Some realtors call it a death trap, one of the city’s priciest real estate locations that is notorious for business failures. The site, located between Fifth and Madison avenues at 7 East 59th St., is within a few blocks of such city landmarks as the Plaza, Sherry-Netherland, and Pierre hotels, Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany & Co.

“It’s the Playboy curse,” quipped a Plaza Hotel manager, referring to the site, which housed the Playboy Club, replete with bunnies, in the late 1960s. Playboy abandoned the site in the 1970s, following which an art auction house and four Italian restaurants tried their luck over the last 20 years and failed, largely because of the ritzy rental.

For nearly five years, the site has been vacant, but no more. Now, there’s a new risk-taker, another Italian restaurant, Botegga Del Vino (which means “boutique of wine” in Italian), which opened November 1. Essentially a replica of a similarly-named 125 year-old Italian eatery in Verona, the New York restaurant is owned by nine partners, including a couple of gentlemen from Verona, Severino Barzen, principal owner of the Italian-based Botegga’s, and Paolo Della Puppa, one of the new restaurant’s chief managers and a coowner of Via Quadronno, an Upper East Side Italian cafe.

The landlord had asked Botegga’s for an annual rental of $950,000, but the group managed to knock the price down to about $600,000, Mr. Della Puppa tells me. A three level, 10,000-square-foot Austro-Hungarian-style upscale restaurant, Botegga’s seats 135 on two levels (the main floor and the cellar) and is manned by a staff of 45.

A major attraction is its wine offerings – 5,000 bottles (which run as high as $3,400 for a 1961 Chateau Latour) and 55 individual wines by the glass (which range from $7 to $55 for Ornellaia, a Tuscan red wine voted wine of the year in 1998 by the Wine Spectator).

So far, wine, which the restaurant also features in a separate non-tablecloth wine bar, is pulling its weight big time by contributing about 45% of the volume.

Speaking of volume, Mr. Della Puppa, who has a 12.5% stake in the restaurant, notes business is off to a fine start, leading him to predict first-year volume of more than $4 million. Aside from brisk wine sales, he attributes a good part of Botegga’s success to the number of hours it is open – from about 8 a.m. to around midnight. The restaurant serves breakfast, partly through a front cappuccino and espresso bar (“we want to be very Italian,” observes Mr. Della Puppa), as well as lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner. Meanwhile, the restaurant is no slouch when it comes to food. Its signature dish – which I thought was super – is Risotto all” amarone, risotto cooked in Amerone wine, for $26.

Mr. Della Puppa also ascribes part of the strong early kickoff to maximization of space to accommodate as many customers as possible. He notes, for example, that a main-floor office has been turned into an enclosed dining room that seats 30. Further, the restaurant, which offers its various wines and drinks in 13 Italian hand-blown unleaded glasses, also sells the glasses that range from $14.98 for a grappa glass to $44.98 for a Bordeaux grand cru glass.

Botegga’s, it should be noted, is not without some tough rivals within several blocks, chief among them Cipriani, San Domenico, and Nello. So success is hardly a guarantee, especially considering past failures in the location of such restaurants as Mondrian, Coco Pazzo Cafe, Amarcord, and Toscamaccio. Further, since the space was vacant for nearly five years before Botegga’s took it over, many of the city’s savviest restaurateurs felt the location, coupled with its lofty lease, added up to a highly risky and probably losing proposition.

It raises the question as to whether Botegga’s did its homework. Responds Mr. Del Puppa: “It would have been stupid not to have looked back at what happened, and we did. We’re very happy with this location, it gives us world stature, and while it’s tough, we think we’ve got a winner.”