Our story
The chef behind
the market.
Chef Michael Manno has spent more than thirty years in professional kitchens, culinary leadership, and product development. Manno's Market is where all of it comes together.
Chef Michael Manno
Chef owned
and operated.
Chef Michael Manno has spent more than thirty years in professional kitchens, culinary leadership, and product development, cooking, building systems, and developing food with a deep respect for craft, ingredient integrity, and the people behind every plate.
His experience reaches from Chicago's restaurant scene to fine dining, resorts, high-volume catering, and culinary research and development in places including Honolulu and Vail. Across every setting, the work has remained grounded in the same belief: great food requires absolute presence, impeccable timing, and respect for the full ensemble, from the farmer and rancher to the kitchen team to the people gathered at the table.
After decades of working across food service and innovation, Michael founded Manno's Market to cook with greater intention: food that honors the people who grow it, celebrates the season, and makes every meal feel like an occasion. His work brings together private dining, provisions, culinary consulting, and natural, regenerative, scalable food solutions built to sustain the people and communities along the chain.
Manno's Market is chef-owned and chef-operated, a direct expression of Michael's conviction that good food is not complicated. It is honest.
Manno's Market brings together the full range of Michael's work: the discipline of professional kitchens, the curiosity of culinary research and development, and the conviction that food can strengthen both people and place.
- ExperienceMore than 30 years of food service and corporate culinary research and development
- RoleFounder, chef, and operator
- BeliefCelebrating local farmers and ranchers
- Est.2026
Thirty years of craft, one table at a time
How I got here
How I got to
Manno's Market.
Before Manno's Market had a name, it began in the loving kitchen of Michael Manno's mother, a generous cook. Mindful of what she ate while carrying him, she made his baby food from scratch, simmering vegetables at home. As a toddler, Michael was excited when the groceries came in, helping unpack brown paper bags and discovering the ingredients inside. By five, he was already thinking like a young cook.
That first kitchen taught him that food is care made visible. In Chicago's Italian-American restaurant community, the lesson grew: a dining room can hold an entire neighborhood, a bartender's welcome, the rhythm of the kitchen, a long table, and one more plate because no one is ready to leave yet.
That education continued at Lido Banquet Hall, where his father worked behind the bar. Michael worked alongside him in the front and back of house, learning that hospitality is made through care at every station. At Il Vicinato, owned by his late godfather James Nacaratto, he encountered the romance of the Italian table, where food carries celebration, memory, and family in the same breath. He worked there, ate there, and saw how a restaurant becomes part of people's lives.
Those rooms gave him a beginning, not a script. At 302 West in Geneva, Illinois, Michael found formative mentorship with Chef Joel Findlay. Joel's discipline and exacting standard became an ongoing inner barometer, the question of whether a dish would be worthy to leave the kitchen still informs Michael's work. From there, he made his own path through family restaurants, fine dining, resorts, catering, culinary research and development, product development, and food-centered innovation. The work took him from Chicago to kitchens and collaborations beyond it, but the lesson stayed constant: flavor matters, systems matter, and the people gathered around the food matter most.
Manno's Market is the return of those lessons in a form that is wholly his own. It brings the Italian-American instinct for generosity and a full table together with seasonal cooking, regional producers, culinary innovation, and Food Emancipation. It is built for the meal in front of you, the farmer behind it, and the community that forms when good food is made with care.
Keepsakes
From the rooms where
it began.
A few pieces kept from the Chicago restaurants and banquet halls that shaped Chef Manno's table.
Good food is not complicated. It is honest.The Manno's Market standard
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The best way to know this market is to sit at its table. Private dining evenings are now being booked.
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