Bar Siena Heads for the Suburbs | Eater Chicago

"An 8,500-square-foot suburban outpost from a popular city restaurant group is opening in Westfield Old Orchard mall to give North Shore diners a city-style Italian-American experience without the trip downtown. For now the menu will mirror the original — pasta, steak, pizza and bomboloni for dessert — with plans from owner Lucas Stoioff and chef Fabiano Viviani to add location-specific dishes after gauging local tastes. The design makes the most of suburban space: two entrances (one from the mall leading to a wine bar with patio and lounge seating for weary shoppers; the other from the parking lot leading to a 3,000-square-foot pergola with seating for 100, a living wall, and a retractable roof and heaters for year-round outdoor dining), while the main dining room features exposed brick, hand-painted murals and an enormous sculptural iron tree of LED lights canopying an open kitchen with a handmade brick pizza oven. Stoioff, who has sentimental ties to the mall where he hung out as a teenager, says the restaurant has already received strong social-media support from the North Shore community and will donate 100 percent of opening-weekend proceeds to a GoFundMe for victims of the recent Highland Park shooting." - Aimee Levitt