Inside Il Carciofo, Joe Flamm’s Rustic New Italian Restaurant in Fulton Market | Eater Chicago
"A “pasta lab” is intended not as marketing hyperbole but as a way to make the offerings taste more like they were prepared at a Roman market: the dedicated room can control environmental factors like humidity — a must-have for many Italian restaurants — and is crucial for authenticity when executing dishes such as cacio e pepe or aglio e olio. “This place is going to be all about technique and product,” Flamm says. The chef, a Chicago-area native, is opening his third restaurant and his second built from the ground up with partners at Day Off Group (they also run Rose Mary and Blvd.); having built Rose Mary, which combined Croatian and Italian food, he notes that Croatian items — including cevapicci (the Balkan sausage) — carry an intrinsic Midwest comfort and that the resulting Rose Mary experience “feels like a love letter to Chicago.” For this project he wants the restaurant to match the feel of a modern Roman experience, drawing on lessons from his time at Spiaggia where mentor Tony Mantuano shunned trends like California chardonnay and ensured the restaurant served Italian wines. Beyond oblong Roman pizzas al taglio popularized by places like Bonci, he’s excited about mozzarella-stuffed suppli (Roman-style fried rice croquettes). The space is in a new building with touches such as tin ceilings that give a lived-in, rustic feel; since the announcement, traffic around Fulton Market has increased and the area feels more urban rather than a desolate space awaiting development. The pasta lab will also double as a private dining room, with workers making pasta roughly from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.; the idea was first floated in 2022 and echoes Spiaggia’s prior practice of dedicating an entire floor to making pasta for catering. Opening is scheduled for Thursday, December 12, with reservations via OpenTable." - Ashok Selvam
