Dino Maniaci, chef and owner of D’Vino, grew up in a traditional Sicilian family, where “food, dinner, holidays, and celebrations were the center of our world. It would be anything from small dinners for 10 to big dinners for 30 to 40 every Sunday. In our family, food is an intimate and thoughtful language.”
Dino’s family, including those of his grandmother’s side (Gutilla), had operated bars and restaurants in the Midwest since the early 1900s, but I wouldn’t say the food business was in Dino’s blood. As much as he enjoyed growing up with his grandfather Augie’s pizza house, Rudy’s Pizzeria in Milwaukee, he initially chose to heed the words of his Nana Mary, who owned and worked in restaurants until she was well into her 80s: don’t ever open a restaurant.
“I started out studying fine art, got into retail and merchandising and design, worked for a couple of design firms here in town, and then started my own business,” says Dino. “I specialized in marketing, packaging, branding, and all sorts of intensive design stuff for 25 years. I had an office here and in New York.”
When it was time for a change, Dino’s next pursuit came from his life partner, Jason, a French-trained chef turned dog show judge. After meeting in 2006, the couple settled in Madison full-time and opened SPAWOOF, one of the first dog spas in the area. The combination of the two of them cooking took Dino’s culinary skills to a different level and introduced him to the world of fine dining and entertaining.
But Dino wasn’t starting from square one as a cook. Back in 1957, when his German Lutheran mother married his Sicilian Catholic father, Dino’s great grandmother (Nana Peppina) had one stipulation. “‘If you marry my grandson, you need to learn to cook Italian food.’ So she taught my mother how to cook all the Italian recipes. My mom was already a great German cook, but now had this Sicilian influence. I watched my mom learning from my grandmothers and great grandmothers and great aunts, and that’s how I learned to cook.”
With great family recipes and refined abilities in the kitchen, the next logical step would be to open a restaurant. But Jason echoed the wisdom of Nana Mary, saying, “I want nothing to do with it. It’s too hard. It’s too much. I did this already.” An LGBTQ sports lounge, on the other hand, didn’t come with the burden of a kitchen. Shortly after opening their dog spa, the couple bought the old King Club on King Street and turned it into WOOF’S.
Next door to their sports lounge, Opus martini bar operated for over 10 years, until closing in 2017. The landlord died shortly after, and in 2019, “Somebody new bought the space,” says Dino. “They approached me and said why don’t you expand WOOF’S into here. I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ … But I started thinking, we can make this into a wine bar. So I got away from having to open a restaurant and told Jason we were just going to have wine and cichetti (small plates): olives, meatballs, small pizzas.” This was the birth of D’Vino, which translates to of wine or divine.
After a well-received soft opening, the time came to officially open to the public in March 2020. It was 10 days of packed houses before COVID changed things virtually overnight. Dino recalls having 200 meatballs prepped when “they started saying how many people we can have in a space. We could only have 12 people, so we invited all the 12 staff from WOOF’S to eat all the food we had here.” At the end of the night, there were four meatballs left, inspiring meatball Mondays, which became a to-go carryout business for the restaurant well into the summer months.
The early months of hardship were a sort of blessing for Dino. With no professional training as a chef, he was able to comfortably cook like he was preparing a meal for family at home, allowing him to ease into what D’Vino would become. Still uninterested in reentering the profession, Jason was happy to offer advice, which Dino initially pushed back against. With Dino’s education being mostly onsite, some speed bumps along the way were to be expected.
“I had three cases of lemons because I didn’t know how many lemons were in a case at that time. I ordered them thinking, yeah, you need three cases.” It turns out three cases is way too many, but when life gives you lemons, make limoncello. The next week, he was selling bottles of his limoncello along with a recipe for limoncello martinis.
With each passing month, D’Vino looked more and more like a restaurant until one day it was undeniable. After almost two decades of there being no restaurants in the family, Dino had found the backroad to creating the next entry. In recognition of his journey and his family, the space is full of thoughtful art pieces he’s collected from longtime friend and local artist Martha Glowacki as well as actual images of the family members who inspired him throughout his life.
“One night, I had a couple sitting at a table. One of my staff said, ‘Table 6 wants to see you.’ I was like now what? Could be good; could be bad. So I get out there, and the woman at the table said, ‘I just want to tell you that this pasta tastes exactly like home.’
“I said, ‘Really? And where is home?’
“She said, ‘Rockford.’
“Well my grandmother’s side of the family (Gutilla) all settled in Rockford. I said, ‘Where are you eating pasta in Rockford?’
“And she said, ‘Oh, my sister used to date a guy, and we would go to his grandmother’s house for dinner on Sundays.’
“I said, ‘Really, what’s his grandmother’s name?’
“She said, ‘Grace Saladino.’
“And I pointed to my Aunt Grace in the picture above her table and said, ‘Oh, my Aunt Grace.’” The connection was amazing, and Dino marveled at his ability to maintain the smell and flavor his Nana Peppina imparted onto his Aunt Grace, then onto his mother, and finally onto him well over 50 years ago.
Five years in and going strong, the centuries-old traditions Dino continues are the essence of D’Vino. He still makes cannoli for all the people who helped his family throughout the year, just as his Nana Mary had. The house Old Fashioned, named the Five Nunzios i cinque Nunzios, celebrates his father and his father’s four cousins who were all named Nunzio after their great grandfather, Nunzio Maniaci. With so many stories filling the space, D’Vino is truly an experience several lifetimes in the making.
