I've withheld a very small mention of this place for more than a year, but this discourse has taken a turn for the small, and now there has been a call for the facts. Here are some admittedly very small facts.

Fact: Terragusto's window signage stated (and may still state) that Terragusto is a caffe' and market.

Fact: A morning soon after Terragusto opened, I went in with my son to (1) purchase an espresso and (2) inquire as to what might be purchased at the "market."

Fact: The only person working in Terragusto that morning was man in his 30's or 40's with dark hair.

Fact: After my inquiries, the person described above harumphed, knit his brow, frowned at me any my son, and stated the price of a cup of espresso, no more no less.

Fact: After some time, the person handed me a short cup of coffee that had no crema; I paid and left.

Fact: We all are human and have bad days, some more than others.

Fact: I love the idea of Terragusto -- a neighborhood market and caffe that becomes a trattoria at night -- but I never returned. I might still, being a thick skinned lover of ragu', but I will not make the mistake of believing what I read on a window

HT70 wrote:How could an owner not want to hear that and make adjustments? I can understand taking advice on food prep w/ a grain of salt as that can be very subjective. Service is not quite as subjective. Most everyone knows when they are being treated improperly.

And I agree with this. That is why I almost jumped out of my seat when I read this:

theo wrote:We do ask that you listen to our 1-2 minute spiel about what sets us apart from the "red sauce" shops and if that ultimately makes or breaks your experience you're too snooty for us and will end up elsewhere anyway.

As a generally good business practice, if you're getting repeated negative comments about your spiel, then you either have to edit it out or tone it down. What you don't want to do is tell people that they have to hear it, and if they don't, they're too snooty. That statement just kills me - if you don't want to hear my spiel, which is snooty and condescending in and of itself, then you're snooty?!

Anyhow, I fear that theo has overreacted a bit - from what I can tell from his post, there may have been one factual error in this entire thread, and that was about the deposit. (By the way, I thought the same thing as riddlemay when I read it - does that mean that they never required deposits or they don't now require deposits? Theo's post doesn't clear this up.) Anyhow, to address that "error," all theo needed to do was say, "Hi folks - just want to let you know that we do not (or no longer) require deposits for reservations. Hope to see you in the future." Anything more just comes off as too defensive and is unnecessary.

And yes, I agree with Cathy2 - I don't see where some frustrated person was trying to set the record straight in this thread. I think the thread, on the whole, reads fairly. Nothing to be ashamed of here.

What is shaping us here is a sad us/them dichotomy, with consumers on one side and a restaurateur on the other. What we’ve tried to cultivate with LTHForum is an understanding that we’re all on the same side. We built in a Professional Forum so that people like Theo (and Antonio, Homaro, etc.) could introduce themselves and be a part of a community dedicated to seeking out and celebrating food happiness zones. I am not suggesting that all complaints can be settled with a group hug, but I think Theo’s aggressive stance suggests that he, unlike Antonio and Homaro, doesn’t understand what we’re trying to do. Thus, conflict.

David Hammond wrote:What is shaping us here is a sad us/them dichotomy, with consumers on one side and a restaurateur on the other. What we’ve tried to cultivate with LTHForum is an understanding that we’re all on the same side. We built in a Professional Forum so that people like Theo (and Antonio, Homaro, etc.) could introduce themselves and be a part of a community dedicated to seeking out and celebrating food happiness zones. I am not suggesting that all complaints can be settled with a group hug, but I think Theo’s aggressive stance suggests that he, unlike Antonio and Homaro, doesn’t understand what we’re trying to do. Thus, conflict.

You're 100% right. It seems like restauranteurs take two diametrically opposed positions to blogs and message boards. One is that, hey, this is a useful vehicle to interact with customers in an honest way that doesn't require them to confront me face-to-face. The other looks upon them with skepticism, waiting for the exact phantom poster or blogger that MikeG described so well on Ruhlman's blog.

I have friends who own a very successful restaurant and they fall into the latter category no matter how much I try to turn their attitudes around. Even though their restaurant is well-reviewed on LTH, Metromix and Yelp, they're still waiting for that one person to ruin their business. They also fall into the same trap as theo by fantasizing that, in the world prior to blogs or message boards, people would show up at their restaurant and conversationally explain to them what about their meals, the service or the price didn't float their boats. And the restaurant owner or chef would calmly listen and have a 45 minute dialogue as the restaurant owner convinces the customer to come back and try it again. Unfortunately, that world existed only in their own minds; what happened then was not different from what happens now -- people talk about a restaurant except it's on the internet instead of word-of-mouth. Except with the internet, the restauranteur can participate positively in the forum if they're saavy.

I hope Theo is still reading this thread because I believe the whole introductory speech question could be handled like it is at other places:

Simply have the waitperson ASK if you've dined there before. If so, skip the speech, if not, pontificate on. That way you don't punish your returning customers, who, if they're returning, already know what to expect, and you manage the expectations of new customers.

This is how it's done in other restaurants and seems like an easy "solution" here.

While I'm not familiar with Yelp, the value of this board is that it is moderated and drive-by spamming is controlled because the participants have to register and sign in. I don't find Metromix useful because it's filled with junk postings designed to mess with a restaurant's business.

If that post was really by Theo, then those who like Terragusto better go there as much as possible because it won't be there long. When you're in a service business, you better care about what the customers think because they pay the bills.

All the best,
John

I've edited this comment (which was petty and non value-adding) which will make people wonder what in the heck MikeG's comment below is about. Sorry, Mike. My comments upthread are a more accurate and potentially helpful depiction of how I feel about Terragusto

Yes, let's not get into owner bashing. The best argument against the view that food blogs/message boards are destructive is the very fact that these threads have been so full of solid commentary, not personal stuff.

re: "as a veteran I ignore both critics & praise alike"

Even if he is so arrogant as to ignore critics, it is difficult to believe that he ignores praise alike. If a customer tells him that he just had the best meal in ages, he does not feel good about that? If a restaurant critic publishes a rave review, he is indifferent? If new customers say they came in based on good word-of-mouth, he shrugs? Hard to believe. So this claim rings false to me.

If in fact he does not care that a diner greatly enjoyed his meal (because we are all rubes that don't know good from bad anyway, or if the masses like it he must be doing something wrong), that bespeaks a contempt for his customers and for fellow humans, whose opinions are every bit as valuable as his own. If he is cooking for some masturbatory ego-stroking, close the business and do it at home for himself and those he deems qualified to comment.

In a city with thousands of restaurants eager for my business, I won't be going here. When it is no longer the flavor of the month, maybe we'll see an attitude adjustment. But I wouldn't count on it.

Mike G wrote:Yes, let's not get into owner bashing. The best argument against the view that food blogs/message boards are destructive is the very fact that these threads have been so full of solid commentary, not personal stuff.

Agree completely.

HT70 wrote:I live pretty close and have yet to try Terragusto. After reading the note by Theo, I don't think I'm going to give it a whirl.

Agree. That's the (undelicious) irony. This thread (after a negative beginning) was starting to put positive ideas into my head about giving Terragusto a try one of these days after all. Until I read Theo's post.

theo wrote:I have been the Chef & Managing Partner at Terragusto since we opened early in 2006 and as a professional, I do not participate in the exchange of subjective interpretations of restaurant experiences, and as a veteran I ignore both critics & praise alike and just focus on doing what I do best - food. My integrity & passion do not change based on the whims of the few.

Not to throw more fuel on the fire...but I found this comment to be particularly strange given that at the end of our meal, we were asked to fill out comment cards by our waitress. I did not fill one out at the time due to pure laziness, but one of my companions did. He wrote a lengthy commentary similar to the points I made earlier--a combination of praise and constructive critisism as to how the experience could be made better.

If Theo doesn't entertain "subjective interpretations of restaurant experiences" "based on the whims of a few" then why have his customers take the time to fill out cards? (Keep in mind that this was on a visit prior to the time of his post and this thread taking the direction that it did...)

If you look on their website, not only do they welcome feedback from customers, but they list excerpts from various reviews and articles and talk about how much of their traffic is based on recommendations. Might want to alter that to give some semblance of consistency since they are purportedly oblivious to praise.

shoes wrote:If Theo doesn't entertain "subjective interpretations of restaurant experiences" "based on the whims of a few" then why have his customers take the time to fill out [comment] cards?

Was a postal address, email address or phone number requested on the cards? Could be the cards are less about feedback-gathering and more about database-building.

This is getting a little tired. Is there really anything to be gained by dissecting every sentence in theo's post? Clearly, his attitude rubs some/many the wrong way and he will likely lose many more customers over this than he gains.

Having said that, it seems clear that the context of the "I ignore both critics and praise" line is in describing why he is posting here:

theo wrote:I am posting this because a long-time customer & loyal friend has been bugging me for a month to sign up & respond to some of the inaccuracies being spun into deeper & deeper fiction. I have been the Chef & Managing Partner at Terragusto since we opened early in 2006 and as a professional, I do not participate in the exchange of subjective interpretations of restaurant experiences, and as a veteran I ignore both critics & praise alike and just focus on doing what I do best - food. My integrity & passion do not change based on the whims of the few. I have made this one exception based on the loyal nature of my patron.

He is not making a general statement that he doesn't make any adjustment ever based on feedback from customers. He goes on to say that he is mainly trying to address some statements of fact.

If we want to encourage owners to participate in the forum, do we do ourselves a disservice by piling on someone who took the time to write, albeit in a seemingly angry manner and saying things that most people seem to disagree with?

Yeah, I think this has gone far enough. Admittedly storming on and off in the same post invites some of this, but no reason we have to take the bait. There are plenty of solid, perfectly reasonable comments about TerraGusto the restaurant here, and that's what we do and do pretty well. Let's leave more personal and touchy aspects of the topic alone, and let our collective restaurant reviewing stand on its own terms versus the reaction to it.

I'm going to lock the two TerraGusto threads for a while, just so the mods can have a life and hopefully this will cool down to "whatever" in the meantime.

John Danza wrote:While I'm not familiar with Yelp, the value of this board is that it is moderated and drive-by spamming is controlled because the participants have to register and sign in. I don't find Metromix useful because it's filled with junk postings designed to mess with a restaurant's business.

agree that metromix truly sucks for reviews ... they allow 250 characters or so, don't check identity, don't have any way to trace back who is what, don't

...in many ways, yelp operates similar to here, the biggest difference being there's a wider array of palettes in those posting about it... which might turn some off, though in the end a customer is a customer and if from their perspective they got bad service it's a moot point whether or not they dine out every night of their life.... it's also a lot more structured... if you go onto my or anyone else's yelp profile you can see the hundreds of reviews they've posted, pictures they've posted, etc all in a matter of seconds. secondly readers can rate the review of a place as useful... and people who participate a lot are marked.. it's pretty easy to tell if someone is a B.S.er or not... if someone is obviously shilling a business, many people pick up on it... (there have been quite a few busiensses who have gotten caught and into heat because they've hired a P.R. person to go around on the Internet and post fake reviews)... but even so, it doesn't necessarily matter much because there will be multiple reviews and you can decide for yourself... there are a few moderators (it's a a for profit business), but for the most part everything is self moderated by users flagging inappropriate things.. many yelpers get to know each other in person through the many events that are held. many business owners seem to have taken hold to paying attention to yelp since often when you search out businesses it's one of the first few search results. i've been spotted in a business i've reviewed poorly, for example and told "we've been looking for you!" ... if you look at terragusto's reviews on the site you'll quickly

..btw, if you look at grubhub's reviews... in Chicago Nan's is one of the first places to pop up. by my estimation, the good majority of the reviews on nan's were put there by the management. i wrote a mediocre review, and only days later a 2 sentence fake review was posted using my same name... grubhub claims they're working on changing their system too, but i question whether they're not acting fast enough because they get a percentage of every order placed through their site, so good reviews = more business potentially...

i walk past their place on the way home from the brown line most evenings. i've tried to dine there without reservations three times (once on a friday at 5pm with three others, once as a pair on a thursday night, and once as solo early in the week). each time, there's been no room at the inn...which means i've never gotten to hear the speech or try those wonderful looking pastas in the window.

i keep hoping i'll catch them half full at dinner time, but that may never happen. i don't believe in reservations (unless it's valentine's day or i need a table for 10 or the chef has a james beard award)...and they don't do walk-ins.

nonetheless, as a roscoe villain and a believer in the free market, i wish them well. after all, if the food wasn't any good, they'd have closed by now.

better to have a snooty, eccentric neighbor than an empty storefront next door...

hanse_coloursmay wrote:i don't believe in reservations

morbid curiosity..........Why not?

Ralph Wiggum wrote:

hanse_coloursmay wrote:i don't believe in reservations

morbid curiosity..........Why not?

Eh . . . I see where he's coming from . . . it's not that I don't "believe in" reservations, my schedule has to be flexible so it's tough for me to plan my life even two hours in advance. (Case in point: I had to cancel a doctor's appointment this morning again that I made two months ago.) If I make a reservation, sure enough, some unplanned emergency will go down at work, I'll have to cancel, and then I feel bad. If I can walk in somewhere at the last minute, it's something I hadn't planned on doing so I can't be disappointed. It's all good, and I'm happy.

Ralph Wiggum wrote:

hanse_coloursmay wrote:i don't believe in reservations

morbid curiosity..........Why not?

i'd like to say it's because i'm spontaneous or i'm keeping it real or something silly like that...but in all honesty, i'm lazy. and i have a strange fear of the telephone (which makes ordering delivery painful, but sloth always beats fear).

oh, and it's not confined to just restaurants. i hate making reservations for everything -- hotels, trains, buses, theatre, etc. i probably have commitment issues or something...

hanse_coloursmay wrote:and i have a strange fear of the telephone

Stay away from the Depot Diner!

LTH,

My wife was recently at Terragusto with a half dozen of her friends, they universally loved, yes loved, the food, but were both perplexed and amused at the Instructions which were part and parcel of the reservation.

Highlights are only two hours for dinner, all parties Must be there on time* but they prefer 15-minutes early, and last but not least, with parties of 6 or more no a la carte, only chef's choice served family style.

Once again, they all very much enjoyed the food, thought the price, mid $30s with tax, not tip, incredibly reasonable and are all planning return visits. I should also note they were allowed to stay, with no hassle, well beyond the 2-hour cut off mark.

Enjoy,
Gary

*Not unreasonable by any means

Did they have to remove their shoes at the door?

Mod. note: I split Sam Harmon's interesting post about the artistic merits of cooking and moved that discussion to Other Culinary Chat.

http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=17874

So is Terragusto lurking on LTH? Perhaps.

To wit: they say they take walk-ins, even encouraged me to come back during the week and sit at the bar--whether that's as true in practice as it is in (their) theory, remains to be seen. Weekends? Definitely not.

As for the menu spiel, it was much simplified this evening: we were asked if we've dined at TG before; when we told our server that I had but other two dining partners had not, she simply noted the pre-fixe option on the menu and said how she'd adapt it to a three-top--my companions got "it" instantly and we got going.

Now, service is still aloof and indifferent, but not really so noteworthy in either direction as to merit distinction. And they're serving the protein after the pastas--much better idea. They could stand to be more consistent with how portions are doled out, though: with both the appetizers and pastas, two of the three plates were individually-sized; the other serving was enough for three people. The set menu option seems designed for collective eating, but the execution is not in tune with that. Odd.

As for the food, you know exactly what I'm going to say: excellent pastas (particularly the bolognese option) and a really nice whole fish presentation. This place is consistent and and makes good on its vision--you will get exactly what this board has described a gazillion times already, with slightly less drama from the staff. Maybe.

So is Terragusto lurking on LTH? Perhaps.

Yes.

with slightly less drama from the staff

No.

A friend asked me yesterday if I knew anything about the restaurant. After telling her I do love the food, I referred her to this thread for some insight on the eccentric service, which she read from start to finish. Her first takeaway: she had better call her friends, since they are notoriously late, and Terragusto is notoriously stringent. She left work early to go anchor a table at the restaurant. She arrived at 5:55 for a 6:30 reservation. The server - a young Greta Garbo, you know the one - greeted her coolly, seated her in the empty restaurant, and didn't say one word to her for the next 40 minutes; no bread offered, no water refilled.

Friend 1 arrived at 6:35, at which point the server brought up policy for the first time: no menus offered for perusal until the full party (three) was seated, and they were lucky she wasn't giving away the reservation right then. Friend 2 arrived at 6:45. The two late arrivals wanted to order the set menu, my friend a la carte. More feather ruffling from the server, but an exception was grudgingly made. Food was ordered at 6:55, and courses started to arrive at 7:30. My friend got the distinct impression that they were being punished for the late order, but the food was spectacular and made up for the frigid service. Bolognese off the charts as usual. (Knowing that everything is handcrafted, I can abide that type of wait, but proffer that a kind word of update halfway through the process can go a long way towards keeping diners happy).

Here ends what the restaurant can be held accountable for, an echo of scores of posts in two threads here: wonderful food, in the context of a room and a staff seemingly designed to let the diner know he or she is barely welcome. Personally, I can live with this, since as I've mentioned in post after post, good food is the bottom line for me.

Here begins the additional drama.

[from my friend's perspective. I expect there will be some Rashomon Effect on this situation if other LTHers were there or we get a report from the staff]

The restaurant starts to fill up while the friends are ordering. At some point, two young women in Cubs gear work their way into the restaurant; there is a night game against the Reds. They have no reservation, but apparently pretend that they're meeting another party, and go into the unisex, single-person bathroom together. The waitress sees this, can't stop them, and goes to get the owner. He emerges, faces the bathroom door, and waits with the waitress. When the two girls emerge, he blocks their egress while the waitress mentions the $30 minimum to even warrant a table when you CAN get a reservation. The girls, getting upset and sassy, try to physically push their way out of the restaurant. The owner admonishes them while slowly walking backwards towards the exit at the front of the restaurant, past all of the diners in the narrow dining room. They finally squirm out the front doorway, and after final unpleasantries, he apologizes to two tables near the door for the drama, but is still livid at the effrontery of the drop-ins.

Things calm. A few moments pass. A sigh from the waitress. The owner walks back towards the kitchen door, but chooses to look briefly into the bathroom. He goes tense with alarm, then turns and runs at full speed through the dining room and out the door after the girls.

Twenty minutes later, my friend decides she can't wait for official sanction to use the facilities, so she heads back to the bathroom. The scene before her: the trendy shelf sink, previously attached to the wall, is in the dead center of the floor, as if broken off by someone sitting on it. The soap dispenser has also been removed from the wall and is on the sink. The window is open to the lively dusk breeze. Water has been splashed liberally around the room.

Turning her back on the mystery, my friend returns to the table. Another ten minutes go by. The owner returns through the front door with two policemen. Two additional cops follow within moments. At all of the surrounding tables, dinner continues merrily. The police eventually depart, and my friends finish their dinner and depart, full of good food, puzzled by everything else that occurred while they dined.

My sympathy is with the Terragusto staff here; nobody should have their own place violated by the uninvited. If a crime was committed, let it be prosecuted. Let pre-sauced fans take better care of their neighborhood. Let honest diners eat in peace. This is the good land, the fruitful ground, the plains of our pride, the terra gusto. You have a problem with that, I've got a strong-armed owner in mind you can talk to. He also makes a damn good Bolognese.

Amazing story!

I'll add another anecdote regarding service and late-arriving guest: last week a group of four of us had a 6:30pm reservation. My fiance and I arrived at 6:30. The other couple was very late - they ended up arriving around 7:15pm.

The staff was incredibly friendly and accommodating. We apologized profusely while we waited for the other couple. But our waiter assured us several times that this isn't going to be a problem, that they allocate two hours (or was it more?) to each reservation, and we'll certainly have time to have a good meal if they aren't too much later. He brought us menus, water, and glasses for our wine, and asked if we wanted anything else. When our friends came, he joked a bit with us about the situation but reassured us that we'd have no problem doing the two-course menu (which is what we had originally planned to order).

Oh, the food...it was amazing, solidifying the fact that this is our favorite neighborhood restaurant (at least for 10 more days, when we'll move out of the neighborhood). We started with the “sformato” (a vegetable-based custard) and carpaccio. Then had the gnocci with seafood and the swiss chard pasta with Bolognese sauce.

Terragusto suffers, perhaps, from the fact that it occupies the space that was a bodega, then a coffee shop named Bodega, before it became an exclusive restaurant with stringent customer standards (that is, stringent standards applied to customers; some among us go for that sort of thing and even pay for it). Terragusto is on a modest corner on an undistinguished stretch of Addison (the street on which Wrigley Field also is, coincidentally), down from the park n' ride lots and across from an Elevated station,next to Smile Cleaners (a very good, nonexclusive neighborhood dry cleaning establishment). The large, plate glass windows of Terragusto frame for the casual passer-by a relatively mundane scene composed of a beverage cooler not unlike those that grace gas stations and Quick-E-Marts across America, some stools and a clean, uncluttered place. The plastic lettering on the windows somewhat misleadingly describes the place as a "market" among other things. An ambiguity clouds Terragusto, possibly to the trattoria's detriment.

I live in the neighborhood and recognize the sort of vandals described above. I bet they aren't even from Chicago and don't know from a good ragu. No amount of misplaced imperious attitude justifies that level of stupidity.

To the ragu, I still don't understand how the combination of a sauce that cooks all day (and thus is either there to be ladled onto the pasta or is not by the time the customer orders it) and a pasta that cooks in moments justifies the waits described upthread. I might never know.

JeffB wrote:To the ragu, I still don't understand how the combination of a sauce that cooks all day (and thus is either there to be ladled onto the pasta or is not by the time the customer orders it) and a pasta that cooks in moments justifies the waits described upthread. I might never know.

I think a look into the kitchen explains (not necessarily "justifies") this. It is a tiny space, making it tough to cook and plate more than a couple of things at a time.