Sundays were sacred during Stephanie Hulbert’s childhood in Montclair, New Jersey. Her mother, Susan, would get up early to prepare sprawling suppers for their extended Italian family. “I’d walk downstairs in the morning and I would smell garlic, I would smell sauce,” she remembers. “I would stay with my mom: cooking, stirring sauce, making meatballs, and just watching.”
The Italian American recipes she learned during those kitchen sessions are the backbone of A Presto! Italian Foods, which will pop up Thursday through Sunday at Bullfrog Bagels in Capitol Hill, starting March 13. The slim upstairs space has six seats at the bar and another two dozen at the tables, which are cloaked in classic, red-checkered tablecloths. Delivery and takeout will also be available and, once it gets warmer, they’ll add the downstairs patio into the mix.
The venture began in 2018 as a series of short-term pop-ups at various venues around D.C. The name is an homage to Hulbert’s late grandfather, Angelio DelPresto. “A presto’ means ‘see you soon’ in Italian and he always used to say, ‘I’ll see you soon. It’s never goodbye.’”
This is the restaurant’s first long term pop-up and the menu changes slightly every week based on customer feedback, sales, and Hulbert’s whims. Antipasti could include fried artichoke hearts, Caesar salad with crunchy parmesan crisps, risotto balls with oozy centers of fontina and prosciutto, and garlic bread topped with parmesan and roasted black garlic.
Another fan favorite appetizer is the beef-pork meatballs, which are so tender they don’t even require a knife. “It’s all in the panade,” says Hulbert, of the starchy mixture made from white bread and milk that holds the meatballs together and keeps them moist.
Entrees are designed to be hearty and heartwarming. A ten-layer lasagna intersperses layers of parmesan bechamel sauce with freshly made noodles and stratums of ground beef and pork.
She’s perfected her chicken parmesan recipe after a lot of research and a lot of testing. “I’ve had really good chicken parm and really bad chicken parm,” says Hulbert. “It’s easy to screw it up.”
Her secret is to pound the chicken breast so thin that it fills the entire sauté pan it’s fried in and then dress it with a mixture of finely blended panko and breadcrumbs. To finish, the chicken goes under the broiler topped with a ladleful of marinara sauce and a blend of parmesan and pecorino that melt into golden bubbles. It arrives with a side of fettuccine or spaghetti, depending on what’s on hand, topped with more marinara sauce.
The most popular dish, however, is her Sunday Gravy: a thick sauce made with Italian sausage and beef braciole — slender strips of butterflied flank steak wrapped around prosciutto, breadcrumbs, spices, and parmesan. The stew is then doled out over a generous serving of fettuccine.
The finishing options are equally classic: cannoli, tiramisu, pears poached in red wine and cinnamon, semolina cheesecake, and almond biscotti have all made appearances on the dessert menu.
This pop-up is the culmination of a culinary journey that began two decades ago, when Hulbert moved to D.C. in 2001 to attend Catholic University. She couldn’t find Italian food like the kind she grew up eating in New Jersey. A sub at Capitol Hill’s long-loved Italian sandwich shop Mangialardo’s was “good, but it wasn’t home,” she says. Sometimes she would go to A. Litteri’s, the storied Italian deli by Union Market, just to lose herself in the familiar smells of cured meats and aged cheeses.
She started cooking family style dinners using her mother’s recipes for friends when she was still in college. After briefly pursuing a career in healthcare research, she pivoted to the restaurant industry where she worked as a caterer, bartender, and manager — including over a decade at the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill. Throughout it all, she kept honing her skills in the kitchen and slowly perfecting her mother’s recipes.
After some pandemic delays, she restarted A Presto! at the beginning of this year with a Sunday-only dinner series at Sushi Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue SE before moving into Bullfrog Bagels. Both establishments are a short walk from the Tune Inn where she stopped working last year to focus on A Presto! full time. Her old regulars and colleagues have been big supporters, frequently dining in and taking out.
Though Hulbert has cooked for her parents before — they’re big fans of her work in the kitchen — they still haven’t been to the latest version of A Presto! “I’m sure my mom will critique it, but mostly in a good way,” says Hulbert. “But they’re her recipes, so she’s allowed.”
A Presto! is located at 317 7th St. SE. Open Thursday-Sunday 5 p.m.-10 p.m.
