A Pennsylvania-centric tasting menu comes to the soon-to-open upstairs annex of Vetri

KITCHEN SENSE: Chef Adam Leonti in the soon- to-open second-floor kitchen at Vetri.
Jessica Kourkounis

Marc Vetri’s eponymous flagship/jewel-box dining room is a place like no other. Although the first-floor dining room seats only 30 patrons and the menu is hand written, there’s something about Vetri that doesn’t jive with other stuffy prix-fixe, fine-dining destinations. This could be because it’s nearly impossible to make Italian food stilted. 

Come June, Adam Leonti and the Vetri kitchen will be unveiling a new dining experience — dinners in Vetri’s newly renovated second floor focusing on Pennsylvania-sourced products. What was once a rundown apartment above the restaurant is being transformed into a bright and airy open kitchen with a long table in the back that will comfortably accommodate 16 guests for private-dining events. Just like the shiny new kitchen, everything in the upstairs dining room has been carefully selected — an induction burner placed flush in the kitchen’s wooden countertop, a vintage 1952 espresso machine, a wooden table by Bausman (a custom furniture maker in Ontario, Canada) and a vibrant red Murano glass chandelier imported from Venice. 

The upstairs menus will be equally custom. Leonti is working closely with Ian Brendle of Green Meadow Farm in Gap, Lancaster County. Being tight with Brendle has plenty of advantages. “He and I are so close that we kind of just make it happen. I don’t even have to order from him,” Leonti explains. “He just brought in all of these fiddlehead ferns and he’s going out this weekend to get morels … but he won’t get a lot. We’re pretty much the only space that can feed 50 guests and no more, so he can get that kind of stuff to us. Whenever he has wild strawberries, we get ’em.”

Aside from custom-grown and foraged items, Leonti and Brendle are working on growing wheat so that all of the Vetri restaurants will be able to use Pennsylvania-grown flour. It will be ground in a 400-pound mill installed on the third floor of Vetri. 

Brendle and Leonti travelled to the Northwest last month to research possible varieties of wheat to grow at Green Meadow. “Ian and I just got back from Washington State University about a month ago. WSU has over 40,000 grains that they’ve produced or crossed, they never manipulate DNA or anything, they just kind of cross. They try to find different crossings that will help with different environments. Everything that they have works on the West Coast, but they have no information about the East Coast, so we’ll be the guinea pigs. They gave Ian a giant bag of seeds, which are of great value. It was like $25,000 worth of seeds. He’s starting to try them out.

Leonti and Brendle don’t expect to be milling any custom wheat this season, but the project is part of a grand plan for all of the Vetri Family restaurants to use custom-grown-and-milled flours in all of their breads, pastas and pizzas. 

But first comes the opening of Vetri’s sunny upstairs kitchen and dining room. “It gives us a chance to expand within the space,” Leonti explains. “Marc’s opened up pizzerias and things like that, but this is a chance to continue with fine dining, to bring it to the next level.”

Along with meet-and-greet aperitivo hours (where guests will have a chance to mingle with Vetri and his partner, Jeff Benjamin) and hands-on cooking classes in the upstairs kitchen, the main focus of the new dining area is customizable meals for small groups. Along with a focus on Pennsylvania-grown produce, Leonti is already envisioning meals based on vintage cookware — such as dinners revolving around copper pots and even a show-stopping duck press for risotto made tableside with rhubarb and Cognac. 

The thinking behind these intimate tasting dinners stems from Leonti’s early days as chef de cuisine at Vetri. Before being tapped to head the kitchen, Leonti had moved to Italy and was studying under Stefano Arrigoni at Osteria della Brughiera at Villa d’Aleme in Bergamo. He wasn’t planning to return to the States.

“I wanted to move to Italy and never come back. My grandparents are from there and so I could get a citizenship and go about that and live there forever. That was my goal,” he says.

But half a year later, Vetri called and offered Leonti the chef-de-cuisine position. At the time, the original downstairs Vetri restaurant offered both a la carte and tasting-menu options, but Vetri and Leonti soon decided to go tasting menu only. Leonti saw the a la carte menu as being somewhat difficult to navigate. “People were familiar with Italian-American food, but not the food of Italy, and most people don’t go about ordering in the fashion that would make the most sense for how we cooked. In our heads, we cooked it that way to eat it that way.” 

“In order to do that, we had to create the experience and make it this one way, but we didn’t want to tell people what to do. We just wanted to be able to find out what they like and put it in order so it could all make sense for everybody. Then, along the way, if you had sweetbreads for your second course and you’re like, ‘ ’Eww, I don’t like organs,’ your meal’s not ruined.  We know now not to give you goat later, or even just mention, ‘Hey, we were thinking about giving you goat later. How do you feel about that? Or how does Dover sole sound?’ If you just order like that a la carte, for a place like this, it doesn’t make sense. The reactions that people have when they come in to eat have been so significantly changed in a joyous way.”