Chicago has more than its share of wonderful Italian restaurants, from the elegant and innovative to the down-home and cozy, but a new entry threatens to eclipse them all. In a dazzling debut, Sole Mio rushes to the first rank of Chicago’s Italian kitchens.
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Sole Mio is rooted in the cooking of northern Italy, aiming for a more diversified, more balanced cuisine than that of the common neighborhood Italian restaurant. Its dishes have plenty of flavor, and portions are large–no nouvelle Italian for this kitchen–but the emphasis is on finesse rather than force. As Newbury puts it, “Each dish has a lot of flavors, but we attempt to balance them so that you can taste several of them in a single bite. You can’t do that if the sauce is strongly tomatoey or you’re contending with huge globs of cheese.”
There are eight appetizers on the regular menu and another couple as specials. From the menu we chose pan-fried polenta with prunes marinated in grappa ($4.95), a dish unlike any I’ve ever had before. Polenta is basically boiled cornmeal, a traditional dish in some parts of Italy; it can be married to a wide range of flavors. At Avanzare, Terczak created a dish of polenta topped with goat cheese. Here, he and LoDuca worked a long time to come up with something equally dramatic. The result: a dish that features polenta cut into triangles and delicately complemented by sweet, diced prunes and a marsala sauce.
Dessert possibilities range from the sensibly light–granita, a kind of Italian sno-cone flavored with campari and grapefruit–to a sinfully rich cannoli, one of the restaurant’s signature dishes. Cannoli at Sole Mio is far more elaborate than you’ll find elsewhere. The pastry is a fresh, homemade wafer cone, unlike the common deep-fried cylinder, and it’s filled at the last minute (no sitting around to get soggy) with a mixture of ricotta and mascarpone, a rich Italian version of cream cheese. It’s served in two sauces: pistachio, to pick up the pistachio baked into the cone, and raspberry for tartness. A simple Italian standby at Sole Mio is beautiful, elaborate, and almost too much for one person.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
