Terragusto Cafe & Local Market
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Terragusto, a new Italian cafe and market in Roscoe Village, is a neighborhood restaurant so casual that the waiters eat their staff meal out front and the chef personally serves and apologizes for a late appetizer. It also happens to serve house-made pasta as good as–what the hell–any in Chicago. Owner and chef Theo Gilbert, who’s worked at Spiaggia and Trattoria No. 10 and hawked his pasta at the Green City Market, works off a tiny but pristine menu: a handful of antipasti, a half-dozen fresh pastas, and family-style plates of meat and fish, all seared and roasted. The bywords are local, organic, and seasonal–at the front market counter, alongside the fresh pasta, there are multihued local eggs for sale. A deboned half chicken was glisteningly moist, rich, and impossible to improve on, and if I could I’d order the deeply flavored accompanying spinach as an entree. Baked polenta with sausage and rapini was texturally perfect, simultaneously yielding and firm, with a transcendently simple stock-butter-cheese sauce. If the thin Swiss chard pasta with Bolognese sauce was underwhelming (the pasta itself was superb, but the Bolognese was missing the fatty sensuality of the best versions), that’s in part because the cinnamon-dotted squash ravioli were good enough to silence the loudest conversation. Terragusto is BYO and open all day–Gilbert figured he’d be around anyway. If you come for breakfast or lunch you can watch the staff make pasta in the front window. –Nicholas Day
Wakamono, 3317 N. Broadway, 773-296-6800
