After just one bite of moist, airy, crackle-crusted Il Forno bread — with its distinctive, sneaking tang — I had to know how it came to be.
Owner Ramon Eduardo had two surprising answers:
A car accident. And cabbage.
First, the crash. It was 1993, and Eduardo had been working for famed Manhattan restaurateur Joe Allen for years, as a cook and as a mechanic. But while Eduardo was driving along a rainy Bronx road one night, another motorist ran a red light and smashed into him, breaking Eduardo's ankle. When Allen saw Eduardo trying to fix a refrigerator on crutches, he offered him a more sedentary job, doing sales for his new enterprise: The Sullivan Street Bakery.
Eduardo worked at the now iconic Manhattan bakery for the next decade. Then he struck out on his own, taking what he'd learned at Sullivan Street, bringing it to a warehouse in the Bronx and calling it Il Forno — Italian for "the oven."
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