Written by Ann Volkwein
Photographs by Abigail Fenton
If you haven’t already devoured his sourdough crusted, wood-fired pizza, you may have encountered Rafi Bildner through his big pizza pie moments on Instagram. He’s posted through years of Hilltown Hot Pie pizza truck pop-ups, as he cycled through southern Italy in 2022, and, most recently, at every stage of the down-to-the-studs renovation of the former John Andrews restaurant for Hilltown, the restaurant, soon to be open in Egremont. You can’t fake his enthusiasm. Bildner carries his heart on his sleeve while spreading “pizza joy,” and embracing a wide community of pizzaiolos.
As the name implies, the restaurant is an homage to our region, and puts a pizza-framed spotlight on our producers and seasonal foods. Bildner grew up spending summers in Becket, sold his own vegetables at farmers markets, helped promote Berkshire Grown, and generally embraced the farming community. He attended culinary school in Ottawa before moving on to study politics and policy of U.S. food and agriculture at Yale, acting as farm manager for the Yale campus farm and grabbing some experience working on the line at a local fine dining restaurant his senior year.
Post college, after spending some time with political campaigns and as a travel guide in Europe and the Middle East, Bildner finally allowed himself to fully lean into his calling. His first professional pizza job was in 2019 at San Francisco’s PizzaHacker, one of the city’s pioneers in sourdough crust. “I learned so much from the owner, Jeff Krupman. I washed dishes for the first two months there, and one of the first things I noticed, before I even got on the pizza line, was—classic San Francisco—a lot of stressed-out tech workers coming in. I watched them sit down, have a pizza, and a smile would immediately come across their face. I had already been thinking about a restaurant on my own, for many years, but that was the first time where I was like, ‘I’m digging into this craft fully. This food makes people happy.’”
Hearing about Bildner’s training, Daniel Osman, the former owner of The Dream Away Lodge in Becket, offered him the opportunity to do a late-night pop-up. Suddenly he found himself in the middle of the woods cranking out his own pizzas, one by one. More pop-ups followed at farms through the pandemic and, in 2021, he launched the Hilltown Hot Pies pizza truck, all the while refining his signature sourdough crust.
Tracing the origins of Bildner’s pizza obsession takes us back to his New Jersey childhood. “Italian Americans and Jews were the world of northern New Jersey that I grew up in, and we share a lot: from food to joy to very loud families and neurotic, crazy conversations, et cetera—and a lot of chaos. Every Sunday my parents would order pizza from Nauna’s Bella Casa, your classic Jersey slice joint. We didn’t eat a lot around the table together growing up because my parents both had very intense jobs running their own food distribution companies and my older siblings were off doing their own things. It was this happy moment.”
The family’s food lineage reaches back to Bildner’s great-grandfather, Joe Bildner, who opened some of the first full-service supermarkets in the country with his brother. “It was the quintessential Jewish immigrant story—again, very similar to many Italians—peddling fruits and vegetables and meats and dairy on the streets of Brooklyn and then Long Island. Eventually, my side of the family started the first King’s supermarket in Summit, New Jersey, in 1936. They were really the first supermarket to have a one-stop shop, with everything from a butcher counter to fresh orange juice to dry goods to high-quality fruits and vegetables. All of our family conversations at the dinner table were basically my parents talking about the price of pears coming in from Chile, and what Earthbound Farms in California is doing in the organic greens world.”
A secondary mission for Bildner is to create a cultural bridge to southern Italy, filtering its food traditions and essence through the lens of the Berkshires, and eventually hosting some of his Italian mentors at Hilltown. During his cycling tour through Irpino, a sub region of Campania, Bildner met Crescenzo and Teresa Di Pietro, and their daughter Anita and son Pasquale, at the celebrated Antica Trattoria Di Pietro in the village of Melito Irpino. Crescenzo’s parents opened the trattoria in 1934. This is slow food, traditional dishes to be lingered over for multiple courses, rooted in the land, and simply prepared.
“It was an instant connection,” says Bildner, “I walked in and saw Teresa and Anita, who run the kitchen. Crescenzo, the host and proprietor, was, as always, in a red tie, sweater, and black apron. Teresa was taking out a bag of locally stone-milled senatore cappelli, heritage durum wheat flour, pouring it into her dough mix, and making pizzas in these pans that the family’s been using for probably 60 years. Anita was at the stove making this beautiful frittata and dumping hand-rolled cicatielli—their village-specific shape of cavatelli—into a pot of tomato sauce with wild mint. And, at the same time, they’re yelling at each other. They’re stressed out. And I’m like, this is heaven. This is the epitome of joy and love and family. I was so emotional seeing this. It reminded me so much of my own family’s history and food.”
Bildner’s maternal grandmother, Norma Spungen, was the consummate host and a revered home cook. “She was such an instrumental force in my family’s life, showing how food is the ultimate connector. Every person had a place at her seder table. She would invite everyone in the community to come eat. A lot of my earliest bread memories come from learning to bake challah with Granny Norma. I would run through the woods to my grandmother’s house in Becket. I never really dabbled in my own sourdough or intense, super crafty bread baking until college and really beyond college. But I always had these deeply fond memories of flour and dough and watching.”
Bildner is the first in his family to foray into the brick-and-mortar restaurant side of the business. Connections between food, place, memory, and community are represented in Hilltown’s design. The center room has a big communal table made from a sugar maple tree taken down on the property, and there’s a row of seats right in front of the wood-fired pizza oven. “You can interact with the people making your food. All of that goes to the memories of Granny.” The space opens to a dining patio and the goal is to move the leaning 1700’s ice shed to a stable foundation and offer soft serve, pizza, and negronis out of it in the “pizza garden” by summer 2026.
Lonny Geller, Bildner’s great friend and (if this is even possible) equal in the love of pizza, is the opening sous chef. Geller has cooked with Bildner for many iterations of Hilltown Hot Pies over the years, while also running his own pizza pop-up business, doing his own reconnaissance tours of Italy, and learning on the line at other pizza establishments. They’re planning on eight core pizzas, a few pizza specials that highlight what’s coming up in the fields around them, and two or three traditional and seasonal pastas, antipasti, and Puglia-style focaccia—plus Geller’s wood-fired meatballs and maximum-stretch mozzarella sticks (more akin to logs).
Bildner wooed talented pastry chef Erica Allen to make her magic with fresh pasta, tiramisu, seasonal fruit pies, crumbles and cobblers, and gelato in the “laboratoria” upstairs, where she and Bildner will eventually hold pizza and pasta classes. Allen grew up in Alabama and has a rich southern cooking history, but her family is also from Calabria, so she has deep southern Italian roots, as well. (Her husband, Will, is the owner of Darke Pines, a sustainable butcher and sandwich shop in Jersey City, where she has most recently been flexing her skills.)
Bildner’s brother Ari Bildner is the Hilltown wine consultant and has sourced from the Finger Lakes region as well as the many small southern Italian producers they have developed relationships with, including a few of the first bottles from Pasquale Di Pietro’s winery.
“We will use artisanal flour, local regional grains, stretch our own mozzarella, and serve beautiful veggies from down the road and meat from here and Columbia County. But in the end, it’s just pizza, and I want people to remember that pizza is a joyful food, and pizza is very casual.” It comes down to building community for Bildner, as his granny did, and a love for the land. “Pizza is a natural canvas for a food system and the food system that we have here in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, in New England, is so rich,” says Bildner. “What better way to paint a picture of the world around you than on a pizza?”
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Hilltown Hot Pies, opening soon
224 Hillsdale Rd., Egremont
hilltownhotpies.com
