[Editor’s note: Both Nella Pizzeria Napoletana and Kith & Kin closed in 2011.]
As I submitted to this scheme, I started to relax. First courses, like a meaty, tender veal cheek with escargot atop salsify puree, are substantial and for the most part technically impeccable. And some, including a pair of seared scallops with smooth parsnip that echoed the texture of popcorn with some freeze-dried corn and a fragrant bloom of cress, pears, fennel, macadamia nuts, peppermint, and grated licorice root—suggest that Levitski and Ngyuen are having lots of fun. There’s enormous potential even in missteps like a charred and overchilled baby octopus with white bean puree, olive, and some of those winter tomatoes—I want that again in July.
Still, I’m just glad Levitski’s back in the kitchen—he’s a significant talent with a lot more going for him than just a good story. —Mike Sula
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In early 2006 Jonathan Goldsmith opened Ravenswood’s Spacca Napoli, introducing the city to authentic Neapolitan pizza and pretty much altering the landscape for pizza in Chicago in general. Goldsmith’s not-so-secret weapon was not his massive imported wood-burning brick oven but an import of another sort: Nella Grassano, a Naples native who’d started making pies at age eight in her family’s pizzeria. Spacca still turns out perfectly good pies, but after Grassano’s departure in 2007, the pizzagentsia began to grumble about a decline in consistency. Now she’s teamed up with Mia Francesca capo Scott Harris for the first of two projected pizzerias, Nella Pizzeria Napoletana, a bright, kitschily appointed Lincoln Park room featuring its own blue-tiled, volcanic rock oven.
The owners of Kith & Kin could’ve hyped their inviting Lincoln Park spot as a gastropub and earned an oxygen-depleting collective yawn. But they didn’t, and a stealthy early-December opening has attracted mobs to this otherwise culinarily bereft pocket of the neighborhood.
3120 N. Lincoln | 773-525-7005
3054 W. Armitage | 773-252-7440
Sprout
1417 W. Fullerton, 773-348-0706, sproutrestaurant.com
Nella Pizzeria Napoletana
2423 N. Clark, 773-327-3400, pizzerianella.com
Kith & Kin 1119 W. Webster, 773-472-7070
