Gene & Georgetti’s Tony Durpetti Championed Chicago’s Restaurants

In 1997, Gene & Georgetti unveiled an expansion with two second-floor dining rooms that grew seating at the legendary Chicago steakhouse by 110. Owner Tony Durpetti paid big bucks for fire doors that separated the newly constructed building from the original that was erected in 1872.

Durpetti would occasionally complain about the expenditure: “That’s $90,000 I’m never going to see again,” he’d tell his daughter, Michelle.

The spend was worth it. In 2019, a kitchen fire raged through the restaurant, shooting up flames to the second floor. Michelle Durpetti recalls the conversation she had with the fire chief at the scene. He said they were lucky — the fire doors protected the 147-year-old building and kept the damage limited to the new space. The daughter waited until her father arrived to tell him.

“I was like, ‘Let me talk about that $90,000 you thought you were never going to see again,’” Michelle Durpetti says. “And he’s like — literally — and this was my father, this was what he said all the time when something is, say, incredulous. He looked at me, he goes: ‘No shit.’ And that was him.”

For 35 years Anthony “Tony” Aldo Durpetti had been an ambassador for Chicago’s hospitality industry, maintaining Gene & Georgetti’s iconic status after purchasing the River North restaurant from his father-in-law, Gene Michelotti (who died in 1989). Michelotti and Alfredo Federighi — nicknamed “Georgetti” — founded the restaurant in 1941. Durpetti and his wife, Marion, navigated Chicago’s turbulent restaurant scene with an eye on preserving Michelotti’s legacy.

Durpetti died on Thursday, September 26, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago from complications due to pulmonary fibrosis and Parkinson’s disease. He was 80.

Durpetti’s customers included locals, politicians, and celebrities including Lucille Ball, Bob Hope, Mariah Carey, and Lionel Richie. Michelle remembers an evening drinking whiskey with Russell Crowe in 2000, right after Gladiator was released. Crowe was there for a gig with his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. There are no photos — Durpetti believed in leaving celebrities alone and thought pictures might make them uncomfortable.

Gene & Georgetti

Michelle says that over the last few days, the family has received messages of support from all over the country. Before the steakhouse, her father founded a national radio advertising firm that took him all over the country — New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, the Carolinas, and beyond. Born on February 1, 1944, he also served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army.

The Durpettis have plenty of family in Italy and plan on livestreaming funeral services on Thursday, October 3, from Assumption of Catholic Church, located just across the street from the restaurant. Gene & Georgetti will be closed for lunch for a private reception and reopen for dinner at 5 p.m. Dad, who enjoyed Beefeater gin martinis, wouldn’t want to miss out on a lucrative dinner service, Michelle says.

Working in advertising, Tony Durpetti embraced a flair for gimmicks. Michelle says her father would routinely overbook the restaurant, forcing customers to wait at the bar in waves even though they booked reservations. Online reservation systems didn’t yet exist, but a crowded bar area made Gene & Georgetti a hot spot. As Chicago’s oldest steakhouse, Durpetti took on the challenge of keeping the space relevant as more restaurants and steakhouses opened and provided more competition.

Gene & Georgetti

“If someone waited for like an hour for a reservation, he joked, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you before breakfast,’” Michelle says, though she assures customers that the restaurant ditched this practice long ago.

In 1994, Tony helped assemble a group of steakhouses across the country, forming an alliance called the Independent Retail Cattleman’s Association. The group would seek listings in airline magazines, grabbing the attention of business-savvy fliers who needed places to empty their business accounts. This was no ranking; they split the cost of the ads and would mix up placements every so often to avoid jealousy between restaurant owners. But the exposure worked, and the business drummed up by the “association” helped Durpetti pay off the loan for expansion within six months. That acumen helped make Gene & Georgetti one of the most successful steakhouses in the country, a fixture on Restaurant Business Online’s Top 100 Independents — a list of the independent restaurants that profit the most.

Tony Durpetti’s philosophy was one of “mindful evolution.” During the pandemic, he briefly moved to Florida where the weather was easier for a senior citizen to manage. He would call in to check on the restaurant. His daughter and her husband, Collin Pierson, had quietly transitioned into running operations years ago. Michelle would joke with her father that she wouldn’t “jazz it up” too much, but the restaurant needed to evolve, and they would add more pasta dishes, leaning more into their Tuscan heritage. As his father-in-law was unable to fly due to his health, Pierson would drive him back and forth; the last trip from Florida to Chicago came in January 2024.

Gene & Georgetti

Pierson manages the restaurant and recalls his father-in-law’s generosity. Years ago, while he and Michelle were in Barcelona, thieves stole nearly $30,000 in photography equipment, which would have doomed Pierson’s photography business if it weren’t for his future father-in-law’s immediate gesture to pay for replacement gear.

Gene & Georgetti

Gene & Georgetti

Chicago’s restaurant world is in mourning.

“He personified class and lived a daily life of hospitality. Watching him, showed us what this business should be. He set the bar for our generation,” wrote the owners of Piccolo Sogno, one of Durpetti’s favorite restaurants, on Instagram.

Piccolo owner and chef Tony Priolo knew Durpetti for more than 25 years. He says when he first opened, Durpetti would walk around Gene & Georgetti’s dining room telling every table to visit Piccolo Sogno: “I would call him for advice and he was up always and there for me,” Priolo says. “He was an icon to our industry, he will be greatly missed.”

Sam Toia, president and chief executive officer of the Illinois Restaurant Association, calls Durpetti a friend and icon and that “his advocacy of the restaurant industry was surpassed only by the genuine love and warmth he showered on his family, his team, and the countless guests he welcomed to Gene and Georgetti’s.”

Durpetti was conscious of giving opportunities to women, using the phrase “glass ceiling” in conversations with his daughter. While he was the restaurant’s public face, Michelle’s and his wife Marion’s impacts could be felt throughout. “My grandmother (Ida Passaglia) was the first bookkeeper,” Michelle says. “This was a restaurant that was always run by women — it just looked like it was run by men.”

Michelle Durpetti says that during the height of COVID, there were times when the steakhouse could have ceased operations. The establishment was evicted by its landlord in suburban Rosemont. Her father, who battled Parkinson’s for 15 years, would occasionally visit, boosting the morale of the restaurant. Michelle says her father didn’t realize but it was his meticulous financial planning through the years that enabled the steakhouse to survive the crisis the pandemic presented.

As she recalls her father’s legacy, Michelle remembers being 18 and challenging her father at the restaurant. She didn’t care for his overbooking policy. He promptly fired her, telling her that she could only return after she accrued enough experience to bring something positive to the table. The ordeal wasn’t scarring; it gave Michelle Durpetti perspective, and in the end, Tony Durpetti trusted his daughter and son-in-law the same way Gene Michelotti trusted him to uphold the restaurant’s legacy.

“Most people loved my dad,” Michelle Durpetti says. “If you didn’t like my dad, it was probably on you and not on him — and I don’t even say that because he was my dad. People just gravitated to him.”

A visitation will be held on Thursday, October 3, at Belmont Funeral Home. A Mass will be held at Assumption Catholic Church.