Everything begins in Italy and ends at your table.
The pasta is extruded and cut by hand each morning. The fish comes in from the Mediterranean twice a week, and every bottle in the cellar is Italian, drawn from all twenty of the country's regions. Chef Jane Doe cooks the food of the Ligurian and Amalfi coasts the way she learned it there, simply and in season, at a pace that assumes you have nowhere else to be tonight.
Seven courses. The menu is written the afternoon of your dinner, around whatever came in that morning.
Chef Jane Doe spent six years in kitchens in Piedmont and on the Amalfi coast before coming home to Chicago. She opened Luigi's in 2014 with twelve tables, her grandmother's ragù, and a wine list she wrote out by hand. The room is bigger now and the list runs four hundred bottles, but her habit stayed: she walks the dining room most nights, and nobody gets hurried out so the table can turn.
The private room seats twenty-four beneath a hand-blown Murano chandelier. Most nights it holds a rehearsal dinner or a fortieth birthday; once, a wedding for six. You plan the menu with the chef, the wine comes up from the reserve cellar, and if you'd like the whole restaurant to yourselves, ask about a buyout.
One of the few rooms in Chicago where the kitchen and the floor are operating at the same level. The tagliolini al tartufo alone is worth the reservation.
Took my parents for their fortieth anniversary. My dad mentioned Barolo once and the sommelier quietly built the rest of the evening around it. My mother still brings it up.
Second visit and the maitre d' remembered which table we liked. We stayed three hours and nobody blinked. Get the branzino.
Reservations are strongly recommended and can be booked up to sixty days in advance. Walk-ins are welcome at the bar, where the full menu is served, subject to availability.
Smart and elegant. We ask that guests skip athletic wear and beachwear. Jackets are appreciated but not required.
Yes. The menu marks vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free dishes, and the kitchen is glad to adapt most plates with notice. Please note any allergies when booking so the chef can prepare accordingly.
The chef's tasting menu is available for the entire table by reservation. For parties with differing preferences, the à la carte menu is always available alongside it.
Yes. The private dining room seats up to twenty-four, and full buyouts are available. Reach out through the reservation form with your date and party size and we'll call you back to plan it.