Dec. 3, 2020

A chef whose career has taken him from Chicago to Denver to Washington, D.C., is opening a restaurant in downtown Sioux Falls.

Bryan Moscatello most recently served as executive chef at The Oval Room, which was near the White House and popular among the D.C. elite.

“The location was a fantastic location. Right now, it’s not the best location around due to everything going on and a comfort level with dining,” he said.

So why Sioux Falls?

His wife, Jaime, is from here, and they have many family members in town.

“It was something we had been talking about a little bit before the madness started, and some of that prompted it,” Moscatello said. “I’m super happy to be here and be involved in the community.”

He has leased the former location of The Market in the historic Harvester Building on East Sixth Street and is in the process of renovating it.

“I love the space, the big beams, the hardwood floors, the brick. It’s fantastic.”

He compares it to a space where he ran a restaurant in Denver, Adega Restaurant + Wine Bar. That concept landed him on the list of Esquire magazine’s Best New Restaurants in the Country in 2002, as one of Food & Wine magazine’s 2003 Best New Chefs in America and as the 2003 Chef of the Year from Denver’s 5280 magazine.

He competed on Food Network’s “Chopped Grill Masters” in 2016.

A New Jersey native, Moscatello’s career also has taken him to Chicago from 2011-14, where he was chef-partner at Storefront Company, a farm cuisine concept.

“I grew up in an Italian family,” he said. “My first jobs were cooking, dishwasher, and then I decided I wanted to ski, so I moved to Aspen, Colo., and started cooking seriously.”

He also has spent time in Panama, Utah and Napa Valley in California.

“This is it,” he said of the move to Sioux Falls. “I’m tired of moving.”

He was seriously looking at the market when he got a call about The Market space and said it felt like the right property at the right time.

“When Laurel and Doug Lather announced they were retiring, Bryan immediately jumped at the opportunity to take the space,” according to Ryan Tysdal of Van Buskirk Cos., who brokered the deal. “The space never really hit the market; Bryan moved very fast.”

Seeing a vacant restaurant space backfill so quickly is a testament to the strength of Sioux Falls’ real estate market, Tysdal added.

“In another market, that space may have sat vacant for over a year.”

Moscatello jokes that when he was introduced to Sioux Falls decades ago, he would not have imagined running a restaurant here, but now “I love this little downtown,” he said.

“It’s fantastic. I love the feel and the walkability and the environment. It really reminds me of when I opened in LoDo in Denver (its oldest neighborhood). It had a very similar feel. I love this space because I think the potential is significant, and I’m just really looking forward to getting to work.”

While he’s still working through the menu development and picking a name for the restaurant, his Italian heritage will be part of it as will his passion for locally sourced ingredients, he said.

“The main base of my cooking is still very Old World, both in belief and tradition, so a lot of it is taken from classic French technique, but the whole seasonality and regionality of cuisine is very important.”

The restaurant likely will open in the second quarter of 2021 once the weather starts to improve, he said.

“It will definitely have a very different feel than it did prior, but the key things aren’t going to be touched,” Moscatello said, adding he will start by opening the upstairs dining room, bar space and patio.

“The downstairs is very usable, and we have big plans for it, but we want to get this first piece of the project going, and then we’ll address that.”