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.

By MIKE SULA

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.”

Quartaro has made fresh pasta in innumerable shapes and sizes in nearly every restaurant he’s worked at over the last 16 years, starting with his first kitchen job during his senior year at the University of Kansas. After graduation he headed straight for San Francisco and found work at the Chez Panisse-Zuni Café CalMed torchbearer Nopa, and later A16, where he came in on his o hours to learn how the sous chefs hand-rolled cavatelli and the Campanian regional obscurity maccaronara. Not long after chef Nate Appleman won his James Beard Award, he brought Quartaro along with him to open Pulino’s in Manhattan.

A few years later he found a new mentor in Chris Pandel at the Bristol. “We had about three to four pastas on the menu there,” he says. “Everything made by hand in the base- ment. That place was a juggernaut as far as production and manpower was concerned.”

Quartaro stepped up at the Bristol as Pandel stepped away to open Balena, which became its own pasta powerhouse, and where he moved over a year later to work under Joe Frillman, now of Daisies (another juggernaut).

The pasta program was “98 percent” his when he opened Formento’s as executive chef, but for the last seven years pasta took a back seat, first when he turned south and helped open Dixie, and then a year later when he left to join a school lunch delivery start-up.

He created a fresh pasta program at Limelight Catering when he was hired as its executive chef three summers ago, but that all ended last spring when he and his sta of 90 chefs were furloughed. “I remember hearing in early April, ‘Oh, we could be back by June,’” he says. “Laughable now, but I reached the stage where creatively I was like ‘I’ve done all the yard work I could do.’”

By then Quartaro was an established Beverly transplant. “My wife is from here,” he says. “Which is what a lot of the guys around here say.” And he was itching to make pasta again. “I reached out to 12 people in my neighborhood just to see. ‘Hey, I’m gonna make some pasta if you’re interested. I’ll take whatever you feel it’s worth, and send me any feedback.’” That week he made 20 orders of rigatoni Bolognese and bucatini cacio e pepe with a KitchenAid extruder attachment near the beginning of the Great Bucatini Shortage of 2020.

Quartaro started a mailing list that jumped from 30 neighbors to 500 within the span of eight months. He made menu changes with the season, and while there was usually something hearty, rib-sticking, and family friendly, other pasta-sauce pairings grew more refined; from ricotta gnocchi with vodka sauce and pasta amatriciana; to saffron fusilli with creamy Lombardian Luganega sausage sauce and squid ink tortellini, stu ed with “summer sofrito of corn, zucchini, tomato, and tropea onions with Sungold tomato sugo.”

“When I realized there was a demand for it and people were literally craving that restau- rant experience in the comfort of their own homes, that was when I was like ‘I know I can deliver that.’” Sauces, pastas, and garnishes were packaged separately, each pairing designed to be table-ready in 15 minutes.

As he bumped up production, first in the idle Limelight kitchen, then at Kitchen Chicago, he’s upgraded extruders twice, and his shapes have become more colorful and esoteric: emerald green broccoli leaf rigatoni; sa ron fusilli; green and white pleated teardrop-shaped culurgiones stuffed with fried sunchokes, ricotta, and mint; candy-wrapper caramelle stu ed with shrimp mousseline in lobster sauce.

Until recently, deliveries from Gemma Foods (named for Quartaro’s young daughter—“the best eater I know”) were only available to Beverly residents. But recently he’s been popping up for Friday afternoon pickups at Kimski (Chef Won Kim is a Beverlian). It was there that I picked up two generous orders of wide, ribbony pappardelle with a duck ragu, fragrant with cinnamon; and two-tone spinach-basil sorpresine—delicate “little