Ruthie Hauge
Francesco Mangano in a blue shirt and apron.
Francesco Mangano has owned and operated Osteria Papavero on East Wilson Street for 17 years.
It’s not a place where you will eat your weight in breadsticks. It’s something different. Osteria Papavero fans lovingly refer to the restaurant as the “Italian shack,” a place where the menu changes often with dishes that may showcase such ingredients as wild boar or octopus.
Leaning against the simple but elegant bar with the night’s menu in front of him, chef-owner Francesco Mangano talks about his latest food cravings. There’s the pizza he hopes to have when he travels back to Italy and the pastry shop he always patronizes for a late-night guilty pleasure. “I need to have a craving for what I’m eating,” he says. “It can’t be just a pretty plate.”
He hopes people experience similar cravings for themselves at Osteria Papavero, the restaurant on East Wilson Street he’s owned for 17 years. And now, Mangano is bringing his passion for food to people’s homes in The Osteria Papavero Cookbook: Recipes from the Italian Shack and Beyond (Little Creek Press) with 40 recipes capturing the restaurant and its flavors.
The cookbook, like the restaurant, evokes Bologna, the city in Italy where family introduced Mangano to cooking. The region is known for great bread stuffed with prosciutto and mozzarella.
Often asked if he would ever publish his recipes, Mangano finally teamed with Lindsay Christians, a food writer and editor at The Capital Times. The duo spent the last year choosing from some 1,000 recipes Mangano has used at Osteria Papavero.
“The idea for me was to put together all the things I ate or cooked growing up that made me think about food — eventually as a profession,” he says.
Christians not only was the writer and editor for the project, but came into the kitchen at Osteria Papavero to work through the process of taking restaurant recipes and adjusting them to fit the dishes that a person can cook at home for fewer people. Christians also sent the recipes to 15 people with different cooking skill levels to see how they worked. “My mom made a lot,” she says. Another bit of homework: How hard was it for the testers to find seasonal ingredients?
Cookbook cover showing soup in shallow bowl
The Osteria Papavero Cookbook
Coming out of the challenges of the pandemic and the ensuing staff shortages, the cookbook is a triumph of sorts. “I still make ends meet. I think anybody who opens a restaurant during this time knows honestly they’re not going to become rich,” Mangano says. The book is more than recipes for Mangano. It’s something he wanted to leave to his children as a legacy considering all the years of restaurant life their family experienced.
When Mangano opened Osteria Papavero, he was naïve about customers’ willingness to try something different, like wild boar. Diners would order spaghetti and meatballs, which was not on the menu. Then “people started realizing they could have different things, and they would come back.” Jonathan Rodriguez, manager at the restaurant, says people do still come in looking for dishes like chicken alfredo. “It’s always a hard conversation, explaining what we do here and that what they are asking for is American, which is fine and great, but not the food we serve here,” he says.
On weekdays, you will find Mangano at area farmers’ markets seeking fresh ingredients for his next craving. His goal is to help people satisfy their own cravings when they cook from the book or come to the restaurant. “I hope they have some flavors that they crave, good service, and [are] cozy in some way. I hope they say, ‘this is something really good and I want to eat there again.’”
The book is for sale at the restaurant at 128 E. Wilson St. or online.
