Formento’s Italian Steakhouse

Randolph Street and the Italian-American Steakhouse Revival

West Randolph Street has spent the better part of two decades absorbing the ambitions of Chicago's restaurant industry — first as the city's meatpacking corridor, then as the address of choice for chefs seeking large-format spaces and foot traffic that skews toward evening spending. The result is a strip where contemporary tasting menus sit alongside oyster bars, izakayas, and wood-fired formats, all competing for the same reservation window. Against that backdrop, 925 W Randolph is where Formento's Italian Steakhouse occupies its particular register: a room that looks backward at the Italian-American supper club tradition while applying kitchen standards that belong to the present. That combination — historical form, contemporary execution , has become one of the more coherent editorial positions on a street that can otherwise feel like a collection of trend cycles.

The Italian-American steakhouse as a category has had an interesting decade. For a stretch, it looked like the format would be absorbed entirely by the modernist impulse dominating Chicago's critical conversation , the city where Alinea redefined what a meal could mean, where Smyth and Oriole built their reputations on precision and restraint, and where Kasama demonstrated that even comfort-driven cuisines could carry tasting-menu ambitions. The white-tablecloth Italian steakhouse, by contrast, seemed to belong to a different era. What Formento's demonstrates is that the format survives when it is executed with genuine commitment rather than ironic nostalgia. The distinction matters: one is a costume, the other is a restaurant.

A Wine Credential That Sets the Context

The most instructive data point about Formento's is its 2-Star accreditation from the World of Fine Wine London Awards (WBWL), a credential that places it in a specific and relatively small peer set. The WBWL accreditation system evaluates wine programs against international benchmarks, and a 2-Star result signals a list with genuine depth, sourcing discipline, and structural coherence , not simply a collection of recognizable labels at accessible prices. In Chicago's competitive restaurant corridor, where wine programs at places like Next Restaurant have long reinforced the city's claim to serious beverage culture, that accreditation functions as evidence rather than decoration.

For the Italian-American steakhouse format, a strong wine program is not incidental , it is structural. The category has always depended on the pairing of grilled proteins with bottle-driven hospitality, and venues that treat the list as a revenue line rather than an editorial statement tend to show it. The WBWL 2-Star places Formento's in the company of restaurants where the wine list has been assembled with the same deliberateness as the kitchen, which affects not just what you drink but how the meal is paced and what the room feels like at nine o'clock on a Friday. That quality of list also contextualizes the restaurant against international peers: the standard it is being measured against is the same applied to programs at addresses like Le Bernardin in New York City, The French Laundry in Napa, and Alain Ducasse at Louis XV in Monte Carlo , a reminder that accreditation at this level is not geographically adjusted.

Italian Technique in a Chicago Context

The editorial angle that makes Formento's worth examining is what the Italian-American supper club format actually means when applied in a city with Chicago's ingredient access and culinary infrastructure. Italy's cooking traditions , the slow braises, the hand-rolled pastas, the disciplined use of fat and acid , were never designed to be nostalgic. They were designed to be delicious, which is a different thing entirely. When those techniques encounter the Midwest's beef supply, its particular agricultural calendar, and a dining culture that expects portion scale as part of the contract, the result is a hybrid that is neither purely Italian nor purely American but has its own internal logic.

That logic is what distinguishes venues like Formento's from the Italian restaurants that treat tradition as a constraint rather than a framework. Across the Atlantic, restaurants such as 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong have demonstrated that Italian culinary method can travel and adapt without losing its identity , the key is understanding which elements are structural and which are superficial. In Chicago's case, the structural elements are the sauce-making discipline, the pasta craft, and the approach to sourcing; the adaptation is the beef, the scale, and the room temperature of ambition that a Randolph Street address demands. Formento's positions itself at that intersection, which is a more complicated and more interesting place to operate than either straight-ahead Italian or standard American steakhouse.

For comparison: the broader Chicago dining conversation in 2024 has tended to reward restaurants that push genre boundaries , Kasama's Filipino-American hybrid earned significant recognition, and the tasting-menu formats at Smyth and Oriole have maintained their standing through kitchen discipline rather than concept novelty. Formento's operates on a different register , its genre is established rather than experimental , but the commitment to execution within that genre is what earns the WBWL accreditation and sustains the room.

Planning Your Visit

Formento's sits at 925 W Randolph Street in the West Loop, the neighborhood that has functioned as Chicago's primary fine-dining corridor for the better part of a decade. The restaurant is accessible by the Green and Pink CTA lines at Morgan Station, a short walk west, and the surrounding blocks have enough density , bars, hotels, additional restaurants , to build an evening around it without requiring a car. For those arriving from outside the city, our full Chicago hotels guide covers the West Loop and River North options closest to the Randolph corridor. Pre- and post-dinner options are well-documented in our full Chicago bars guide, which maps the cocktail programs within walking distance.

Given the WBWL 2-Star accreditation and the restaurant's position on one of Chicago's highest-traffic dining streets, booking in advance is advisable, particularly for weekend evenings. Randolph Street restaurants at this tier do not rely on walk-ins to fill the room, and prime-time slots on Thursday through Saturday tend to be the first to go. For a broader orientation to the city's dining scene , including how Formento's fits within Chicago's Italian-American tradition relative to its modernist neighbors , our full Chicago restaurants guide provides the necessary context. Readers with interest in the wine dimension specifically can cross-reference with our full Chicago wineries guide and our full Chicago experiences guide for a fuller picture of how the city's beverage culture operates.

Comparable Italian-American wine and kitchen ambition at this accreditation tier appears elsewhere in the American restaurant scene , Emeril's in New Orleans, Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg, and Providence in Los Angeles all operate within related registers of serious wine culture and kitchen craft , but the specific Italian-American steakhouse format, applied on Randolph Street with this level of wine program depth, is a narrower category. That specificity is the point.