Osterio Forto triumphs with classic Italian, subtle twists in O’Fallon, Mo. (2024)

I haven’t spent much time driving Highway K in O’Fallon, Missouri. I bet that will change — and soon. The communities west of the Missouri River are booming. Where people and money go, restaurants surely follow.

Osteria Forto, which opened in December in a shopping plaza north of Highway 364 on Highway K, fills the need for a higher-end Italian restaurant. Owners Dominic and Liz Pietoso, who live nearby in Cottleville, have seen the area’s growth firsthand. But the married duo is building something bigger here.

Maybe you recognize the Pietoso name? Dominic’s father, Fortunato Pietoso, is the executive chef. The native of Aversa, Italy, north of Naples, is also the younger brother of Tony Pietoso, the owner of Cafe Napoli in Clayton. That branch of the family has steadily expanded west, with outposts in Town and Country (Napoli 2) and St. Charles (Napoli III, Napoli Sea) as well as a pizzeria planned to open his year in Chesterfield.

Before retiring, Fortunato cooked at some of the most revered names in St. Louis Italian dining: Cafe Napoli, Giovanni’s on the Hill, John Mineo’s, Roberto’s Trattoria. Meanwhile, in 2016, Dominic and Liz returned to St. Louis from Cincinnati, where Dominic had been the general manager of a fine-dining restaurant owned by another Pietoso uncle. The couple wanted to open a restaurant back then, but unless you already owned a brick-and-mortar restaurant, the business-loan market was unforgiving.

Instead, Dominic and Liz bought a franchise of Cecil Whittaker’s Pizzeria in Creve Coeur. As part of the sale terms, they could serve their own menu whenever they wanted. They introduced an osteria menu on Wednesdays, which proved popular, packing the pizzeria once a week before the pandemic.

The osteria menu is essentially what the couple presents at Osteria Forto, where they have brought Fortunato out of retirement for a “last hurrah,” as Dominic described it in a phone interview. That menu doesn’t differ in kind from what you can find at Italian restaurants throughout the metro area — the format is the familiar array of antipasti, pastas and meat and seafood main courses — and at first glance you might think the same about the restaurant’s style.

Yet even among straightforward dishes, subtle touches stand out. Instead of marinara sauce, a tart lemon aioli accompanies an antipasto of crunchy, springy flash-fried calamari. Shrimp fra diavola, another of the antipasti, teases you with the dish’s expected chili heat, but instead its savoriness and a brush of sweetness linger, the shrimp’s tomato sauce further enriched by a sherry reduction.

The menu specifies the carbonara sauce for a plate of rigatoni as Carbonara Americana. The splash of cream added to the traditional egg yolk-based sauce is undeniable, but it is only a splash. A silky gloss still coats the rigatoni’s ridges. For that matter, the cream makes sense, not as a concession to supposed American preferences, but for the carbonara to work as a sauce for tubular pasta. If anything, this carbonara could benefit from crisper, more distinctly flavored bacon.

Sometimes, though, Fortunato Pietoso’s style is bracingly bold. Atop shrimp scampi — each of six very large shrimp set atop a glistening slice of lemon — he strews capers as generously as confetti at a parade. His Rigatoni Cardinale in a tomato sauce with a touch of cream for a velvety body and a glug of white wine for a peak-summer brightness would have been satisfying with shrimp or lobster, let alone both, let alone both and a plump scallop.

For Pietoso’s version of saltimbocca, he substitutes a whopping bone-in pork rib chop for a veal cutlet. He tops this already ample cut of pig with the traditional slices of prosciutto and a cap of nutty fontinella cheese and serves all of it in a white wine-sage sauce.

My cholesterol numbers inform me there is, in fact, such a thing as too much pork. This dish works, however, because Pietoso knows how to cook a thick pork chop — a rarity, still, in 2024. He shades the center toward a very pale pink for a clean, sweet flavor (reinforced by the white wine sauce) that contrasts with the naturally salty prosciutto.

Incredibly, this pork chop saltimbocca wasn’t the most overwhelming dish I encountered at Osteria Forto. Fortunato loves specials, Dominic said, and during my visits, the recurring special was a bone-in veal chop under a broiled blanket of gorgonzola cheese.

As with the pork chop, Fortunato lets the sizable dish unfold in layers: the funky cheese and the chop’s deeply browned exterior yield to veal’s naturally mild essence, which in turn is rounded out by the chop’s jus. The regular menu includes a small selection of steaks, but if this veal is available, you can skim right past them.

The main courses come with the unobtrusive “vegetable of the day,” which on my first two visits were a scoop of mashed potatoes, carrots and green beans. At my final dinner, two fat stalks of perfectly grilled asparagus replaced the green beans, a welcome nod to seasonality from a restaurant that doesn’t trumpet seasonal cuisine, but clearly pays attention to it.

Likewise, a fresh strawberry coulis topped a dessert of beautifully wobbly vanilla-bean panna cotta. Liz Pietoso makes the desserts (ice cream and sorbets excepted), and you will also see her helping Dominic lead the front of the house. More restaurants are bound to open in O’Fallon and neighboring communities in the coming years, but Osteria Forto has already found the personal touches you will want to revisit.