Born in Texas in 1980, Sarah Grueneberg opened Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio in Chicago in 2015. A Top Chef finalist (2011) and James Beard Best Chef: Great Lakes 2017, she retells Italy through Midwestern grains, seasonal produce and globally informed technique.
Raised in Victoria, Texas, among family gardens and Italian-American delis, Sarah Grueneberg took her first job at sixteen at Austin’s Asti Trattoria. In 2005 she joined Chicago’s Spiaggia, rising to executive chef in 2010—garnering four Chicago Tribune stars and reaching the 2011 finale of Top Chef: Texas.
In November 2015 she and partner Meg Sahgal launched Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio in the West Loop. The glass-walled, bronze-die pasta lab earned Jean Banchet “Restaurant of the Year” (2016) and a Michelin Bib Gourmand from 2017 onward.
Her cooking blends Italian memory with Midwestern bounty: smoked-pork casoncelli with Medjool dates; “cacio whey pepe” chitarra made with goat-mozzarella whey; carnaroli rice with roast chicken and XO-dashi. The common thread: dough rolled to order, concentrated broths and vegetables from small farmers.
May 2017 brought the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes, cementing Monteverde’s status. Subsequent honors include a Netflix Chef’s Table Pasta feature (episode “North vs South”) and Food & Wine’s Lisa Shaw Award for Women in Food 2020.
In 2022 she published “Listen to Your Vegetables” (HarperCollins), 180 recipes exploring seven vegetable families and flavor-boosting condiments like colatura, soy garum and chickpea miso. The book became an IACP Cookbook Awards 2023 finalist.
Committed to education, Grueneberg leads “Pasta de la Casa,” a quarterly course for professionals and advanced enthusiasts, and partners with Pastificio Di Martino on alternative American grains. She mentors in the James Beard Foundation Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership program and, since 2024, curates the Chicago Botanic Garden’s “Chef-in-Residence” series on seed biodiversity.
“Pasta is storytelling—I speak Italian with a Texan-Midwestern accent,” she says, inspiring a new generation to marry craftsmanship with local identity.
