The Best New Italian Restaurant in Chicago Doesn't Feel New
A chef comes home from New York with a decade of fine-dining muscle and applies it to mozzarella sticks, tavern pizza, and the corner that has always been Italian.
The corner of Armitage and Seminary has been feeding the neighborhood Italian food for the better part of half a century. Before Dimmi Dimmi, it was Tarantino's for thirty years. Before Tarantino's, it was an Italian market. There is something to be said for a space that keeps returning to the same answer. Dimmi Dimmi is the best version of that answer yet.
Chef Matt Eckfeld is from Michigan, not Chicago, but the city is where he started. He came up under Bill Kim at Urbanbelly before leaving for a decade in New York with Major Food Group, where his résumé included Carbone, Torrisi, and Contessa. That training is evident in the food. What is equally evident is that he did not come back to open a Chicago version of Carbone. The techniques are there. The cosplay is not.
The name means "tell me, tell me" in Italian, the thing a grandmother says while stirring Sunday sauce and pulling the news out of everyone at the table. That is the governing energy of the place, and it is not just branding. The interior earns it. Siren Betty Design preserved the hardwood floors, exposed brick, and original bar from the Tarantino's era and then layered in something richer: red and maroon, teal barstools, booth detailing that nods to 1950s automobiles, wallpaper that feels collected rather than installed. The result is a space that reads as though it accumulated over time rather than opened in August. It is completely modern and it does not feel modern at all. That is a hard thing to pull off.
The menu is built around abbondanza, the Italian concept of abundance, though Eckfeld's stated goal is to leave you energized rather than wrecked. That distinction shows up in the food. The red sauce has brightness. The pasta has restraint where it needs it. The kitchen's Chicago identity is embedded directly in the menu: tavern-cut pizza, giardiniera, an Italian beef carpaccio that anchors the city in a single bite.
That pizza is what puts this on the list alongside the best tavern-style squares in Chicago right now. The crust is paper thin, with the kind of crunch that holds up through the meal. The lace is excellent. The sauce carries a slight sweetness that makes it addictive without tipping into heavy, and the housemade sausage lands on every square with enough coverage that you are not calculating your bites. This is the pizza that deserved to be in the tavern-style conversation, and it is.
Some former Tarantino's staff reportedly joined the new team, which may explain something intangible about how the place feels. There is an ease to the service that newer restaurants tend to not yet have.
Dimmi Dimmi is a neighborhood spot that will please everyone at the table without feeling like it was engineered to do so. Those are usually different things.
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