I think I may have found my new favorite Italian restaurant in the city. Piccolo Sogno is a beautiful Italian restaurant located in the Fulton Market neighborhood of Chicago. If you’re not from Chicago, this area is arguably best known for its high end dining all throughout. Its safe to say that met the standards and is absolutely some of the best Italian food you can get in Chicago, for many different reasons.

I need to start by explaining how beautiful this restaurant is. It’s classy with tons of natural light, which makes the place very inviting. But the highlight is the outdoor patio. Tons of tables are scattered throughout this space that truly does look like it could be a normal Italian backyard, completely isolated from downtown Chicago. If you do go here, make sure to book a reservation early. Outdoor seating is not able to be reserved, so you want to make sure you are early. For reference, our reservation was at 4PM on a Sunday (it opens at 4PM). Outdoor seating was completely filled by about 5pm.

With that being said, everything only got better from here. We started off with fresh bread, and a glass of red wine. There were two different types of bread, both very soft and warm. We also shared the Funghi al Forno (translates to oven roasted mushrooms). This dish was a perfect balance of saltiness, acidity, and tasted extremely fresh overall. I loved the pairing of these delicious mushrooms with pancetta and aged balsamic over raddichio.

It’s finally time to talk about the main course. I ordered the Bavette. This was one of the best pasta dishes I’ve ever had. It blew me away. It was one of those dishes that you don’t stop eating no matter how full you are. Fresh spaghetti-like noodles with the perfect bite to them, with jumbo shrimp (they were not lying about “jumbo” and a creamy pesto to round it out. The pesto mixed and adhered to the pasta and cheese in a beautiful way. Cherry tomatoes brought a nice punch of acidity to cut through all the fatiness/creaminess in this dish. This was easily the highlight of the meal for me. I also had a few bites of the Gnocchi dish. It was amazing to me how a dish that is normally perceived as a very heavy meal was turned into something light and refreshing. Fresh eggplant and tomatoes complemented gnocchi extremely well.

Overall, this was a fantastic experience. From being transported into an Italian backyard to having conversation with the friendly staff, I highly recommend making a reservation at Piccolo Sogno next time you’re craving Italian food. It might just become your favorite spot.