Aiming for the divine at Di’Vino 

For the past nine months the partners at Berwyn’s La Parra restaurant have plied a new menu in Forest Park. Di’Vino, 1527 S. Harlem Ave., sits along a somewhat lonely strip of Harlem. Traffic zips by the building that once housed a bar. While their original restaurant speaks Italian with a Spanish accent, Di’Vino leans further into Italian and Mediterranean fare.   

“More Italian with a little Asian twist,” said partner and chef Gabriel Padilla. “All our pastas are house made. Bread is made in house. Everything is made in house.” 

Both restaurants are family owned and run. Padilla brings his 30 plus years of helming kitchens and menus. Fellow partner and brother-in-law Valerio Muñoz has been a mixologist for more than a decade. Their dedication is apparent.  

An old fashioned cocktail arrived tucked inside a small wooden barrel, mysteriously filled with savory smoke. As Muñoz opened the hatch for the diner to retrieve the glass, tendrils of smoke billowed out and scent memories of camping and barbequing with family flared.  

The chicharrón de pulpo (octopus) appetizer is a favorite on the menu. The octopus perches on a pedestal of avocado mousse flanked by pickled red onion and sweet potato chips.  

“It has a big, big Asian twist to it,” Padilla said. “Umami and then a lot of sesame and kimchi. So, you got Korea. You’ve got Japan and China all together.” 

This second restaurant adventure was not only an opportunity to expand into a new menu profile, but it also met a need for more space.  

“We have a lot of parties there that we will turn them down. We want a second location to take all those, then this building showed up for sale,” Padilla said. Though the traffic pours by, the partners feel their existing clientele is driving the dining. “Since a lot of people know us from La Parra, they figure we’re the same family so that they give us a try.” 

Entrees include house-made pastas, like linguine frutti di mare with shrimp, calamari, scallops mussels and clams in a light, spicy tomato sauce. And the linguine Di’Vino, which amplifies its seafood base of shrimp with serrano ham and prosciutto all enrobed in a caramelized garlic cream sauce.  

“Our gnocchi with short rib ragu, it’s amazing. People love that one. And there’s one thing that I put for specials, and now everybody wants, which is tuna,” Padilla said. 

The tuna steak is served with a roasted pepper sauce, chipotle aioli and pisto Manchego (sauteed tomato, onion, zucchini and more). 

Weekly happy hour specials feature drinks from the innovative cocktail menu, extensive list of wine, beer and non-alcoholic options. On Tuesdays, all bottles of wine are half-price.  

The décor is refined, elegant and exuberant. Painted on the wall is a woman’s portrait, her hair accentuated with a three-dimensional floral kick. The artist, Oscar Garcia, formerly worked as a server at La Parra. 

The partners are understandably proud of the drinks, the food, the atmosphere that they have created on Harlem Avenue.  

“What I am surprised about, though I’m not surprised because we’re trying our best, on Google we don’t have one review under five stars. The 64 reviews all are five stars. It’s not easy to do,” said Padilla.