Named for a famed NC Condition coach, Osteria Georgi will carry Italian flair to Chapel Hill

Jan. 29—Giorgios Bakatsias and George Tarantini shared a bond about good food.

Now, the prolific Triangle restaurateur will title his most up-to-date restaurant in honor of his buddy and longtime N.C. Point out College men’s soccer mentor, who passed away in 2019.

Osteria Georgi, an Italian trattoria, will open up this spring in Chapel Hill, moving into the previous Residing Kitchen area. The cafe will be Bakatsias’ first new restaurant in nearly a few many years, pursuing the Mediterranean-concentrated Rosewater in Raleigh’s North Hills improvement.

At the helm of Osteria Georgi will be Chapel Hill native Daniel Jackson, who has worked in some of the world’s best kitchens, which includes two many years at Eleven Madison Park in New York, which in 2017 sat atop the Worlds Greatest Restaurants Listing at variety 1.

Osteria Georgi will serve lunch and supper and a weekend brunch, with a menu which include a 50 % dozen unique clean handmade pastas just about every working day, whole roasted fish, braised beef and pork and a assortment of antipasti dishes. The restaurant will also include things like a marketplace where by pastas and olive oils and Italian items will be offered to consider household.

Neighborhood farms on the menu

Jackson went to Chapel Hill Large University, graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, then attended the Culinary Institute of The usa. He returned to Chapel Hill from New York previous yr following the COVID-19 shutdown compelled layoffs in the restaurant where was functioning. Jackson explained it can be a delighted return and that he’s looking ahead to placing North Carolina farms on a menu.

“I am grateful to be back in Chapel Hill and join the food items neighborhood below,” Jackson claimed. “You can get fantastic create in New York, but you really don’t sense it as significantly. In this article, you will find so substantially at your disposal. I am fired up to be in a position to use nearby cheese purveyors, local meat, fish from the coast.”

Bakatsias is accountable for some of the Triangle’s most well-known and acclaimed dining places, which includes Vin Rouge in Durham and Kipos in Chapel Hill. Osteria Georgi marks his first Italian restaurant due to the fact Cafe Giorgio closed in Cary more than a decade back. But instead of wooden-fired pizzas, Osteria Georgi will be a spouse and children-style Italian neighborhood cafe.

“The room is likely to be somewhere you can take in every day,” Bakatsias reported. “It will have breathing place, complex with out currently being stuffy, pleasurable and gentle-hearted.”

‘One of my best friends’

Tarantini coached the Wolfpack men’s soccer crew for approximately 30 several years, winning an ACC title and primary the N.C. Condition crew to a No. 1 ranking. Bakatias said Tarantini’s enjoy for food stuff rivaled his enjoy of soccer.

“He was just one of my greatest good friends,” Bakatsias claimed. “He experienced the nose and flavor to obtain the ideal dining establishments, it could be in the center of nowhere in Argentina.”

Opening a cafe in 2021, in the center of a world-wide pandemic, suggests setting up for the now with an eye on the long term. Osteria Georgi can be successful with the present dining restrictions, Bakatsias stated, which includes 50 %-entire dining rooms.

But he explained that the restaurant is intended for what arrives future, when diners sense more snug collecting jointly. Vin Rouge opened in the early 2000s in the “Liberty Fry” second, when some Americans turned down French meals mainly because of disagreements amongst the U.S. and France more than the Iraq War. Bakatsias mentioned he shed great quantities of money, but didn’t give up on the cafe.

“I explained this area warrants to be in this article 20 years afterwards it is really one particular of the most thriving dining places in the spot,” Bakatsias reported. “I stay with no concern, but that isn’t going to suggest I am not cautious and compassionate about what is actually heading on. Almost everything passes, no subject what.”

Osteria Georgi seems to be to open in March or April at 201 S. Eliot Street in Chapel Hill. To stick to the restaurant on social media, check out osteriageorgi.com