Area restaurants give their recipes for success

By Katie Morell
Contributing Writer

While it is widely understood that 99 percent of restaurants fail within their first year of opening, others stay around and become institutions in communities, tempting residents to return time and time again.

What makes a restaurant successful? The Business Ledger sat down with the three local restaurateurs to find out.

Café Amano

“I was born on the kitchen counter,” said Marco Conte, executive chef and proprietor of Café Amano in Elmhurst of his experience in the food industry. “I really was born in the restaurant business. It is all I’ve ever done in my life.”

Growing up, Conte’s family owned a variety of restaurants. He opened his first eatery in Michigan at the age of 25 and operated it for 15 years before coming to the Chicago area for a change of scenery.

After a few months, in January 2005, he decided Elmhurst was the perfect spot to open a French/Italian wine and dessert bar. He named it Café Amano and the locals started flocking.

“We opened very strong,” he said. “Our largest success is that we’ve always listened to our customers to see what they really want. After a little while, they asked for more food, so we added food to the menu.”

Today, Café Amano is a full service restaurant with everything from appetizers and small plates to soup, salads, and filets. The restaurant experiments with all kinds of food, not just Italian and French, and Conte regularly travels the globe to find new flavors.

“I go on four major trips a year,” he said. “This year alone, I’ve been to South America and Alaska. Up in Alaska, I went out to a small smokery and sent back 40 pounds of smoked salmon. I will go into kitchens all over the world. I’ve never been afraid to go into a kitchen and talk to the chef.”

What are Conte’s secrets of success?

“I always explain to my staff that they have two employers: me and the patron,” he said. “They always have to treat the person as if it is the first time they’ve been in the restaurant – like royalty. I also say to never be afraid of change. We are unique in the items we serve; we keep the dining area and kitchen clean and always go the extra step for our customers – whether it is offering cooking classes or wine tastings.”

Things have changed quite a bit for Café Amano since it opened in downtown Elmhurst early this year. There’s music on Thursday evenings, monthly cooking classes and wine tastings, and veal and lamb chops on the menu. The original menu concept of small, light tapas-style dining has evolved to include more traditional entrees. Meat and poultry, which had been relegated to the nightly specials on the seafood-centric menu, earned a place on the printed menu. “Our specials were going out the door, we were running out nearly every night,” Chef Marco Conte says. The winter menu includes boneless chicken breast sautéed with sun-dried Michigan cherries and hazelnut liqueur and eggnog crème brulee. Pastries made on site make Café Amano the perfect place to grab a quick bite before catching a morning train. Sandwiches and salads, such as the Cottage Hill salad, chock-full of chicken, Belgian endive and a wild banana vinaigrette, are popular with the lunchtime crowd. In fact the lunch and dinner menus proved so universally popular that the full menu is available
throughout the day.