At first glance, Stefano Viglietti’s career has followed an unlikely trajectory. He’s a James Beard Award-nominated chef and restaurateur who never went to culinary school or even worked in a professional kitchen before he started his own restaurant. He’s a multilingual world traveler fascinated with Italian culture who still lives in the Midwestern city where he grew up (Sheboygan, Wisconsin). Today, he and wife Whitney Witt Viglietti ’92 own four restaurants: Trattoria Stefano, Il Ritrovo (a pizzeria), Field to Fork (a café and grocery featuring local and organic food), and The Duke of Devon, an English gastropub. A fifth is in the works.
“In another life,” he says, “I’d have been a history professor.” He majored in the subject at Knox, and his mentor, Rod Davis, encouraged him to go on to graduate school. What Stefano really enjoyed, though, was making dinner for Whitney. “We decided to come back home to Sheboygan and rolled a couple of really big dice. We opened the first place, Trattoria Stefano, without me really having any experience.” Whitney, a philosophy major, did the accounting, baked bread, and served as hostess. Stefano’s father invested in a building that the Vigliettis rented back from him, and his mother made desserts. “We just poured our hearts and souls into this thing,” he says, “and lo and behold, it worked.”
How do you think your Knox education helped you succeed?
I learned there’s no replacement for hard work. When we started the restaurant, we worked basically 18–19 hours a day, saved every penny, didn’t travel, cared about every detail. Just like I did at Knox. l hardly ever missed a class. I took statistics with Marty Eisenberg and nearly died. I got an A on the first test, a B on the next, and a C on the third. I could see it was going in the wrong direction, so I found the smartest person in the class—I can’t even remember her name now, but she was very, very nice and kind. I said, I am really struggling, and she studied with me every single day. I took the final exam and thought I’d failed. I was standing at graduation and Marty Eisenberg walked up to me and asked, “What the hell did you do on that final exam? You got the second-highest score in the class.” This was probably my proudest moment at Knox. So shout-out to this person who helped me. Thank you.
What’s one of your favorite Knox memories?
I spent a lot of time watching the trains go past the soccer fields. You always heard the whistles, and it was wonderful, sort of melancholy, but not in a bad way. Galesburg is kind of landlocked, but you were still connected to this outside world, even though you were in this sort of cocoon of learning in the middle of a bunch of cornfields. You still had the sense of this big world out there.
