West Loop Italian Spot Formento's Is Launching A Lighter, Healthier Menu

By Anthony Todd in Food on Jun 13, 2016 2:35PM

When Formento's, the Italian restaurant in the West Loop run by B Hospitality, first launched, it was all about good old nostalgia. Then-chef Tony Quartaro created a menu inspired by red sauce Italian restaurants of the 1950s, complete with rich pastas, meatballs and a gorgeous old-fashioned relish tray. Quartaro left a few months ago, and the new chef, Stephen Wambach, is taking the restaurant in an entirely new direction.

"The restaurant was doing well, but we felt as a group that it needed to be lightened up a bit," Wambach told Chicagoist. "With people’s tastes these days, they want to eat a little healthier."

What does that mean for the menu? Expect more veggies, more fish and much more use of the wood grill, a feature of the Formento's kitchen that hadn't been utilized all that much before. "We are using maplewood at the moment, but we’ve been experimenting with woods," said Wambach. "The whole dining room smells like a fireplace now; it smells like home. It’s really had a great effect."

Wambach is a restaurant industry veteran with experience in hotels, fine dining restaurants and Chicago connections at Epic and the Four Seasons. It's usually a challenge for someone to come in as the second chef of a restaurant with an established clientele, but Wambach has done it before.

"The important thing is to respect the foundation of the resturant that you’re entering while putting your own spin on things," he said.

He was particularly inspired by the space at Formento's, which is deceptively intimate for a restaurant that serves hundreds. His hotel training serves him well at such a large operation, which includes an entire second kitchen for an upstairs event space. "At such a big restaurant, and I’ve worked at a few, you have to be on top of your game or it can get out of control quickly," he explained. "You have to make sure to be everywhere at once."

A couple of dishes from the old menu remain, most notably the Canestri, made with pork neck, meatballs and sausage. Aside from that, however, most of his new dishes are kept as simple as possible: one-pan pastas, for example, which cook quickly and blend bright flavors and fresh ingredients. "In some restaurants, you have a lot of sauces ready to go, you cook the pasta and then ladle the prepared sauce into the pan," described Wambach. In his kitchen, "you throw some aromatics in the pan, hit it with wine, and the whole dish just pops and tastes fresh when it comes out of the pan."

The menu also boasts a large selection of those wood-grilled proteins, including a rich skirt steak marinated in shallots, garlic, oregano, rosemary and thyme, then grilled and topped with basil oil salsa verde and crispy shallots and elephant garlic.

"With the food now, there’s no place to hide," said Wambach. "Everything has to be just right. We’ve taken it back and made it simple, but sometimes cooking simple can be very difficult."

The new menu launches today at Formento's.