Sotto Breathes New Life into the Century-Old Italian Village

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My sister, Madeline Shea, and I have been coming to the Italian restaurant La Cantina in downtown Chicago since the respective ages of eight and seven, so it wasn’t without trepidation that we visited its successor, Sotto, for the first time in early December. The cheeky, Italian American bar (Bar Sotto) and restaurant (Ristorante di Sotto) combo from the fourth-generation owners of Italian Village is the latest addition to this four-restaurants-in-one temple to Italian American cooking, which first debuted at 71 W. Monroe St. in 1927, as the Village. Subterranean La Cantina came next, in 1955, followed by Vivere, the contemporary main-floor restaurant, in 1961, then called the Florentine.

Beyond a herculean overhaul of a 70-year-old Chicago icon within an (even older) icon, Sotto’s arrival also represented the end of an era for my family dating back to 1991.

It began as an annual holiday tradition the year our family moved to the suburbs of Chicago: early-bird dinner downtown after a Saturday matinee viewing of “The Nutcracker” ballet. For my mom and dad, La Cantina offered passable, kid-friendly Italian-American cooking and a deep, surprisingly affordable Italian wine list. But for Mad and me, it was a whimsical underground labyrinth that happened to serve our favorite food: spaghetti and meat sauce.

We’d descend the marble stairs in our best fluffy dresses and bunched-up stockings to the narrow, dimly lit corridor flanked with cafe tables and high-gloss exposed brick walls beneath a low, curved ceiling – like an alleyway in some make-believe Italian town. Past the tiny coat check with the windowed door, a small foyer featured a faux balcony looking out over a frescoed Florentine scene, complete with real lights in the tiny windows. This connected a low-lit bar (the future Bar Sotto) on the left and skinny dining corridor with cozy leather booths to the right. It took just one visit for us to determine that the latter offered the choicest seats in the whole place, because aquariums full of technicolor fish were built right into the wall. Under the guise of (far too many) bathroom trips, we’d set off to explore, rerouting with glee whenever we spotted the roving serving cart laden with platters of veal saltimbocca and creamy fettuccine.

For a decade, this tradition endured more or less intact. Dad ribbed now-teenaged Mad and me for keeping our orders exactly the same: a cup of chicken brodo for her and minestrone for me, followed by spaghetti with meat sauce or, occasionally, meatballs. Our family got to know Cantina’s general manager Hans Kurt.

“It’s so good to see you girls!” he’d say. “Come back when you’re 21; your first drinks are on me.”

The Turkish-born Kurt started working at Italian Village as a dishwasher in 1974. After a few years back in Turkey he returned, working his way up through busser, pantry cook, server, bartender, and captain before becoming GM at La Cantina.

“Five times a week for 35 years,” he told me in 2020. “It’s my second home! It’s like we are family.”

Once my sister and I reached college, edgier shows and trendier Chicago restaurants supplanted “The Nutcracker” and La Cantina at the holidays. But after I moved to the city in 2006, my sister and I revived the tradition of dining at Cantina once or twice a year – except that now we shared a bottle of wine, and often requested an extra side of meat sauce with our pasta. Sometimes we popped into the bar at Vivere for a pre-dinner cocktail. We even ventured upstairs for dinner at the always-packed Village. It felt safer in that less hallowed space to branch out via toothsome grilled calamari swimming in oil tinged with oregano and garlic; stacks of buffalo mozzarella, tomato, and basil doused in syrupy balsamic; and pastas like orecchiette with Italian sausage and garlicky greens.

Indeed, despite a design and menu glow-up in 2015 to lighten the space and focus more on steaks and chops, we kept Cantina largely frozen in time. Maybe the meat sauce wasn’t anything to write home about anymore, but it tasted just like we remembered. Such a rare fixture in this ever-evolving city and life is worth preserving, isn’t it – even if the ritual’s grown a little tired? Nostalgia’s funny that way.

Cantina went dark at the height of the pandemic, in fall 2020, as did the pasta-focused Vivere, which reopened as a private-dining space. Kurt moved upstairs to work at the Village. Every time my sister and I returned to eat at the Village over the ensuing couple of years, we’d peer down that darkened stairwell and worry that Cantina would never reopen.

“We should’ve gone more often,” Mad said. I nodded fervently.

Little did we know that fourth-generation owners, siblings Jonathan and Giovanna Capitanini, had a fresh, slightly irreverent, vision for our beloved underground labyrinth that would fill a void for cool neighborhood joints to pop by after work in the reviving, increasingly residential Loop. Bar Sotto came first as an idea and a pop-up in November 2023. Construction on the full restaurant-and-bar overhaul started in earnest early in 2024. Being the youngest link in a family-run business chain dating back almost a century, Jonathan and Giovanna knew they couldn’t just abandon nearly 70 years of history, memories and meals at Sotto’s venerable predecessor. Nor did they want to.

“There was a lot of focus on how to retain the character of the unique space and the gentle balance between renewing and replacing,” Jonathan Capitanini told me. “We saw everything that had existed in the space for decades as pieces of the story, things to be adapted and reused rather than torn out, replaced or covered up.”

They painstakingly removed and kept as much of the original, Italian cypress-wood wall paneling as they could, reinstalling it carefully in certain areas. The same went for the old, red brick, which helped fill in a doorway and expanded one of the tiny bathrooms. Our dear, glowing Florentine mural remained and received a neon-pink Bar Sotto overlay. The long wood bar stayed, too.

The Capitaninis brought on former Vivere vet, chef Steven Mendez, to reimagine the menu as a tight, if liberated, mix of snacks, pastas, and heartier entrees – keeping one anchoring foot in Italy. Tiny pastine stand in for rice in the cacio e pepe arancini with buttery, truffled robiola cheese and a syrupy drizzle of saba. Short ribs are slow braised with Chicago’s essential condiment, giardiniera, then nestled with tangy, sweety drop peppers atop rich polenta. Pastas include  a classic-ish Norma, with rigatoni, tomato, guanciale, eggplant, pecorino, and basil; and a sweet, umami-rich pappardelle with mushrooms, black garlic, and truffle. But no spaghetti bolognese, to the disappointment of my seven-year-old self.

Wine and beverage director Jared Gelband leans on his vast knowledge and network for the also-compact and playful drinks menu. Sardinian mirto berry liqueur lends bittersweet, herbaceous notes to a bracing gin sour in the Mirto Beach. In the espresso martini-riffing Reggiano, Parmesan-infused vodka delivers a hint of savory funk alongside the usual suspects of espresso and coffee liqueur. You’ll find a few uncommon gems on Gelband’s food-loving beer and wine lists, too: ahem, not one but four beers from Langhe craft brewer Baladin and the plush, pretty 2022 Massolino Chardonnay from Piedmont.

The anticipation was palpable when Mad and I descended those old marble stairs for the first time together in four years. The entry corridor recalled the make-believe Italian alley of the old days – cafe tables and checkered-tile floors, twinkle lights and flower boxes – but it was as if a fresh breeze had blown through the whole place. Sumptuous red banquettes lined the lightened-up dining rooms and bar-adjacent lounge, which is accented with a glittering disco ball. Red-tinged light fixtures mingled with flickering candlelight; artfully torn wallpaper complemented panels of the restored cypress wood. On one wall of the dining room where my family used to sit, a hand-drawn collage of four generations of Capitaninis and Italian Village’s longest tenured employees grinned out at us, embraced one another, rolled dough, or gardened. It’s like we are family.

“The goal was to try to keep the space a relaxing, unpretentious hideaway, which is what we had heard from so many longtime Cantina guests and employees,” Jonathan said. “What they valued and missed most was that Cantina felt like an extension of their living room and they knew people by name.”

He told Mad and me that Kurt had finally retired in July 2023, some 50 years after his first dishwashing shift – and moved back to Turkey.

“Next time you talk to him, tell him the Shea girls said hi,” I replied.

Mad and I lingered until almost everyone else had gone home. We snapped photos of one another perched at the low-lit bar like a couple of tourists. We snuck extra passed bites of the tiramisu submerged in chocolate pot du creme and sipped juicy, rose-scented Etna rosso. We explored and twirled through each whimsical corridor, delighting in every discovery, just like the old days.