- Michael Gebert
- Chef DiGregorio with Chicken Mario
Chef David DiGregorio has been in Chicago for 35 years, but he still has the broad East Coast accent of his native Rhode Island—an accent that bespeaks big family tables full of hearty Italian food. After working for several restaurants here, he’s spent the last ten years as chef-partner of Lettuce Entertain You’s Osteria Via Stato, which celebrates its tenth anniversary on Wednesday with a party benefiting the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation. Replacing the earlier Greek concept Papagus in one wing of the Embassy Suites in River North, Osteria Via Stato does the kind of Italian food you see a lot of in Chicago—the rustic, easy-to-like kind—and it’s the kind of place that does a lot of large parties, because even your pickiest aunt or sourest supervisor would be hard pressed to leave unhappy.
Then I was part of the reopening staff for the 95th restaurant in the John Hancock Building. I was there for a good ten or 12 years, I was a chef there from ’85 to ’91. Rich Melman used to come up and eat once in a while, and they were just getting Maggiano’s started. I ended up joining them, and I was with Maggiano’s and helped build that whole thing for 11 years. And then we started this place.
- Michael Gebert
- Chicken Mario with rapini
Was there any particular region that you leaned toward more?
Being part of a corporate empire, did you have people saying things like, “This works at Maggiano’s, you should do it here,” that kind of thing?
And customers understand that better. You’d hear from customers, “I had the best tomatoes in Italy and it’s just not the same here.” Well, you were probably in Italy in late summer, and now it’s January here. Thinking you’ll get the same tomato in winter—it’s not the same. I think they get that now, because of the prominence of the farmers’ markets.
River North has turned into this place where there’s restaurants everywhere—
