Take your mouth on a tour of Italy at Gaetano's

If you come to Gaetano’s looking for a quintessential Italian meal, complete with spaghetti and meatballs, you’re out of luck. But that’s a good thing.  This fusion Italian restaurant is anything but ordinary. With expertly crafted dishes bursting with unique flavors you’d be crazy to want anything else. 

Just east of the Fox River, in the heart of Batavia, Gaetano and Wendy Di Benedetto opened their second restaurant at the beginning of August.  Gaetano Di Benedetto hails from the coastal town of Bagheria, located just outside of Palermo, Sicily.  He has been an executive chef since 1989 in restaurants throughout Italy, as well as France, England and the United States. 

As you enter Gaetano’s it’s as if you’ve stepped into a Sicilian Chateau.  Herb gardens line the windows of the restaurant and the stucco walls give the interior an old world vibe.  Once the sun goes down the painted ceiling comes alive and the Moroccan style lanterns cast a romantic glow on the tables.  The experience at this restaurant is so whimsical, even reading the different items on the menu seems as if you’re reciting a poem.  With a chef who isn't afraid of a little improvisation, a meal at Gaetano’s is simply magnificent.  But be carful of their homemade bread baked in their wood-burning oven, because once you start eating it, it’s hard to stop.

The phrase above their restaurant says it all: Fusion of regional Italian cuisine, with respect to tradition.

I was able to sit down with both husband and wife to talk food, history and a little bit of jazz. 

Alle: You’re originally from an area just outside of Palermo, Sicily can you tell me how some of the traditions of that area can be seen in your restaurant and food?

Gaetano Di Benedetto:  Well, here we actually do fusion original.  So, we go pretty much everywhere in Italy and then fuse those different traditions together.  In a way, and hopefully I won’t offend anyone, Italian cuisine is kind of boring.  Wherever you go in Italy we have all the same menu. We have some traditional dishes that are specific to the region or city, but it's basically very simple food. 

What I did in order to please customers was start to put together dishes in different ways using ingredients from different places in Italy.  Let’s say I go to the region of Emilio Romano and I get the balsamic, then I go to Liguria and I get a pesto, I go to the south and I get all the heirloom tomatoes, so I go everywhere and kind of shop with different ideas and combine them and come up with something that is different.  I’m not disrespecting the dish, I’m embellishing it.  By doing that I’m making it more appealing to the customers that I serve.  I mean if you come out here and you just have a piece of bread and meat, you don’t want that, you want something more interesting.

A: You compared the art of cooking to playing Jazz music. Can you explain that comparison?

GB: Jazz is my passion.  I love jazz and that’s actually the reason why I came here on vacation, so I could go around to jazz clubs and find musicians that I love.  The cooking that we do is very similar to jazz. If you cook traditional and you stick with the standard, it’s like playing classical music.  You have the music sheets, you read it and you play and try to interpret the music pretty much the same way as how the composer put it together.  When you’re playing jazz you have an intro, you go into the melody, you go back to the intro and then, when you go back to the melody you have space for improvisation.  And improvisation doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong.  You still leave room to respect the design of the music but now you can go out of the box and play and that’s exactly what we do at Gaetano’s.  So, the recipe is the recipe and it stays the recipe. But then you still have space to play and introduce new things.

A: Your career spans three decades! You’ve been the executive chef at restaurants throughout Europe and the United States how do you keep your ideas fresh and exciting?

GB: I like to go around and go to stores and that’s refreshing in a way.  Yesterday I went to Caputo’s.  They have different things and I like to get ideas just by walking around.  Let’s say couscous, I went there and I saw couscous and I think 'I should make couscous'.  Now you might ask why couscous?  Well, it is still part of the Sicilian tradition.  We were invaded by the Spanish so there are actually cities where we still make couscous and paella.  So I’m like why not make it here?  

A: And that’s what makes up the fusion nature of your restaurant.

GB: That’s right, we do things a little different here.  Like the idea of a meatball, that’s embarrassing for us to do a meatball.  Italians don’t do meatballs in restaurants.  Meatballs represent a time in our life when we were poor and we were eating meat once a week.  We weren’t able to afford steak, so we had to buy all the bad meat to make ground beef to make meatballs to eat meat once a week.  The tradition was meat on Sunday and fish on Friday and every other day we were eating whatever we would find around. Dinner was supposed to be eggs or vegetables or soup or pasta.  But meat and fish was only once a week because it was expensive.  When I go to a restaurant and I see a meatball it hurts my feelings, because it reminds me of a historical time when families were suffering.  That’s why when I see a meatball I want to explode and jump out of my skin.

A: The last time I was in your wife mentioned you have an organic garden back home that often provides some of the fresh ingredients that your cook with.  What sort of things do you grow?

GB: Zucchini blossom, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, some different squash, and eggplant.

A: How important is farm to table dining?

GB: Farm to table dining is a wonderful concept.  But it restricts you on a lot of things.  In a way we do farm to table here.  But it is done not directly by us.  If I have to spend a lot of time doing the farming, and tell everybody that we do that here, well look at the size of my menu, I’d be lying.  So we do not claim that.  But most of our food is organic, most.  

Organic doesn’t last forever, it’s not year-round and it’s not necessarily always pretty.  So, when I go to the market we always look at organic and non-organic and we figure out what we have to buy for the day.  Sometimes if you do beets that are organic they look terrible.  They are small and we don’t want that, because believe it or not when you come in and you have a beet salad with all these ugly small beets you’re going to complain.   We have no preservatives.  That’s one thing I try to avoid here.   Smoked salmon, we smoke our own.  Ricotta cheese, I don’t get the processed ricotta cheese I’m getting the real thing.  

A: Can you explain your wood burning oven techniques that you are so famous for?  What makes yours so unique?

GB: We’re only talking about over 5,000 years of history… You find this oven in almost every culture.  Some cultures use it outside, other cultures have the wood underneath.  If you go to Bombay they use it in the bakery. If you go to a town close to where I grew up there’s an oven that’s close to 3,000 years old.  Now, of course it’s broken, it’s not operating anymore.  But it’s kind of funny to see this old fashioned technology working to this day.  Now, I say technology because the shape of the dome allows the wood to catch on fire and the fire turns around and creates the same idea of a convection oven.  So it’s 5,000 years of technology that still totally works today. 

You can see when you come in the decoration on our oven is a mosaic of little pieces that are memories that we have collected from trips we took and we brought pieces back from Mexico, Belize, Arizona, from Italy or whatever we had at home and we just broke them into little pieces and we put it together. The oven reflects the heat it doesn’t really smoke that much but it gives a nice flavor of wood without overwhelming the meat.   I don’t like meat that is completely loaded with smoke flavor.  So what happens is, I take the old tradition and try to bring some new dishes with it.  Now, many people just use this oven, unfortunately, just for pizza or bread.

A: So what kind of things do you cook in there?

GB: We cook all our meat inside.  We use hot plates so the plate gets up to very high temperatures, between 750 and 900 degrees. We sear all our meat, our scallops are made there, all our special fish is cooked in there. The dates with pancetta are previously cooked at a very low temperature and then we caramelize everything in the oven at a very high temperature. It’s kind of playing with temperature, and these ovens are all different.  So you need to become friendly with the oven and understand how it works and how it’s going to work for you.

A: What’s your favorite item on the menu to make?

GB: Ah, I don’t know. Today, I’m very excited about making my fish.  Why?  I don’t know.  I was going around and I saw a tortilla. I looked in my cooler I had avocado, I saw some nice mango and today I’m fusing some Latino influence into my Italian recipe.  So, instead of breading it with breadcrumbs, I bread it with tortilla.  Instead of making traditional mashed potatoes I’m making them with chipotle and cumin.  Instead of doing a guacamole I’m going to do an avocado mousse.  So I’m playing with the ingredients, using an Italian technique but with a Latin accent.

A: How has the community responded to the new restaurant in town? You guys are kind of the new kids on the block. 

Wendy Di Benedetto: They’ve been wonderful.  The city of Batavia has been fantastic to us, very supportive.  The response from a lot of the people that live here in Batavia has been incredible. It’s been very heartwarming and very close to our hearts because we’re residents here now too.  Sometimes I still like to serve as an owner and I like to be right out there with my servers and kind of getting a feel for how everyone is enjoying everything.  I would say that most common comment I get from locals here is “thank you so much for opening, we can’t believe this is open in our own town”.  It makes me feel so good because all the hard work we put in here has paid off.

A: What are some things you’re doing to set yourself apart from other restaurants?

WD: We have specials at our other restaurant that we just recently implemented here.  We’re open Tuesday through Saturday.  Tuesday nights we’re going to have 50 percent off selected wine bottles, 20 percent off reserves.  Wednesday we’ll have half priced martinis.  Thursdays we offer “Gaetapas” at 50 dollars a person instead of 60.  And now that it’s fall we offer live music on Thursday nights. It will always be jazz or some form of classical jazz. 

A: It feels really homey here.

WD: If you came to our home and had dinner in our dining room you would feel like you’re in our restaurant.  And that’s what I love about it.  I love that feeling when I’m serving people that I am in my own house and I am just taking good care of my guests.

A: And I feel like it kind of has to feel that way because I’m sure you’re here a lot.

WD: Yea I’m here all day long with him (Gaetano) and then I go home and then I come back and serve.  And yea it’s a lot of hours, and yea I’m tired, but it’s a good tired.  It’s not an I want to cry tired.  I want to people to feel as if they’re coming into someone’s home and I want people to feel like they’re coming to a great awesome dinner party.

A: For people who might be dining for the first time at Gaetano’s would you explain the tasting menu?

WD: It’s an experience, it’s not just going out for dinner.  And that’s another goal of ours, to make everyone’s time here an experience.  From the time they walk in the door.  He’s a chef, when we go out to eat he needs inspiration.  We’ve been to Tru, Alinea, we’ve done tastings downtown.  You’re going to pay around 250 dollars minimum per person to do a tasting like we do here out there.  Some people don’t understand that because they’ve probably never been to those restaurants.  But, the quality of our ingredients is top notch.  That’s why our price point is where it is, which is still extremely low compared to going downtown. 

The concept behind the “Gaetapas” is if you want to have an experience here try the tasting menu the first time, because you are going to enjoy tasting food that comes from our wood burning oven station, our gas fire station and our cold station.  Then you’re going to share a beautiful pasta and then you’re going to have a desert tray.  And that’s three courses, that’s nine dishes, plus a desert tray for 60 dollars per person.

A: You can’t go wrong

This wasn’t my first time at Gaetano’s, it was actually my fourth!  My mom and dad have been frequenting their Forest Park location for years, so when we heard they opened a second restaurant out here we were thrilled!  So much for my diet though…

As Gaetano suggested we went with the tasting menu, and our stomachs thanked us for it.

Check out our three course meal below!

We began our meal with Panna Cotta di Bufala.  Bufala mozzarella panna cotta served with cream of eggplant, grape tomatoes, speck, pesto Genovese and 25 year old balsamico from Modena.  This little bite was melt in your mouth delicious.  It was the perfect, light treat to start the meal off with.

Another favorite in the first round was the di Kobe Piccante.  Pan-seared kobe beef served with toasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds, crystallized garlic, pumpkin oil, Calabrian pepper paste and soy-lime vinaigrette.  Garlic crostinis accompanied the beef.  I’m not lying when I say this is the ONLY beef Carpaccio I have ever enjoyed.  My mom is a Carpaccio fanatic. Whenever she orders it I try a bit and I’ve never liked the texture of raw beef.  But Gaetano’s Carpaccio had me craving more which is truly a first.

 The last dish in the first course was the Carpaccio di Barbabietole.  Yellow and red beets roasted in their wood-burning oven, sliced Carpaccio style and drizzled with champagne vinaigrette.  The beets were paired with mache greens topped with fried goat cheese.  All you had to say was beets and goat cheese and I was sold.

 As anticipated the first course was a hit.  What I love most about this particular tasting experience is that throughout the entire meal we were never rushed.  When you’re consuming multiple courses, pacing is essential.  I’ve been to other tastings where they rapid-fire send all of the courses out and before you know it you’re in a food coma and they haven’t even sent out half of the meal.  Our server Abby who has worked for Gaetano since he opened his Forest Park restaurant was terrific at not only spacing out our courses but also recommending wines to accompany the dishes.

Next up Capesante al Cioccolato.  This dish was what I imagine they would serve in heaven.  Fresh harvested scallops dusted with cocoa powder and roasted in the wood-burning oven.  They were served over king oyster mushrooms and chocolate vinaigrette, watercress and drizzled with 25-year-old balsamico from Modena.  I am not a scallop lover, but just as I was with the beef Carpaccio, I’ve been converted.

 One of the staples on the menu is the Datteri con Polpettina al Cocco.  Translation: Dates stuffed with beef and chorizo, wrapped in pancetta and baked in the woo-burning oven, served with coconut tomato sauce accented with cumin, coriander and jalapeño.   If you’re coming for dinner and not doing a tasting you simply cannot leave without having these.  The coconut tomato sauce is the perfect combination of sweet and savory.

 But wait there’s more!  The last dish in our second course was the Crabcake dei Cesari.  This was a fun take on a traditional dish.  Think crab cake cannelloni, baked and served with arugula dressed with ceci bean anchovy sauce and accented with garlic and Parmigiano.

 Our third course included one of my all time favorites: zucchini blossoms or Fiori di Zucca al Drago.  These were zucchini blossoms stuffed with pecorino cheese mousse, fried tempura style and served with Drago sauce.  The cheese was so smooth and decadent and the tempura added a perfect crunch.

 The other dish in this course was also tempura fried. At this point my imaginary diet coach inside my head was screaming at me, but I chose to ignore her because this food was heavenly.  The Calamari al Porto Rosa had the perfect flavor combination.  Tempura fried calamari rolled with asparagus, topped with sun-dried tomato spicy shrimp sauce, served with soy-lime citronette and borlotti aioli.

 A welcome break between courses came when Gaetano asked me to accompany him  to their lower level where he was making pasta.  This kind was a bit different; it was black, dyed with squid ink!  

Gaetano makes all of his pastas from scratch, which is quite the time consuming process.  But in his (and mine as well) opinion, it’s well worth it.  He uses a machine that uses the same technology as a pasta maker from Thomas Jefferson’s days.  Obviously, this is not an industrial size machine, but Gaetano likes it that way.  He says this machine uses more eggs and less water, which gives the pasta that glorious chewy consistency that we as diners enjoy.  So what’s this pasta being made for?  Still to be determined, but Gaetano was thinking it might pair nicely with some lobster and artichokes.

Now, back upstairs and on to the main course, you’re probably thinking wait there’s more?!  But yes and it was incredible.  The great thing about the tasting menu is that nothing is really concrete.  Gaetano is always switching in and out tastings from the evening’s specials.  Our pasta tasting was Gnocchi di spinaci alla Piemontese.  Spinach gnocchi tossed with beef and lamb monachine, porcini mushrooms and elephant garlic-butter drizzled with Gruyere fondue.  The gnocchi was a vibrant green color and the Gruyere cheese was almost silklike. 

 And just as we thought we were headed for dessert Gaetano surprised us with one last dish.  Ippoglosso alla Don Jose gave a fun Latin flair to our meal.  The dish included scallops encrusted with corn crumbs sautéed with cumin-guajillo butter and served with mango Pico de Gallo and avocado mousse.  The scallops were buttery and the Pico de Gallo was so refreshing and light. (We were a bit quick on the uptake and I forgot to capture the plate's presentation.  Three glasses of wine will sometimes make even the best bloggers forget things...)

You might be shocked to hear that we still had room for dessert, and good thing we did because the Gaetano dessert tray is epic.  It included three little tastings, my favorite of which was the tiramisu served in a terracotta flowerpot.  It was layered with cookies and dipped in coffee, flavored with Kaluha and Amaretto with mascarpone cream and cocoa.  The second desert was Millefoglie alla crema Catalana con Pesche.  Caramelized phyllo layered with custard and peaches, drizzled with caramel sauce.  The final dessert was Semifreddo all’aceto Balsamico di Modena.  Vanilla semifreddo drizzled with 25-year-old balsamico from Modena.

And what Italian meal would be complete without a little limoncello?

Gaetano's is the epitome of charm and innovation.  Their flair for creating spectacularly delicious Italian cuisine while still making you feel right at home is one of a kind.  If you're looking for an unforgettable meal and a place to feel like you've stepped into the magnificent restaurants of the Mediterranean, without leaving the suburbs, look no further than Gaetano's.