The O Ya Team’s Forthcoming Chestnut Hill Restaurant Will Include Pizza

Tim and Nancy Cushman — the husband-and-wife team with a restaurant empire stretching from Boston to New York to Mexico City — have a new restaurant coming to the Street, a development in Chestnut Hill, by the end of the year or shortly after. The Cushmans, who run multiple locations of high-end sushi destination O Ya (in New York, Boston, and Mexico City), debuted a more casual Japanese restaurant, Hojoko, in Boston in August 2015, and they’re also behind a rooftop cocktail bar and an American restaurant with Mediterranean touches at the New York hotel that is home to O Ya.

Since last fall, the Cushmans have been planning the Chestnut Hill restaurant, keeping most of the details under wraps while working to open Gogo Ya and Ms. Clucks Deluxe Chicken & Dumplings inside Fenway’s Time Out Market Boston in June. Last fall, they merely described the forthcoming Chestnut Hill project as a “neighborhood restaurant,” and they filed a new LLC under the name Bianca on the Hill.

In a fall restaurant preview this week, the Boston Globe shared some new details on the restaurant, including its name (Bianca) and a devotion to wood-fired cooking methods. Bianca is slated to open around the holiday season this year, or right after, joining a number of other dining options at the Street (including the recently opened OddFellows, an ice cream shop from New York).

The word Bianca means “white” in Italian, but the identity will be American, Tim Cushman told the Globe, noting that the name refers to a clean plate, leaving room for the Cushmans to create exactly the restaurant they want: a family-friendly spot for locals, with plenty of wood cooking — a smoker, wood-fired grills and ovens, and a wood rotisserie. And there will be pizza.

At the duo’s Mediterranean-leaning New York restaurant, Covina, wood-fired pizza is a major highlight, so it will be interesting to see what they come up with at Bianca. Stay tuned for updates.

• O Ya’s Tim and Nancy Cushman Have Something Brewing in Chestnut Hill [EBOS]
• Boston’s New Restaurants: A Look at the Season’s Most Exciting Openings [BG]