The wall of a Midtown restaurant soon will soon become a fresh canvas for a Sacramento muralist. Hot Italian and the Arts & Business Council of Sacramento have put out a call for artists to submit mural proposals with modern Italian themes. The winning artist will be paid $1,000, plus $500 in restaurant certificates, to design and install an 8-foot by 3-foot mural for the eatery's main dining room. The space was intended to hold a bicycle. But the restaurant's owners, Andrea Lepore and Fabrizio Cercatore, want to open it up to local artists instead and decided to hold a contest to choose the design, Lepore said. "It's really open to anyone," she said. "It could be any medium: photograph

Fashion shows in Sacramento have typically barred teens since the majority of the shows are held inside night clubs.  But with prom season just around the corner, one local retailer has decided change things up a bit and give teens something to shout about with her own fashion show tailord for teens and their parents.  The event, titled, "A Tale of an Edgy Cinderella," and will feature top designers, some of whom have shown at red carpet events in Hollywood. Immediately following the show, guests are invited to the “After Party” located at Tres Chic Boutique on the corner of 23rd and J Street. The evening will continue with fine pastries, coffee, champagne and non-alcoholic beverages. Sp

The 23rd Annual Christmas Party Extravaganza will feature free food from a multitude of hip Sacramento restaurants and establishments.  Tuli, Zocalo, Hot Italian and Kru will all be at the party serving delicious appetizers plus, Rail Bridge Cellars will offer wine tastings. This is heaven for the gastronomically inclined! If you just want to fuel properly before you hit the dance floor, that can be easily accomplished too. Do not miss this unique opportunity to sample so many culinary creations in one place, knowing its all for a good cause. Food is included in the ticket price ($60 in advance, purchase online) and proceeds benefit at-risk youth in Sacramento.          

Today I had but one objective which was to find a superior slice of pizza to sit down and enjoy without going broke in the process. You should know I was born and raised in New York so this was not going to be a simple task. I decided to try Giovanni’s Old World New York Pizzeria. My first impression was that the restaurant is enormous. The size of the restaurant drew attention to the fact I was the only one in the place. Normally I wouldn’t stay at a completely empty restaurant but they deserved an impartial review as much as any place. Let’s start with the positives. The lunch special which is offered from 11-4PM consists of two slices of pizza and a soda for $5.99. Draft beer is avail

The Wall Street Journal featured a story recently that held some tremendous promise for Sacramento Area small businesses.  The article titled “Three Best Ways to Win Community Support” outlines the some opportunities that small businesses can create or take advantage of.  I think these are particularly ripe for those businesses around the Sacramento community.   First off, a recent trend in small business marketing has been to develop community around your products and services.  Community is where loyalty comes from.  It is why we have newsletters, a social networking presence, and why we all wish there was a bar where everybody knew our name.  These tips will help you further to engage

At 9:00 am, nearly a hundred cyclists showed up for  Sacramentos first Tweed Ride sunday for the all day neighborhood bike ride. Amazing as  the idea gave birth just a little over a month beforehand. Thanks to powerful internet networking the idea traveled fast and soon the restaurants that accepted  to participate got what they reserved, a lot of love from the enthusiasts dressed in fine vintage tweed.  The scramble to amass the finer vintage look was on and the final result a best dressed contest showed us the need for such an event.  The enthusiasm was contagious as was the creative impulse for both vintage bike and dress alike. Many cities have such a ride already in place. New York,

Sacramento-raised painter David Garibaldi delivered a poignant speech at Wednesday's "For Art's Sake" meeting. The 26-year-old thanked Mayor Kevin Johnson and the city for its support and guidance when he was growing up in Sacramento. While Garibaldi was a high school student interested in the arts, the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission recognized his potential and sent him to California State Summer School for the Arts on a full scholarship, he said. Garibaldi credited this and his high school art program with helping him redirect a creative fire that led him to graffiti the streets of Sacramento, inspiring him instead to become a performance artist. The "For Art's Sake" initiativ

Saturday morning I contemplated whether or not I should eat breakfast. My stomach was inexperienced with grub crawls, the Eat Your Art Out Crawl would be my very first. I settled on eating something small. Luckily I lived close enough to walk to the captain meeting place and by the time I had gathered my team's bags and badges, my stomach was growling. Of the 18 restaurants and dining establishments in the Crawl, I had eaten at all of them but five.  My team, Team Snuffleupagus, started at Brew It Up! where a fruit platter and blue cheese kettle chips awaited. This was a good warmup for the digestive system, not too heavy, and easy to eat. Lucca was one of the restaurants I hadn't t

The vibe at Fremont park was laid-back and friendly during the new Hot Lunch series presented by Hot Italian and The Sacramento Press. Dozens of people sat scattered through the park on blankets and in lawn chairs, bobbing to the live music and chowing down on the food that was delivered from Hot Italian, just across 16th Street. Most people in attendance were on their lunch breaks some were just walking their dogs and got pulled in by the delicious smells and intriguing sounds. Attendee Melissa Olsen said, "I'm here on my lunch hour, and I think this is a good morale booster for all of the state employees in this hard time, to have somewhere near the end of the week to just unwind and l

Sacramento music fans dreading the upcoming end of this season's Concert in the Park Series have a new reason to rejoice. There is a new series in town, and it looks to be a doozy. The Hot Lunch Concert Series, brain child of Hot Italian owner Andrea Lepore and local concert promoter Jerry Perry, begins next Thursday, Aug. 20 in Fremont Park at the corner of 16th and P Streets, and will host an eclectic slew of talented and entertaining bands. The series, which will take place every Thursday from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. for the next six weeks, began with Lepore's dissatisfaction with the under-use of Fremont Park. She saw the series as a "way to promote the park as a venue and as a place for

Sacramento's Italian community is known to produce gourmet food, but there's much more to the community than Biba, Sofia's and Hot Italian. With this weekend's Festa Italian opening Saturday and running through Sunday at The Croatian Culture Center, we take a look back at the role Italian immigrants and their descendants played in Sacramento's history. Italian Americans have a long history in the Sacramento area. Agriculture and food processing are just some of the many successes of Italian Americans who settled in the area in the early 1850s, but their successes are hardly limited to that. Early Italian Americans Many of the earliest Gold Rush settlers who migrated in the "Mother Lode

It's that time of year again - time for "Best Restaurants," brought to you by Sacramento Magazine. After reading the readers' picks for each category, it made me wonder whether the results would be different for readers of The Sacramento Press. Our focus has been primarily on events and coverage of things in the Grid, whereas Sacramento Magazine covers a larger demographic including the suburbs. There were four categories that stood out to me in Sacramento Magazine's Best Restaurants: Best Burrito, Best Pizza, Best Burger and Best Coffeehouse. I live in the Grid and therefore have my own biases about restaurants that live in Downtown and Midtown. I prefer restaurants in this area to tho

So last night Saturday June 13th 2009 was another amazing second Saturday here in Sacramento but among the normal routine of the event it was Hot Italian’s Grand Opening bash. The people showed up in full affect for this event last night. The whole place was packed wall to wall with all types of people all with one common goal, pizza! And of course the beer and wine. But on top of all the great food was the entertainment, all night there were DJ’s spinning records on the roof all the while a local Sacramento Mural/Graphitti artist painted an awesome Hot Italian couple on the 16th street side of the building. Up All Night TV was also on site shooting and interviewing folks as well. But the

Hot Italian, barely in business a month, and just today profiled for its environmental construction in Sacramento Press, has already taken on a subject more serious than pizzas and motos, and more pressing than even the environment: humanitarian aid. Today, the new restaurant's owners, Andrea Lepore and Nicola Rivieccio, announced that tomorrow evening, Thursday, April 9, the restaurant will be donating 100 percent of its net proceeds to a fund just established for victims of Monday's devastating 6.3 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, 56 miles from Rome. The fund, the NIAF/Abruzzo Relief Fund, set up by the National Italian American Foundation in Washington, DC, will then send the money to I

The new retail/restaurant concept, Hot Italian, on the corner of Q and 16th Streets, is embracing green ideology in its entirety, completely renovating an old, vacated retail space with a sleek new design that Mother Nature would be proud of. Andrea Lepore, co-owner of Hot Italian, had the environment in the front of her mind when she first had the idea for Hot Italian. The reason is simple. "I think the environment is important to everyone,” she says. “Especially when you're in a space where you're eating, drinking, and relaxing. We wanted to create a restaurant that offered healthy food, but was also healthy to be in." Lepore decided to pursue a Leaders in Energy and Environmental Desi

Shake shake shake. Pfffft. Pfffft. One thin coat at a time, a spray of paint creates a bright new decoration over the gray brick wall. An artist with a rubber mask stands on a ladder while his suitcase full of aerosol cans waits below. He steps off and away from the ladder, looks at the black-and-white photograph in his hand and tilts his eyes upward to view the entirety of his 10-foot-tall mural. Pffft. Pffft. He continues to touch up the wall with black and white paint, the words "PERONI ITALY" nicely stenciled in the top right corner. Anthony Padilla holds a day job as a graphic designer, but for the last 10 years he has been expressing himself by doing graffiti art and murals during

A year in the making, the new home of pizza-with-style - Hot Italian at the corner of 16th and Q in the downtown Sacramento Grid - will be opening inside of three weeks. The owner's self-declared deadline: the Amgen Tour of California on Feb. 14. "That's Valentine's Day as well," says Andrea Leport, the woman who has managed this eatery from concept to near-fruition. "And the next day is St. Faustino's Day, the holiday for the single." Sounds like they're expecting business those days. And tying it to the big international bike race fits perfectly the theme of Hot Italian. “We’re all about the two wheels,” says Andrea Lepore. Hot Italian is a concept place that aims to serve lifestyle