Supper Club: Piccolo’s Sunday Supper
By Mike Haimes
There are restaurants that define a city's dining identity, and then there are restaurants that become part of its heart. Piccolo was both.
Opened in 2013 by Chefs Ilma López and Damian Sansonetti and beloved until its closure in 2020 just after the pandemic began, the intimate Portland gem earned national acclaim for its heartfelt regional Italian cooking, recognized among Bon Appétit's Best New Restaurants in America and celebrated for the kind of refined simplicity that is far harder to achieve than it appears. Today, Damian and Ilma continue to anchor Portland's dining scene through their beloved restaurants Chaval and Ugly Duckling — but more on that later.
For me, that style of cooking is not just something I admire. It is something I was shaped by.
My formal culinary training took place in Florence at the Apicius Culinary Institute, where I studied the foundations of regional Italian cuisine before eventually landing in the small town of Panzano in the heart of Tuscany as an apprentice to the great Dario Cecchini, arguably the most renowned butcher on the planet.
While the stories and lessons from my time with Dario could easily fill their own blog post and then some, many of my most formative experiences from that period in Italy occurred in a tiny restaurant I worked at just around the corner from the Ponte Vecchio called Buca Dell'Orafo. It was the kind of place that tourists walked right past, deterred by the handful of steps leading down into a ground floor dining room that held at most twenty-four seats. That was entirely by design. The locals knew where to find it, and they kept coming back for the same reason: every dish, every pasta, was true Florentine fare. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing out of season.
I still think about one afternoon when the local distributor arrived on his vespa with a basket of spring peas. Giordano, the owner, took one look at them, and what followed was an unintelligible, rapid Italian verbal berating of the driver. The driver responded with the same intensity, and the two went at it for several minutes at full volume with every animated hand gesture possible from the Italian hand-speak dictionary. Not knowing what was being said, one could only assume, based on the sheer ferocity of the exchange, that some grave transgression of a deeply personal nature had recently come to light. When the driver finally sped off, I turned to one of the other cooks and asked what on earth had just happened. The answer, delivered with a shrug: "i piselli erano troppo grossi." The peas were too fat.
That was my education in Italian cooking. Not a lecture, not a textbook. Just a chef who cared so completely about what went on the plate that the wrong pea was genuinely not an option.
It is that same spirit, that same refusal to compromise on the integrity of the ingredient and to celebrate it above all else, that always drew me to Piccolo. Damian and Ilma are chefs of remarkable technical range and depth, whose mastery shows not in complexity for its own sake but in the confidence to let exceptional ingredients and flawless execution speak for themselves. Their generosity of spirit tends to extend to everyone who comes through the door, farmers, distributors, staff, and guests alike.
When we connected with Damian and Ilma about reviving their beloved Sunday Supper — IYKYK — it hit all of the notes for us. For those who never had the chance to experience it, Sunday Supper was one of the most cherished rituals of Piccolo's run before the restaurant closed in 2020, an intimate, abundant, never-know-what’s-on-the-menu Italian feast that made guests feel less like diners and more like family who had wandered in from the street and been handed a glass of wine. Bringing it back, even for one night, in the warmth of a candlelit barn in February, felt like exactly the kind of thing the Supper Club was made for.
The meal unfolded with the abundance and warmth of a proper Italian Sunday. Cocktail hour offered baccalà on potato chip with smoked salmon roe, as well as Damian's grandmother's wedding soup, a recipe passed down through the family and featuring the most impossibly tiny, delicate meatballs imaginable. The story behind them is exactly as charming as they looked: Damian's grandfather did not care for ground meat, so his grandmother found her workaround, making the meatballs so small they could barely be argued with. It is the kind of detail that tells you everything you need to know about the cooking philosophy at work in this kitchen.
As guests settled in for supper, the table filled in a generous first course wave, almost antipasti style. The Breezy Hill Farm coppa di testa arrived and was served playfully on a skull from which it could have originated — a wink at Damian's commitment to whole animal cooking and a signal that the evening would take no half measures. Confit Calabrese chicken wings (it happened to be Superbowl Sunday, after all…), ricotta and squid ink focaccia, garlic Brussels sprouts with colatura, and fried panelle with anchovy aioli rounded out our guests' first tastes at the table.
For the second course, Dandelion Farm spring beets with buttermilk, fennel, pickled mustard seeds, and red onion offered a moment of brightness before the pasta course, which offered an umptuous handmade cavatelli, lamb's neck ragù, eggplant, fennel, Cerignola olives, mint, Pecorino, and bread crumbs.
Then came the porchetta di maialino da latte alla Calabrese, served with 'nduja, whey potatoes, roasted peppers, and olive oil jus, bringing the savory progression to a deeply satisfying close. For Essie and me, this course carried a particular resonance: porchetta was the centerpiece of our own wedding dinner at Flanagan Farm, served family style to our guests in the same barn where we were now hosting this supper. Seeing it arrive at the table that evening felt like a quiet, personal full circle moment.
Dessert was announced simply as La Dolce Vita. When it arrived, the room understood why. Chef López's pastry work is its own argument for her talent and this course made it emphatically. The peche a la crema came first: handcrafted to look exactly like a ripe peach, each one a perfect golden orb with a sprig of fresh mint standing in for the leaf, so convincing that guests did a double take before reaching for one. The ricotta tart with limoncello followed, its burnished golden surface catching the candlelight, finished tableside with a delicate pinch of salt that dissolved into something between sweet and savory and exactly right. Finally, the chocolate budino arrived, rich and deeply set, and crowned with struffoli, impossibly tiny and deletable honey-glazed fried dough morsels. A deeply Italian ending to a deeply Italian evening, and impossible to leave unfinished.
It was a dessert course that felt less like a conclusion and more like a love letter. For anyone who has not yet made it to Ugly Duckling for breakfast or brunch, Ilma's pastry work there offers a more daily window into this kind of range and care. It is well worth the trip.
There was something quietly meaningful about the evening beyond the menu itself. Damian and Ilma are a husband and wife team, and so are we — and there is a particular shorthand that comes with building something alongside your partner, a shared language of long days, high standards, knowing glances, and mutual trust. Working alongside another couple who has woven their life and livelihood together so completely makes the collaboration feel less like a vendor relationship and more like a kindred one, every time.
That sense of kinship extended to the team they brought with them: from the bar to the kitchen to the floor, every person present that night has a history with Piccolo and remains in Damian and Ilma's orbit. That kind of loyalty is not incidental. It is a reflection of the people leading the room, and of the culture they have built across everything they touch. While Piccolo popped up with us in the barn for one night only, that same talent and level of care can be accessed at their two beloved Portland establishments: the Spanish and French-inspired Chaval on Longfellow Square, and the playful and delicious Ugly Duckling cafe and luncheonette. Precision, warmth, and an instinct for what makes a meal feel like more than a meal.
Sunday Supper with Piccolo was, quite simply, one of the evenings we will talk about for a long time. Thank you, Damian and Ilma, for trusting us with something so close to your hearts, for bringing Sunday Supper back to life in our barn, and for reminding everyone in that room why Piccolo mattered so much in the first place. We hope it will not be the last time.
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Photo credit: Harper Photo Co., Florals: Timber & Moss
A portion of proceeds from this evening was donated to Food For All Services, a local organization providing nourishing food and essential resources to immigrants and refugees in Maine.
