Drive the length of Irving Park Road through Dunning this month and you will pass two restaurants that opened within about five weeks of each other this summer. One has a rooftop, two wood-fired ovens, and a menu built around San Marzano tomatoes and 24-hour dough. The other is a counter-service Greek spot where the biggest draw is a spinning spit of pork, a cut most Chicago gyro places skip in favor of the usual lamb-and-beef blend. They sit at opposite ends of the same road, and neither one looks anything like the other.
That is not a coincidence worth shrugging off. It is a decent read on where Dunning's food scene is actually headed right now, and it is more interesting than either restaurant on its own.
The rooftop end: Sapori Napoletani
As Fra Noi reported, Sapori Napoletani opened in July at 8235 W. Irving Park Road, and it did not start there. Owner Antonio Vitiello, who grew up in Naples working in his family's pizzeria from the age of eight, first ran a small version of this restaurant out of a Norwood Park strip mall. The Dunning location is a step up in every direction: two floors, two bars, a rooftop patio that is 21 and over, and mosaic-tiled ovens that function as much as decor as equipment. Vitiello runs the place with his wife, Ewelina, who is from Poland and met him after she moved to Italy.
The pizza itself follows the rules of the style it is named for. Dough made with 00 Caputo flour rests for at least a day before it is hand-stretched, topped with San Marzano tomatoes and fior di latte mozzarella, and fired in an oven built for exactly this. The rest of the menu runs longer than a pizzeria menu usually does, with arancini, seafood linguine, and lamb chops alongside the pies.
This is not a stop-in-for-a-slice kind of place. It is built for a Friday night reservation, a birthday dinner, a night when you want the rooftop and the golden bar and the sense that you drove somewhere for the evening rather than just picked up dinner on the way home.
The other end: Lenci's Greek Pita
A few miles east on the same road, at the corner of Narragansett and Irving Park, Lenci's Greek Pita opened June 2 in the space that used to be Mr. Zees. There is no rooftop here, no reservation system, no wine list. What there is: a rotating spit of pork, hand-cut fries, and a tzatziki sauce people keep mentioning by name in reviews.
Pork gyros are genuinely a little rare in this city. Most Chicago gyro counters run lamb and beef, sliced from the same kind of pressed cone you have seen turning in windows on every commercial strip in the city. Lenci's does that version too, plus chicken souvlaki and a solid burger, but the pork is the reason people are driving here specifically. It is the kind of place built for a Tuesday, not a Friday. You order at the counter, you can eat in the dining room or take it home, and the whole transaction takes less time than it took to read this paragraph.
What the pairing actually tells you
Put those two openings next to each other and a pattern shows up that a single restaurant review would miss. Dunning is not getting one kind of new restaurant. It is getting two kinds, aimed at two different reasons people go out to eat, and both bets landed on the same road within the same summer.
That matters more than it sounds like it should. A neighborhood that only attracts destination restaurants is signaling one thing about its trajectory. A neighborhood that only attracts quick-counter spots is signaling something else. Dunning got both, on the same corridor, within about five weeks of each other. Irving Park Road already carried plenty of daily traffic before this summer. What changed is that it is now doing double duty as a place people choose to go, not just a road they use to get somewhere else.
The constant at the other end of the neighborhood
None of this displaces the neighborhood's actual institution, which sits on a different street entirely. Eli's Cheesecake World has occupied 6701 W. Forest Preserve Drive since 1996, and it operates less like a restaurant and more like a working factory that happens to sell you a slice on the way out. Weekday tours run at 1 p.m. and cost three dollars, walking visitors past the conveyor belts and decorators before ending with a sample. On weekends, a free walk-in presentation called Discover Eli's: Tasting and Traditions runs Saturday and Sunday, also at 1 p.m., no tour included but samples of the cheesecake and a few other products.
It is easy to live in Dunning for years and never actually take the tour, the same way people who live near a landmark rarely visit it. But it is worth doing once, if only because it explains why a bakery on a residential side street ships desserts internationally and still keeps its retail hours modest: Monday through Friday 9 to 5, Saturday 10 to 4, closed Sunday.
For a lower-key version of a night out that has nothing to do with either new restaurant, Dunning Pour House on Addison Street remains the neighborhood's default sports bar, the kind of place where a Sunday afternoon game determines how full the room gets.
The outdoor rhythm that has not changed
Fall in Dunning still runs through Schiller Woods, the forest preserve on the neighborhood's edge with enough trail mileage and grove space that you can find a quiet stretch even on a busy Saturday. The groves are set up for picnics rather than performances, which is the appeal. Nobody is trying to program this space. It is just there, and it works the same way every year once the weather turns.
The Chicago Public Library's Dunning branch runs a recurring walking club that starts at the library and loops out to Hiawatha Park and back, a small, low-effort way to see more of the neighborhood on foot than a normal errand run would show you. It is not flashy programming. It is the kind of thing that only shows up if you are already paying attention to what your own library branch is doing, which is most of the point.
If you want to see all of this in one weekend
- Saturday at 1 p.m.: the weekend tasting at Eli's Cheesecake World, no reservation needed
- Saturday afternoon: a walk through Schiller Woods while the weather still allows for it
- Saturday night: dinner and the rooftop at Sapori Napoletani if you want the full evening out
- Sunday: a pork gyro at Lenci's, eaten in the dining room instead of rushed at a counter
- Any weeknight: Dunning Pour House if there is a game on
None of this requires a car ride out of the neighborhood. That is arguably the real story here. Dunning added two very different restaurants to the same road in the same summer, kept its cheesecake landmark running exactly as it has for three decades, and still has a forest preserve and a library walking club doing the quiet work they have always done. The neighborhood did not trade one identity for another. It picked up a second gear without losing the first.
If you are curious what any of this means for property values on these same blocks, or you are thinking about buying or selling somewhere along this stretch of the northwest side, Antonio Sarmiento knows Dunning block by block. Let's Connect.
