A MEDITERRANEAN ODYSSEY

I’ve studied in Italy. I’ve vacationed in Italy. I have profiled quaint seaside trattorias and Michelinstar restaurants, from Rome to Lake Como. In all my travels, across a country that may be God’s greatest gift to culinarians, I have yet to encounter a single slice, square, pan or sheet-cake of focaccia quite like the one currently being served at Pella Signature, the irresistibly charming ode to pan-Mediterranean cooking in Burr Ridge.

It would be defamatory, in my opinion, to refer to this focaccia as simple old bread. It’s not flat. It’s not doughy. Nor vaguely pizza-like. Mac’s focaccia has been molded to look like an oversized Italian biscuit or savory muffin. It’s light and fluffy, studded with Castelvetrano olives, and then baked to a mahogany hue usually reserved for Louis XIV furniture.

Mac, who’s spent the much of the last decade dazzling tourists at the Wynn in Vegas and its sister casino, the Encore, doesn’t overwork the gluten in her dough. In fact, she barely mixes it, knowing that a lighter touch will produce a billowy, crenulated interior. The dough is poured into molds lined with olive oil, which allows the oil to seep and into the inner folds of the focaccia, creating an interior that’s almost custard-like. It’s nothing less than an opulent, flaky-skinned olive-oil bonbon for the ages.

One bite into our meal at Pella, and I was completely smitten. Not just with our opening bread course, but the entire sprawling, go-for-broke, you-deserve-to-be-pampered vibe of the place. It’s charming and grandiloquent, without ever being kitschy.

Sometimes, after just one dish at a restaurant, you know you’re in good hands. You can lean back in your chair, knowing that everything to follow, for the rest of the evening, will live up to that first expected shockwave of surprise and delight. Which is exactly what Pella Signature delivered the whole night through.

I am no accountant nor general contractor, but it’s clear to me that owners Maya and Alex Spasov have given new meaning to the phrase “spare no expense.” I invite you, for instance, to consider the sheer chutzpah required to greenlight a 500-plus seat restaurant that boasts seven different dining room, three bars and a 4,500-square-foot glass-enclosed atrium, bedazzled with ceiling lights and the kind of retractable roof usually reserved for NFL stadiums.

I drank it all up. Its food, opulence, and ambition. Sometimes, a night spent twirling pasta at a cozy trattoria or tearing into a plate of lamb chops at a family-run taverna will do. And sometimes, especially during the winter, we all secretly crave a little spectacle.

I loved the fact that Pella’s glass bar pays homage to Venetian glassmakers. And I like a restaurant where its executive chef references The Odyssey as inspiration and talks about open-hearth cooking—wood-fired meats and spit-roasted chickens and whole-roasted branzino stuffed with pinwheels of lemon—as if it’s the cure to all of society’s ills.

Think of it this way: Pella Signature is a taste of the Las Vegas Strip closer to home. It reserves a whole section of its menu to meat cooked in tagines. It serves $250 seafood towers with bouillabaisse-flavored aioli and seems willing to sources Wagyu beef from a small family-run farm in Michigan.

Pella’s current executive chef must walk into his jaw-dropping 5,000-square-foot kitchen every day and pinch himself. I would, too. It’s a culinary playpen. You’ve got flat tops. A pair of inverted shawarma rotisseries allow the team to suspend fruits and veggies over the rotating meats and baste them with Mediterranean juices. There’s, of course, a wood-fired pizza oven that bakes flatbreads and finishes off proteins. And then there’s the chef’s pride and joy: an open wood-fired hearth with a Santa Maria style grill.

Should you order the whole roasted Spanish branzino—and you should—he will sandwich lemon, salt, pepper, thyme into the fish’s cavity, slather an herb marinade onto its flesh and then lock the branzino into a specially designed grill basket.

It’s a brilliant little tool designed to be the same shape as a whole fish. The kitchen will roast your branzino above the open hearth, wheeling a series of grills up and down so that they are just right distance from burning wood. The contrails of smoke and all those spittles of fire will do all the rest. All that glorious direct and indirect heat will crips up the fish’s skin, yet keep its cavity moist, tender, and gently infused with just the right amount of smoke.

The Spasovs have named their restaurant after the ancient Macedonian city of Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great. At one time, Pella was an epicenter of trade, a hub for the exchange of ideas, of art and, of course, spices and recipes from across the globe. Thus, the restaurant hopes, over time, to pay homage to entire Mediterranean world, from the shores of North Africa to Europe.

For now, I recommend you let the chef de cuisine take you on a tour of the menu’s more exotic offerings. Let him brine you a chicken—the secret ingredient in his saltwater mix is seaweed—and paint the skin of his chicken with his signature mostarda, a Dijon mustard blended with charred apples and pears, an homage to the salty-sweet preparations that dominated Europe during the Middle Ages.

For your pasta course, try the handmade lumache, a snail shaped pasta, which the chef steeps in a mushroom tea. The lumachel is tossed with more friends of the forest, thick slices of beech mushrooms, truffles, and tiny bits of asparagus—the latter a brilliant verdant addition—that have been slowly sauteed in a veggie broth. The entire dish is finished with a butter, so that all those pungent flavors stick tight to every curl of pasta.

The only dish that might offer more richness per square inch is a rather brilliant short rib “marmalade” risotto. The dish takes three days to prepare, a series of steps which gradually reduces the short rib, veal stock, red wine, carrots, and onions into a savory jam. This marmalade is smeared over the risotto and then finished, in a glorious bit of overindulgence, with bone marrow. All of this, I might add, is served with a chaser of port, which cuts through all those unctuous flavors with a final palate-cleansing blast of blackberry and caramelized raisins.

If you’re interested in enjoying your meal in Pella’s most stunning room, the aforementioned glass-enclosed atrium, remember to make a reservation early, as walk-ins are often relegated to one of the restaurant’s other dining rooms. Trust us, it’s worth the early planning.

Remember how I mentioned Vegas? Here’s a dining space that’s feels like it was lifted from a wing at the Bellagio. Thirty-three tables. Trees swaddled in tiny Christmas lights. Moonlight streaming down from the glass rafters. And a bar made from onyx that seems like it glows in the dark.

Suffice to say, everything seems to twinkle and wink at you in here especially if you finish your meal the same way you should start it, by ordering something from Maria Mac’s dessert list.

If you like what she’s done with focaccia, you’re going to love what she’s done with tiramisu. Surprise, surprise, it’s not flat; it’s vertical take on tiramisu. Mack bakes her own ladyfingers and soaks them with a coffee syrup. She builds upward from there. A Kahlua whipped cream; a thin wafer of white chocolate embossed with the Pella emblem. Crunchy crumbles are packed around the dessert. And just when you assume that theatricality is over—that Pella is all “Vegas’d out”—your server will come bearing a silver pitcher of coffee toffee sauce.

It’ll look like she’s pouring Turkish tea. She’ll pour small pool onto the crowning disk and then wait as the sauce burns a hole through the top of the dessert straight down to the center of the plate. So, when you pierce the mascarpone mouse, the coffee will burble out of the sides like a chocolate lava cake. It will swirl around the sides of the crumbles, until the whole affair tastes like a Mozart chocolate bar.

You can scoop up three different flavors of coffee—the sweet sticky toffee-like syrup, a creamy Kahlua liquor flavor in the ganache and a final blast of expresso from the soaked ladyfingers— and you’ll understand that sometimes we all deserve a little escapism. Sure, less can be more, but at Pella, why settle for a little sliver of the Mediterranean when the kitchen is prepared to serve you the entire Mediterranean table in one postcard-worthy setting.

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Cocktails

Pella offers an extensive wine list, as well as by the glass offerings, but the cocktail list plays with classic Mediterranean ingredients in the cleverest of ways.

Garden of the God: This extraordinarily light, almost spa-worthy sipper, amplifies all those subtle notes of juniper and angelica root from the gin by pairing it with an elderflower liquor, spritz of lemon, cucumber, and prosecco. It’s vegetal and light, a perfect aperitif or pairing for the house’s oysters and seafood tower.

Pomona’s Rhey: This is a pineapple demerara old fashioned spiked with citrus bitters. All the classic smoky flavors you’d expect but jolts of tropical sweetness. It’s a great foil for steak and Pella’s roasted meats, especially its mostarda chicken.

Pella Signature is located at 720 Village Center Drive in Burr Ridge, 630.686.8621, pellasignature.com.