Nine months after remaking its 25-year-old Figlio Italian concept in Minneapolis into the more “uptown” Il Gatto, Parasole Restaurant Holdings has brought in a new executive chef and culinary consultant.
In addition to the culinary changes, Parasole said it also completed some “architectural enhancements” to 275-seat Il Gatto, which debuted last November.
Parasole officials have said that the company spent “north of $1 million” to develop Il Gatto, which means “the cat” in Italian. They said Il Gatto has targeted annual sales of $6.5 million, compared with the $5 million in annual sales associated with Figlio.
Edina, Minn.-based Parasole, which is led by chief executive Phil Roberts, operates nine casual and upper-end dining concepts that the company said generated sales of about $60 million in 2009. Parasole's current roster includes Burger Jones, Chino Latino, Manny’s Steakhouse, Pittsburgh Blue, and Salut Bar Americain, and the company is planning to launch a new concept, called Mozza Mia — Pizza Pie and Mozzarella Bar, in Edina this November.
“Il Gatto has been performing to plan [but] having said that, Phil Roberts is all about challenging the status quo,” said Kip Clayton, Parasole’s vice president of business development. He said Roberts and his team “surveyed the market and decided the time was right to challenge our guests while preserving safe harbors for your more traditional customers.”
To that end, Roberts has hired as menu consultant and developer Tim McKee, a James Beard Foundation award winner, a Figlio kitchen alumnus and the chef-owner of Solera and La Belle Vie in Minneapolis. In turn, McKee convinced Parasole to bring in as Il Gatto executive chef his longtime collaborator Jim Christianson to replace opening chef Matt Kempf, who has left the company.
McKee said the work for Il Gatto scratches a personal itch. “Ever since I left my position as executive chef at D’Amico Cucina in 1997, I’ve wanted to cook Italian,” he said.
He noted that the creative assignment at Parasole’s Il Gatto was a good fit because “this is an opportunity to walk into a beautiful restaurant with great management and staff, and simply do what I’ve been longing to do.”
For now, Il Gatto guests will find a menu similar to its predecessor in structure and price point, but with food that is more adventurous in flavor pairings while remaining authentically Italian, McKee said. He acknowledged that he has taken some liberty with tradition “in the way we mix refinement with rusticity,” and indicated that going forward the menu’s makeup “will be fluid” and primarily guided by product seasonality.
Additions to the Il Gatto menu include house-cured, wood-roasted pancetta with mission figs and balsamic vinegar, $9; preserved swordfish with heirloom tomatoes, radishes and tuna, $11; a pizza of grilled eggplant, smoked mozzarella, oyster mushrooms, tomato and fresh oregano, $11; and mint-infused “fazzoletti,” or handkerchief-shaped pasta, with braised lamb, tomatoes and olives, $16.
Il Gatto also has a new décor, including fully-opening windows that run the length of the restaurant’s Lake Street dining room; new booth seating in the main dining room; a new mirror and steel bar; and the clean-up of sightlines between the bar and street, Parasole officials said.
Roberts said in a statement about the changes at Il Gatto that he got “the notion of breaking away from the [restaurant] pack” after his company opened the Uptown Cafeteria & Support Group and he realized how dynamic the neighborhood around Il Gatto had become.
“I thought: Why stop there?” he said.
Parasole’s Clayton said that while the changes at Il Gatto are significant, they amount to “neither a new concept or repositioning.”
“Every new concept we create gets tweaked by 20 percent. It’s our way of opening, learning and refining,” Clayton explained. “We took that step in the last year with Pittsburgh Blue and sales there are up 15 percent year over year in a down economy.”
Contact Alan J. Liddle at [email protected].
