Crain’s 40 Under 40 List
By Cynthia Hanson

Four years ago, Chicago restaurateur Joseph De Vito had an idea. “I wanted to do something I hadn’t done before—an Asian fine-dining restaurant,” he says.
Then Mr. De Vito met Homaro Cantu, a Charlie Trotter alumnus and chef. Mr. Cantu introduced Mr. De Vito to his post-modern cuisine, in which raw ingredients are manipulated with liquid nitrogen, helium, organic food-based inks and other not-so-obvious kitchen tools to create dishes ranging form edible menus to doughnut soup.
Mr. De Vito quickly scrapped the Asian idea and opened moto. Things didn’t start well.
“Customers would walk out because they didn’t understand what we were doing,” he says. “I thought I was crazy for having jumped into this high-tech food concept.”
But Donnie Madia, managing partner of restaurants Blackbird and Avec on West Randolph Street, urged him to stick with his radical ideas. “I believed Joe could succeed because he’s always been tenacious and had big dreams,” Mr. Madia says. “He needed to give moto time to catch on.”
Mr. De Vito did, and within two years it gained the attention of Bon Appetit and Food & Wine magazines, Today, moto, where the average check is $150 to $200 per person, has annual sales of $2.5 million. It has become so popular with local foodies and out-of-towners that it takes three months to get a table on the weekends.
In July, Mr. De Vito opened OTOM, a casual-dining spot located two doors down from moto. “OTOM is moto’s fraternal twin,” Mr. De Vito says of his new place, where entrées top out at $20.
The work is hard, he says, but that’s not a concern. “I work 90 hours a week by choice because I love what I do. “Maybe I’ll slow down in five years—but I don’t think so.”