Calabrian chile oil, served with onion-soup mayonnaise and pickled Korean radish. Burrata comes with buchu muchim, the Korean garlic-chive salad normally found among the banchan.
Rigatoni Amatriciana with gochujang
Margherita
Willie, incidentally, is not a chef, an owner, or somebody’s beloved Italian grandfather. He is Bissonnette’s motorcycle-riding French bulldog, now employed as the restaurant mascot. In a place where amatriciana contains gochujang and pizza speaks with a Basque accent, the dog may have the easiest job to explain.
