Aposto — the fruit of deep roots

9/4/2024

When the millennium was new, Tony Lemmo opened his first café in the Metro Market. That brilliant incubator of food businesses was doomed by its limitations — mainly that it could only be open on weekends. 

Lemmo saw the writing on the wall and started looking for a more permanent place to grow. He discovered a dilapidated house in Sherman Hill, a few blocks east on Woodland. It had previously housed Le Chat Noir, Walter Jahncke’s Victorian coffee experience with exquisite pastries and a wrap-around front porch.

Le Chat had not been doing his job. The 1880 mansion was possessed by rodents, spiders and vagrants. 

“It was definitely a money pit, but no one else wanted to buy it. My mom was so worried that she called Walter and begged him not to sell it to me.” 

Lemmo’s fully restored place, now called Aposto, is about to turn 20. Tony and the property took a long, strange trip between then and now. The restaurant, previously known as Café di Scala, vaulted Lemmo into several other ventures — Frank’s at Drake, Gusto, Guapo, The Breakfast Club, Anna Dolce and Gusto Pizza Bar. All that is over for him. How does he feel about being reduced to one?

“I love it. It took 20 years of sweat equity to get here. I had no investor and no cash in the beginning, and now I am back to no partners and no mortgages — just the therapy of my gardens and one restaurant. No one told me how long it takes for a restaurant to find its identity. It takes time, even for Thomas Keller. Now I feel like the director of a big Broadway show. Aposto runs organically. (Host) Leslie Boyd, we all call her Mama, is the star, and it runs around her. 

“I have been fortunate to have a lot of great chefs run through the kitchen, Phil Shires and Joe McConville among them. But it all starts in the garden and the cellar.” 

No other restaurant in the area employs a garden so successfully on its menu. Lemmo was raving about a new kind of finocchio the last time we saw him. The tiny flower buds burst with an intense flavor that would soon accent salad dressing, pasta and desserts. 

The cellar houses the pasta maker. The restaurant has always specialized in 100% scratch-made pasta. It’s unique in that now. Others tried and gave it up, but it’s the brand at Aposto. Lemmo’s cavatelli are so good that even George Formaro quit making his own and just buys Tony’s for Centro. 

Lemmo’s “sweat equity” has given the lie to his mom’s worries. Lou Ann was his original host till her early death 10 years ago. It helps that Tony’s a talented artist and craftsman himself. “And that I was in my early 20s then,” he shared. 

Diners now enjoy Victorian splendor from the inlaid bar to the porch furniture. The business is swift, even on nights the restaurant is closed, with private parties. 

The menu changes frequently because of the garden, which is thoroughly Calabrese. This summer, I tried two gazpachos; Caesar salad with heirloom tomato; mussels with crème fraiche and herbed wine; marrow bone with linguini, caramelized onions and myriad garden stuff; polenta cakes (that are as much a signature as the cavatelli) served with a garden marinara; gnocchi with crab and arugula pesto; osso buco of lamb shank with carrot risotto and a gremolata with more mint than parsley; and, of course, cavatelli that include sausage and finocchio. 

I’m usually too full to also eat dessert, but the homemade ice creams and the olive oil cakes are reliably wonderful. The latter is a lemony bundt cake with strawberries sauce. 

Bottom line — Aposto is as good as garden dining gets, and no time is better to dine there than September when the garden is in its prime. ♦

Jim Duncan is a food writer who has been covering the central Iowa scene for more than five decades.