Requiem for Sabatino’s — the kind of place that used to exist
And now, Sabatino’s Restaurant is history.
During the summer, when Dec. 23 was announced as its final day, the business’ computer crashed. Soon, the restaurant’s answering machine message said it was all booked up, period. The final weeks have witnessed a traffic jam at the maitre d’s desk in a pinched corridor between the bar and a rabbit warren of dining rooms.
Those waiting to be seated line up on one side. On the other is a procession of those who’ve already eaten but insist on giving and getting a final hug from the proprietors, Enzo and Angelo Pagni. The diminutive brothers disappear into the wraparound embrace of longtime patrons. Some tick off numbers, like old soldiers reciting their service records: “Twenty years ago, we celebrated our engagement here.”
How come? The owners aren’t celebrity chefs, the kind whose careers restaurant critics chronicle: sous chef here, chef there, chef de cuisine somewhere else. Enzo and Angelo are just two gentlemen who, for 40 years, have stood at a maitre d’s desk on Irving Park Road, in “K Town,” as some Chicagoans refer to the thicket of bungalows west of Pulaski Road. Sabatino’s hasn’t gone through a series of dining fads (Northern Italian, nouvelle cuisine, fusion, vegan). It’s a “red-sauce restaurant,” which foodies pronounce archly. Sabatino’s pastas are coated in tomato sauce, in the Sicilian fashion.
“It’s not about the food,” said Scott Andryk, who was eating recently at the bar. “It’s how you feel when you’re here. A sense of belonging.”
Bucktown, where he lives, has trendier restaurants, but they’re here and gone. “You can’t go back to the same place,” Andryk said.
Alongside him at the bar others, lacking a reservation, wanted a plate of gnocchi or ravioli to store in memory. Phones have been held high to grab a shot of the bar’s lowered-ceiling rack dripping stalactites of wine and martini glasses. Parents with infants in arms have taken selfies. With her husband and son, Yvonne Grendys came from Gurnee.
“A reservation was harder to get than tickets to a Rolling Stones concert,” she said. “Sabatino’s is a classic.”
It’s also a product of the American dream. Their parents brought Enzo and Angelo to Chicago from Santa Maria a Monte, a village near Pisa, in 1966.
“We came for a better life,” said Enzo, 64. “My father and brother went to work the day after we got here.”
Enzo, four years younger than Angelo, eventually got a job in an Italian restaurant. So too did Angelo, and in late 1977 they bought Sabatino’s.
“It was a little place, serving pizza and a few things,” Angelo said. “I was the cook. My brother was the bartender.”
Putting in 10- and 12-hour days, they made it a neighborhood landmark — meaning a state of mind no less than an address.
“Years ago, a family would dine out once a year,” said Tina Shannon, who was at Sabatino’s for a birthday celebration. A restaurant back then, she said, was a special place. A family’s favored restaurant was expected to be unchanged since the previous year. The menu wasn’t much different than a family’s daily fare — steak, chops, chicken, and, in Sabatino’s case, Italian dishes — plus maybe something a little different. “Shrimp de jonghe, baked Alaska, bananas foster flamed at the table,” someone at the bar suggested when the subject came up there.
Other diners thought one mark of an old-style upscale restaurant was a relish tray: a Lazy Susan’s worth of radishes, olives, carrot curls, pickles, green-pepper slices.
“Radigan’s still has a relish tray,” Grendys said. “No. It’s closed,” her husband said, looking at his smartphone.
So too are other old-style restaurants like Zum Deutschen Eck on Southport Avenue, the Golden Ox on Clybourn Avenue, Club El Bianco on 63rd Street. And now Sabatino’s.
“We wanted to go out before we couldn’t physically do this anymore,” Enzo said. There wasn’t a family member to take over the restaurant. Members of the younger generation have careers of their own.
“That’s the thing about a restaurant like this,” said Suzanne Lukes, a waitress there for 15 years. “The children go to college.”
Enzo and Angelo were leery of selling Sabatino’s as a restaurant. They’d worry that the new owner might cut corners, maybe use canned tomato paste. So they sold the property to a developer.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Enzo said. “I got to think about that.”
So, too, does Patrick Shannon, Tina’s father-in-law. For 25 years he has celebrated his birthday surrounded by children and grandchildren at a place that won’t be there next year. But Patrick has a dream, he said looking down a long table at his brood. Why not? The place was born of a dream.
Patrick’s is that once a year, Sabatino’s will reopen for his birthday.