After Steven Chiappetti graduated from Marist High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side in 1985, he spent the summer working at a McDonald’s. He told his manager he was headed to college to learn how to run a restaurant.
“She said to me, `You should get out of this business. You’re not meant for it.’ I just laughed,” said Chiappetti.
Now an acclaimed chef who recently opened his third Chicago restaurant, Rhapsody, at 65 E. Adams St. in the newly rehabbed Symphony Center, the 29-year-old Chiappetti still grins when he recalls his fast-food days.
“I didn’t know how to boil water until I was about 17,” he said.
Chiappetti’s star has been on the rise since 1995 when he opened his first restaurant, Mango, at 712 N. Clark St. in Chicago. It was hailed by Chicago magazine as one of the city’s best new restaurants, and his menus have drawn praise from newspaper food critics.
“Steve Chiappetti is a well-admired restaurateur in Chicago. His hard work and excellent taste in cooking have allowed him to grow with each day. He continues to make Chicago a diner’s paradise,” said Colleen McShane, executive director of the Illinois Restaurant Association.
Born and raised in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, he often worked after school and on weekends at his family’s business, Chiappetti Lamb and Veal Corp., which has plants at 3810 S. Halsted St. and 3900 S. Emerald Ave.
“Seeing the chefs come down to buy their meat–they had a lot of passion for what they did–that got me interested,” he said.
His future began to jell in the fall of 1985, while he was attending Boston University.
“I was there one month studying business management,” he said. “Somebody said if you’re going to do business you have to understand the product you’re selling.”
He immediately transferred to Kendall College in Evanston where he could study cooking. Within two years, at age 19, he received a bachelor’s degree in culinary management. His on-the-job training began in 1987 as an intern at what was then Cricket’s restaurant in Chicago’s Tremont Hotel. Later that year he began working at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in stints as banquet chef, cafe chef and eventually dining room chef under the direction of Fernand Gutierrez.
“I was doing all French cooking. Gutierrez said that you won’t understand the food until you understand the people,” Chiappetti said.
Gutierrez sent him abroad to work for one month each year in a French restaurant.
“He didn’t set me up in fine dining. I worked in bistros and brasseries. It was common basic food. He thought my strength was in food that was soul-satisfying,” he said.
After six years and several promotions at the Ritz, Chiappetti sought a return to his Italian roots. He began working as the dining room sous chef at Spiaggia, a Chicago restaurant serving pricey yet simple Italian fare. There he met his future partner, George Guggeis of Chicago. Like Chiappetti, Guggeis was drawn to the food service industry through his father, a regional manager for Stouffer’s restaurants.
Rhapsody, the duo’s new $3-million eatery, has a 160-seat dining room and features an open display kitchen that alone cost more than $500,000. It’s a far cry from their first restaurant, Mango, which cost $200,000 altogether two years ago. The pair looked at more than 60 locations from Skokie to Chicago before settling on the three-story, 127-year-old building on Clark Street for Mango.
Renovated with room upstairs for Chiappetti’s apartment, Mango features dining for 65 on the main floor and a 30-seat dining area in the basement’s wine cellar. Entrees, priced from $9 to $16, include duck prosciutto, lamb shanks, veal, pork and seafood. Honey-glazed roasted banana, praline cake, and pecan and chocolate pie are among the desserts.
“I’m very simple in my approach to food. I don’t believe you need to put thousands of ingredients into a dish,” said Chiappetti.
Chicagoan David Curry often dines out after a concert or the theater and enjoys trying new restaurants. Of his recent visit to Mango, Curry proclaimed, “The mango-apple tart is the finest dessert in the city. It’s awfully good.”
“We went back to the basics of what restaurants used to be–a place where you had a good meal, not where you see servers dancing in the aisles doing the Macarena,” Guggeis said.
Guggeis handles the “front house,” checking the daily reservations, keeping track of the books, paying the bills and ordering wine for all three restaurants, while Chiappetti creates the menus for their ventures and oversees his chefs and kitchen staff.
“When we opened Mango, we did everything we could to get the place going. I was bartender and hostess for the first six months and Steve (organized orders) and cooked. We wanted to be hands-on and take an active role,” Guggeis said.
Chiappetti considers Mango his culinary palette where he can create menus based on French, Italian and American cuisine.
“It’s where I get to be uniquely creative. We’ve taken European recipes and applied American ingredients,” he said.
For his menus, Chiappetti seeks out cheeses from Wisconsin and Louisiana, dried cherries from Michigan and wines from California.
“I look to local farmers rather than going to Europe. We have better products than they have. For example, the strawberries here are fantastic year-round,” he said.
Mary Lynn Ferrara of Chicago recently dined at Mango.
“Everything is nicely proportioned and flavorful. The presentation of the food is interesting too,” she said.
Chiappetti attributes his culinary success to his mother Annette’s cooking and his father Arthur’s meat packing business.
“My mother is a wonderful cook. There wasn’t one day when we didn’t have two different main courses on the table. She’d spend three hours in the kitchen and she loved it,” Chiappetti said.
In a nod to his mother, Chiappetti has adopted some of her recipes for Mango’s menu, including braised lamb shank with molasses, bread pudding and Mandarin barbecued short ribs.
“When I started going to cooking school, she couldn’t believe it. I’d be in the kitchen every day with her, making pot pies, simple things. We made a lot of recipes together,” he said.
His parents recently ate at Mango, their first visit to one of his restaurants, and his father proclaimed the food “excellent. He puts his heart and soul into cooking. When he gets an interest in something, he picks it up fast.”
Chiappetti and Guggeis routinely work a minimum of 75 to 80 hours per week, starting about 10 a.m. and working until midnight or later six days a week. In July 1997, the partners opened Grapes at 773 N. Wells St.
“We wanted (to open) something in the meantime, before Rhapsody,” Guggeis said of their entrepreneurial middle child, whose 50-seat dining room is modeled after a Mediterranean cafe.
Although management staff was hired to take over the reins at both Mango and Grapes, the partners are still very much hands-on, meeting with staff each morning and constantly checking on all three restaurants. There have been a few frustrating moments for them, including an unexpected downpour that put almost 4 feet of water in the basement of Grapes and 2 feet in Mango this summer.
During the storm, Guggeis hurried to a hardware store for more sump pumps. While searching the aisles, he bumped into staff from several other downtown restaurants doing the same thing.
“There was no way we could pump the water out (of the basements) fast enough,” Guggeis said.
Although the wine bottles in Mango’s cellar were sealed, those that could not be moved had to be thrown out along with other food supplies because of health department regulations.
Things are running smoothly thus far at Rhapsody, which Chiappetti sees as the ultimate reflection of life’s pleasures: music, art and good food. The restaurant anchors the Chicago Symphony’s new Education and Administration Wing in the recently renovated $110-million Symphony Center. Rhapsody will offer late night dining, with the bar open until midnight or later for theater and symphony patrons.
The pair was chosen to open the Center’s restaurant because of the youth-oriented crowd that they draw at Mango and Grapes.
“We gave a presentation to a lot of the major donors and a symphony committee,” Guggeis said.
A 50-seat wine bar offering 80 different wines, an oyster bar and a sushi-style counter are among the restaurant’s attractions.
“We wanted a restaurant that would bring excitement to Symphony Center,” said Michael Gehret, vice president for marketing and development for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “(The committee) went to Mango several times. We were really impressed by the atmosphere and certainly the food. We wanted a similar experience for diners at Symphony Center. All of us are pleased with the choice.”
Rhapsody’s entrees, which run from $11 to $24, include roasted salmon with chanterelle mushrooms in a curry sauce; country turkey pot pie; seared sea scallops; and risotto with corn kernels, white truffle and parmesan cheese. Menu items are expected to change seasonally.
Diners can watch as pastry chefs prepare cherry cobbler, granny’s apple pie, and a chocolate and macadamia nut brownie with Vermont maple syrup ice cream.
Although the December issue of Food and Wine magazine touts his culinary skills, Chiappetti downplays the praise.
“Cooking is not rocket science; it’s not brain surgery. It’s about loving what you’re doing and showing you care,” he said.
In his limited leisure time, Chiappetti plays the piano, and he likes to paint. He’s also looking into marketing a line of Chiappetti food products. His cookbook, a collection of recipes based on American cuisine, will be published this fall.
“Every day should be a new experience and a new challenge. That’s what cooking’s all about,” Chiappetti said.
And down the road he may return to his Beverly roots.
“I’d like to open a restaurant on the South Side. It would be an old-fashioned diner,” he said.
