Milwaukee’s Ca’Lucchenzo took the long way to the James Beard awards

Ca’Lucchenzo in Wauwatosa, a suburb bordering Milwaukee. | Photos by Joe Guszkowski

When Zak and Sarah Baker opened their restaurant, Ca’Lucchenzo, in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa in 2019, they did not set out to win a James Beard award. 

Their goal was simply to run an impeccable restaurant, the kind they’d spent years dreaming about while earning their stripes at other local establishments, including the multi-Beard-winning Bartolotta Restaurants. 

It’s not that the couple didn’t want a Beard award — one of the industry’s highest honors — or didn’t feel that they deserved one. Ca’Lucchenzo is widely considered one of Milwaukee’s best restaurants, and has been almost since it opened. 2025 was its most successful year yet.

But seven years in, with no publicity team and little to no national attention, it’s safe to say the Bakers weren’t expecting that type of recognition.

So when Zak got the call from a friend, as he was preparing for service one morning in March, that he’d been named a finalist for Best Chef in the Midwest region, it derailed his whole day.

“We didn’t think that was gonna happen,” he said, while sitting in Ca’Lucchenzo’s sunlit dining room one recent afternoon. “I know [the restaurant] is good enough. I’m just like, ‘Well, look, all the pressures, all these people, they have higher visibility …’ and then we make the finalist list.

“At some point,” he said, “I maybe need to start preparing myself that maybe we could win?”

The chef will find out for sure this Monday, when the James Beard Foundation unveils its 2026 winners at a ceremony in Chicago. Baker is up against four other chefs in the Midwest region, and would be the first Milwaukee restaurateur to win a Beard since 2022.

‘The most obvious thing’

The nomination alone is validation of a nearly lifelong career in hospitality for the Bakers, both of whom began working in restaurants in their teens. 

Zak grew up in Door County, a cluster of quaint vacation towns about three hours north of Milwaukee, where restaurants are always looking for help in the summer months. He started as a busser at age 14 and was soon kicked to the back of house, where he quickly took to the fast-paced environment. Meanwhile, he was learning a lot about cooking, though more by osmosis than any sort of concerted effort.

When it came time to start thinking about college, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. While lamenting the uncertainty with his co-workers one day, one of them asked, “Why don’t you do this?” The thought had never occurred to him.

“After that, it was the most obvious thing,” Zak said. “And then I never really stopped doing it.”

For Sarah, who grew up in Wauwatosa, the service industry was her real passion outside of her day jobs. After college, she worked as a reporter in Minnesota and an office manager at a medical device company in Denver. But she always found herself counting down the hours until she could leave and go to her restaurant gig. 

 Like Zak, eventually she realized, “Maybe I should just do that.” 

That meant moving back in with her parents at 23 while she looked for work. She landed a hostess job with the just-opening Cheesecake Factory in Wauwatosa, but when management denied her request to become a server, she began applying elsewhere. That’s how she ended up at Ristorante Bartolotta, part of a group of acclaimed full-service restaurants in the Milwaukee area.

She was immediately impressed by the restaurant’s focus on quality, the knowledgeable customers, and the passionate staff. “It was like the world just cracked wide open,” she said. 

That’s where Sarah and Zak met, and fell in love, and soon began talking about what their restaurant would look like — the natural endgame for two high-achievers who’d chosen hospitality as a career path. 

An early idea was a 10-seat counter staffed by just the two of them and a dishwasher. But they could never figure out a way to make it work on paper. 

In fact, the more the Bakers dreamed and schemed, the more they realized there was a lot they still needed to learn about the business if they were to strike out on their own.

“We knew how to work an hourly job in a restaurant,” Sarah said. “But owning and operating a restaurant is so much more than the hourly work.”

That realization began a decade-long journey to both expand their knowledge and find their voice as restaurateurs.

Sarah began applying for every available management job at Bartolotta, and was denied for all of them. She finally got her way into a data entry role at the corporate office, which led to her becoming co-founder Joe Bartolotta’s assistant. That gave her a front-row seat to the ins-and-outs of restaurant ownership, from handling customer complaints to contract negotiations and board meetings. She later became the company’s HR director.

Meanwhile, Zak rose the kitchen ranks to chef de cuisine at Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro, where he honed his cooking and leadership skills.

“We learned the technical side of how to make good dinner, but we also learned all of this other stuff, the blind spots,” he said.

After about seven years with Bartolotta, the Bakers got involved with the revival of Pizza Man, a Milwaukee institution that had burned in 2010. First as consultants, then as partners, they re-opened the restaurant in 2013 and then expanded it to two more locations. What they had expected to be a brief interlude before opening their own restaurant turned into a five-year job. 

It was through this experience that the couple began to really understand what they were good at, what they valued, and what sort of restaurant they wanted to have. And a multi-unit group, with all the oversight and meetings that entailed, was not it. 

“I can’t just be this guy who travels around and checks in at places and hangs out a couple hours and leaves,” Zak said. “I need to live and breathe it. I need to open it, I need to close it. So it just wasn’t really for me.” 

In 2018, the Bakers went to Italy with a wine importer they’d met. It had been about 10 years since Zak had last been there while staging, and his love for Italian food and cozy trattorias came rushing back. 

 “Within a couple days, I look at her, and I’m like, ‘When we get back, I’m quitting,’” he said. 

They were both 37, and Zak was worried that if he spent any longer at a glorified desk job, he’d never be able to come back to the kitchen. 

“I have to go back to a restaurant and do the chef thing again,” he told Sarah. “We should just do the restaurant.”

Ca’Lucchenzo opened in May 2019. 

A dream come true

When they got back from Italy, they put in their notice with Pizza Man and immediately began looking for places. Within a few weeks, they’d found their spot, on a corner in Wauwatosa that had housed a series of iconic restaurants over the years, including Jake’s steakhouse and Juniper 61. 

It was quite literally the restaurant Sarah had always envisioned. “When I would close my eyes and think about our restaurant, it was something on a corner in Tosa, with living space above,” she said. “Before I ever even knew that this place would be a possibility, that’s what I thought of.”

They closed on the building in December of 2018, with the help of an SBA loan, and opened Ca’Lucchenzo the following May. The name is a mashup of their dogs’ names, Luca and Enzo. 

Inspired by their trip to Italy as well as their years of experience with Italian cuisine, the menu featured a variety of scratch-made pastas, prepared in view of customers behind a glass-paned bar. Also on the menu was Zak’s focaccia, deemed “glorious” by one food critic, and a wine list curated by Sarah.  

The atmosphere was bright, modern and homey, with some of the decor borrowed from the Bakers’ apartment upstairs. Zak led the kitchen while Sarah ran the front-of-house. It was just the sort of intimate, hands-on arrangement they’d imagined. 

“We didn’t open up a restaurant to own,” Zak said. “We opened up a restaurant to work at.”

And they were busy right away — maybe too busy. With 120 to 135 covers on weekends, “it always just felt like we were on the brink of disaster,” Zak said. But they avoided any major calamities and had a great first six months. 

The pandemic pivot

2020 started off in much the same way. And then disaster struck in a way they could not have predicted. When COVID hit, they closed for a week, and then local regulations forced them to go dark for much longer.

“It was terrifying,” Sarah said. “We had more debt than I thought could ever be possible for two people. And we had no way of making money.”

Fortunately, their strong opening year had left them with enough cash to continue paying their employees while the restaurant was closed and before benefits had kicked in. And while other operations stayed afloat with pop-up shops and carryout, Ca’Lucchenzo chose to sit those first few months out. 

“We were just so young in our identity that we didn’t want to muddy what people thought of us,” Sarah said. 

Instead, the Bakers took the chance to pause and reassess their business. It was an exercise that, without the pandemic, they may have never been able to do, given time constraints and the risk of upsetting customers by shifting gears without warning.

But with COVID providing cover, they decided that they wanted to raise the bar a bit at Ca’Lucchenzo, with an eye toward easing some of the weekend chaos.

“It was like, let’s make some slightly nicer food, let’s bring in some splashier ingredients,” Zak said. “Let’s charge a little bit more, and bend this a little bit more towards our skill set.”

It would be what he called an “experimental summer.” 

In June, Ca’Lucchenzo reopened on the patio, with just 30 seats. Zak began sourcing finer ingredients — expensive cuts of lamb, morel mushrooms, truffles, caviar — and turning them into pricier dishes. The new approach proved to be the “perfect storm” for customers who’d been pent up at home for months.

“They would come here once a week on the patio and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is the best meal I’ve ever had in my life,’” Zak said. 

It gave the couple confidence that they were on the right track, and also solidified an emotional attachment with their customers. That, in turn, freed Zak to stretch his legs as a chef.

“We built up a trust with these people that [allowed us to do] things that I never, ever thought would sell in a restaurant,” he said, like a half-roasted Guinea hen.

Whereas the restaurant was initially set up for customers to order some bread, pasta and a glass of wine, patrons now expect to get three or four courses and a bottle. Covers are down to about 100 on Fridays and Saturdays, while check averages are much higher than they were when it opened.

The Beard bump

Since then, Ca’Lucchenzo has grown sales every year while establishing a sterling local reputation, mostly through word-of-mouth. That reputation has now gone national with Zak’s Beard nomination, which the couple said is at least partially the result of loyal customers vouching for the restaurant during the awards’ open call period.

The nomination has introduced Ca’Lucchenzo to new customers and delivered a nice bump in business. Zak and Sarah have noticed more visitors from out of town, for instance, and the restaurant for the first time was mentioned by Eater and other national publications.

“Now people, when they look up Milwaukee and they look up restaurants, all of a sudden we’re on the radar,” Zak said.

Still, the owners are being careful not to let the limelight change what they do. Consistency is the most important thing, Sarah said, both now and after this moment passes. 

Nor are the Bakers feeling the pressure of knowing there could be a Beard judge in the dining room on any given night.

“We’ve been doing this for seven years,” Zak said. “We’re pretty secure in who we are and what we’re doing.”

The recognition has encouraged them to think bigger about the business, but only a little. They don’t plan to open another restaurant or hit the Food & Wine circuit. They still don’t have a publicist. But they’ve always wanted to do a Ca’Lucchenzo cookbook.

“Suddenly, it’s like, this is maybe a good idea, and we actually might have more reasonable means to pull this off than before, when it’s just like, who cares about distributing a cookbook of a restaurant nobody’s ever heard of?” Sarah said.

Zak’s nomination is the latest feather in the cap for Milwaukee’s dining scene, following a string of other Beard nominations, a star turn on “Top Chef” and the recent news that the Michelin Guide will consider Milwaukee restaurants for the first time.

But it’s also been a brutal couple of years for restaurants here. Several beloved places, including Beans & Barley and The National Cafe, have shut down, part of a wave of restaurant closures to hit the area amid rising costs and slowing demand. 

The Bakers hope the Beard buzz will put a bigger spotlight on independent restaurants in the city. It could make diners think twice about choosing a national chain over a mom and pop, Sarah said, and maybe even inspire more aspiring restaurateurs to make the same leap that they did.

“It is a difficult time to be in any business right now. It’s a difficult time to be in restaurants, too,” she said. “Maybe it gives some young kid [the idea that] ‘Actually, I could do this.’”

And if Zak wins? Well, he’s worried about getting whisked away for a photo op, and having to make a speech, which he’s learned are typically a little longer than he thought they were.

There will definitely be no vacation, at least not any time soon: Ca’Lucchenzo’s books are open for next week, starting Thursday, Sarah noted.

At some point, Zak said, it might be fun to host a special dinner, or dinners, to recognize the restaurant’s long-standing customers, as well as its staff, some of whom have been around since the beginning.

“If I could make anything clear, it’s that this is a chef award, but there’s no way I get nominated for something like this without all of this around me,” he said. “The reason this place is good is because of all of these things working in concert, including the guests that come here.”

If he does end up having to say a few words Monday, that sounds like a pretty good start.