Oliver Stumm Opens Italian Spot With To-Go Shop, Greenhouse, and Outdoor Seating

Just a few months after relaunching Happy Ending as a French restaurant with basement club, Oliver Stumm of Cafe Select and Rintintin is opening a Williamsburg restaurant with takeout arm.

Diviera Drive began serving wood-fired pizzas and sandwiches for lunch and takeout last week; it soft opens for dinner next week. The restaurant’s adjacent sister deli, Sodaposh, is also up and running. “It’s based on Italian dishes, but we’re taking a few liberties,” executive chef William Hickox said of the forthcoming dinner menu. “It’s very simple, rustic and seasonal; we’re going to source our ingredients from local farms as much as possible and keep a predominately seasonal menu.”

Over the past two years Stumm renovated an old mechanic shop on North 7th Street, between Berry Street and Bedford Avenue, into a rustic restaurant. Many details that hint at the building’s past were painstakingly preserved, like the long lamps you would typically see over a mechanic’s workstation, which now light the dining area. There’s a bar, a large dining room with a tiny stage to host live music, a built-on greenhouse that seats 30, and an outdoor courtyard.

The restaurant will make its own pastas and sauces to order, and the kitchen is built around the wood-burning oven, shipped from Naples, which will cook not just pizzas and focaccia bread but many of the vegetables used for the pasta sauce and sides. The mushrooms, a garnish for the chicken entrée, are roasted in the pizza oven with chicken fat, garlic and oregano. Hickox also uses the oven to cook up an item that many foodies probably haven’t heard of called farinata, a type of chickpea flour used to make a flat, pancake-like bread.

Entrees will cost between $20 and $25, with the exception of a seasonally changing whole fish, which will be $32. “We encourage family-style dining, but if you want a traditional appetizer, main course and dessert we can accommodate that, too,” said Hickox, a former head chef at downtown Scottish spots Highlands and Mary Queen of Scots who was recently a sous chef at Mario Batali’s Del Posto. The drink menu will offer “simple selections at a reasonable price point,” he said.

Lunch items are available for takeout and include cheese and salumi plates, salads, and a selection of $10 sandwiches and $14 pizzas. Once the restaurant begins serving dinner it will hold off on serving lunch until both dinner and weekend brunch service are up and running in a about a month. The brunch menu includes an egg white frittata with broccoli rabe and roasted tomatoes and a pancetta, bacon and tomato sauce breakfast pizza with an egg cooked on top.

If you want to take a piece of Sodaposh home with you, the homemade focaccia and pasta are sold in the small deli adjacent to the bar, where you can also find olives, sauces, olive oil, deli meat and more for sale.

Sodaposh’s regular hours will be dinner from 5:30-11 p.m. and lunch 11 a.m.-4 p.m., replaced with brunch at the same time Saturday and Sunday. See the lunch menu below (click to enlarge).