Chicago, IL | Italian Restaurant & Wine Program | Wine Club & Chef's Dinner Club

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Key Results

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• Two Table22 clubs running side by side: a three-tier Piemonte wine club and a seasonal Chef's Dinner Club
• Reach extended well past Logan Square, with members now picking up from the South Side and the suburbs
• Rising crossover between clubs, as wine members sign on for dinner and bring friends who do the same

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A restaurant built on one region

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When Aldo Zaninotto opened Osteria Langhe in Chicago's Logan Square in 2014, he made a bet that ran against the grain of how Italian restaurants usually get built in America. Rather than cover the whole country, he narrowed in on Piemonte, the northwestern region where his family's roots run deep, and built the wine list, the menu, and the whole point of view around it. Among many other accolades, Osteria Langhe has earned a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence every year from 2016, and a spot on Fodor's list of the 15 best Italian restaurants in the country.

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Aldo runs the wine program himself. Two decades in the international wine trade means he's tasted more Piemonte producers than most guests will ever get through in a lifetime, and his cellar reflects it, with bottles from names like Produttori del Barbaresco and Paolo Scavino sitting alongside smaller labels most Chicago diners have never heard of. That expertise shows up nightly at the table, where he's the one walking guests through an all-Piemonte list and helping them find their way from something familiar to something new.

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"When they come to my restaurant, I always have to introduce what it is," Aldo says of guests encountering the region for the first time. "You ask what they like, what they're drawn to, and all of a sudden they warm up. They feel comfortable."

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Guidance beyond the dining room door

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The dining room placed natural limits on how far Aldo's guidance could reach. Regulars who moved to the suburbs or guests who wanted to keep exploring Piemonte between visits had a way to take his expertise with them.

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Since Aldo runs the restaurant as a bridge to a place, not just a menu, the idea for an at-home club became the natural next step: a way to extend that same hospitality experience and education to guests he couldn't always see across the table.

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Two clubs, one point of view

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Working with Table22, Aldo launched Aldo's Wine Club, offered in three tiers so members can choose their own depth of exploration. The All About Wine tier delivers two bottles a month spanning Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain. The Piemonte Region Focus narrows in on two premium bottles built around grapes like Nebbiolo and Barbera. The Complete Experience combines both for four bottles a month. Every selection reflects the same standard Aldo holds for the restaurant's own list.

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"The wines that we're showing are important in the sense that they're seasonal," he explains. "If it's the Piemonte tier, it has to be truly the best of the best. I would never compromise on quality for that." The other bottles serve a slightly different purpose: approachable, well-priced wines from beyond Piemonte that Aldo describes as “discovery-mode”, the kind of bottle that just pairs really well with a good weeknight dinner.

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Alongside the wine club, Osteria Langhe runs a Chef's Dinner Club built around a rotating three-course menu that brings the kitchen's seasonal work home. The idea, as Aldo puts it, is to recreate the kind of meal you'd get in Italy: something built with real technique and genuinely good product, but simple enough for a member to warm up themselves. One month it was a whole smoked pig. Another leaned into the first produce of the season from local farms. The standout has been the Plin, the restaurant's signature hand-folded pasta filled with La Tur cheese, which Aldo calls the business card of the restaurant.

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The system behind the hospitality

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Aldo had tried running a club on his own after the pandemic, and found it fragile: no consistent structure, deliveries he had to coordinate and track by hand, and no clear system if something went sideways. Table22 gave the concept the infrastructure it needed to actually hold together, handling the logistics so Aldo could stay focused on the selections themselves.

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"There's always a point person you can reach out to if there's an issue. A customer says they didn't receive something, we call, and it's fixed right away. It's been a really good partnership."

— Aldo Zaninotto, Owner & Wine Director, Osteria Langhe

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That reliability extends to reach, too. Coordinating deliveries across a spread-out city isn't something Aldo could manage on his own, but with Table22 handling their own drivers and delivery logistics, the club now reaches members well beyond Logan Square into the South Side and the North suburbs.

For pickups with members who are more local, Aldo treats every one as a chance to build the same relationship he'd build at the table; he makes a point of catching members when they come by, asking how last month's bottle landed, hearing what they paired it with. That personal connection is clearly paying off: Aldo has watched wine club subscribers sign up for the dinner club too, and bring friends along who then join both.

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"[Club members] are buying the wine and the dinner, and they're bringing friends. It's like a double whammy. This is one of the greatest kinds of feedback you can get."

— Aldo Zaninotto, Owner & Wine Director, Osteria Langhe

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The Plin has become its own proof point. Members who first tried it through the dinner club now ask for it by name when they come in for a full meal, a direct line from a subscription box to a seat at the table. The wine club's member discount adds another pull in the same direction, giving subscribers a reason to keep choosing Osteria Langhe over a bottle shop when they're already coming in to eat.

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Bringing the club to Piedmont

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Aldo's already thinking about how to layer more onto the foundation Table22 built. He's working to lock in wine selections further ahead of each shipment so they can feed directly into the video content his team produces, turning each month's bottle into its own piece of promotion before it ever ships. And this October, several club members are planning to join his next trip to Piemonte, a chance to stand in the vineyards behind the wines they've been drinking at home.

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For an owner who built his entire concept around getting people to fall in love with one region, that's the club doing exactly what it was designed to do: turning a bottle on a subscriber's counter into a reason to get on a plane.

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Our platform, your terroir. Welcome to the club. 

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