Gemma Foods is Chicago’s next pasta juggernaut
Former Formento’s chef Tony Quartaro’s fresh handmade and extruded shapes aren’t just for his neighbors anymore.
Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe Clockwise from left: Canestri alla vodka, cappelletti with lamb pancetta and fava cream, sorpresine with burro e oro and mozzarella di Bufala Jeff Marini for Chicago Reader Tony Quartaro has an impeccable pasta pedigree going all the way back to all-day suppers at his Grandma Joyce’s house in upstate New York, where he learned to shape gnocchi for the Sunday gravy. “She showed me the difference between sinkers and swimmers, as she called them,” says the 37-year-old chef behind the Beverly-born fresh pasta delivery start-up Gemma Foods. “And how you can make something transcendent from something as simple as potatoes.”
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For two months last spring, Jamie Minotti and Mark McLarry kept the doors closed on their new San Marcos restaurant-brewery complex My Yard Live because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, the partners and their staff survived the shutdown, thanks to a CARES Act federal loan and expanded unemployment benefits.
But this time around they may not be so lucky. On Monday, a new state health order restricted San Diego County restaurants to takeout-only service in a bid to keep people home during the alarming surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. But carry-out service was only a fraction of sales at My Yard Live, an experiential family-friendly venue with a fenced children’s playground and an outdoor concert stage. So Minotti and McLarry decided to shut down for now in what they are calling an indefinate hibernation.