Celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis, known for her Food Network shows, will open an Italian steakhouse called Sorella as part of the new Hollywood Casino resort under construction in Aurora.
The casino is planned to open in 2026.
The restaurant’s menu is expected to include fresh pasta, steaks, Roman-style pizza and other Italian dishes, according to De Laurentiis. The restaurant will have outdoor seating and an open kitchen.
This is the latest update to the casino project, which will move the Hollywood Casino from its current location in downtown Aurora to a site at Farnsworth Avenue and Bilter Road in Aurora, across the street from the Chicago Premium Outlets mall.
The project broke ground in November 2023, and is expected to have 1,200 gaming positions, about 220 hotel rooms, a retail sportsbook, an outdoor entertainment area, a full-service spa, a roughly 12,000-square-foot event center with meeting areas and a number of bars and restaurants, according to past reporting.
The casino site, which is part of the city’s newly-announced APEX District, will contain Aurora’s first four-star hotel, the largest structure built in the city in over 50 years, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin has previously said.
The project is currently on schedule to open in the first half of 2026, vice president and general manager of Hollywood Casino-Aurora Greg Moore said on Wednesday. The casino’s 1,000-car parking garage has been fully built, according to past reporting, and the hotel’s glass exterior was recently completed, Moore said on Wednesday.
Going forward, they’re going to be working on interior construction, such as laying cables for the gaming systems, hotel doors, surveillance and valet systems, according to Moore.
And when it came to having a high-end restaurant at the site, Moore said they were looking for something a little different from the steakhouse they have at the downtown location – and they wanted star power.
“We just landed on (De Laurentiis),” Moore said on Wednesday. “That was our dream, that was the one we wanted to reach out to.”
De Laurentiis will also be opening a restaurant, to be called Sorellina, at the Hollywood Casino Joliet.
The restaurants in Aurora and Joliet will be the chef’s first two locations in the Chicago area, according to a news release from Laughlin Constable, the advertising agency for the casino project, and Penn Entertainment.
De Laurentiis already owns two restaurants in Las Vegas and one in Scottsdale, Arizona, the release said. She’s also the author of 11 cookbooks.
The Joliet restaurant is set to open first, near the end of 2025, alongside the Hollywood Casino location it’s part of, Wednesday’s release said. The Aurora restaurant is set to open in the first half of 2026.
De Laurentiis said she had been involved in the project for about a year and half before the new restaurants were announced on Wednesday.
At this point, the design for Sorella in Aurora is mostly finished, Moore said, and they’re working on, for example, ensuring pipe fittings will fit the pizza ovens they plan to install.
One of the special features of the Aurora restaurant will be the outdoor seating, De Laurentiis said, which she said required special city approval.
“Because we’re part of a casino, outside seating to me is, like, a breath of fresh air,” De Laurentiis said on Wednesday. “It’s usually, you’re stuck inside for a lot of it.”
The projects in Aurora and Joliet also require some calculated design choices, De Laurentiis noted, that allow restaurant-goers to enter the restaurants without going through certain parts of the casinos.
According to Illinois law, individuals under 21 years old are not allowed to be in parts of a casino where gambling occurs, so the restaurants need to be designed in a way that families and young people can easily access them without having to go through certain areas of the casinos.
De Laurentiis said they prioritized having an entrance straight off the main parking lot at the Aurora location, for example.
De Laurentiis said the menu for Sorella in Aurora is also expected to be more formal than Sorellina in Joliet – and a bit pricier. Sorella means ‘big sister’ in Italian, she explained, and Sorellina means ‘little sister.’
Main courses at the Joliet restaurant will range from about $22-$35, De Laurentiis said Wednesday, but they expect the price point to be slightly higher for Sorella in Aurora.
Although the menu for the Aurora restaurant is not finalized yet, she has planned for dishes like Roman-style pizza appetizers, branzino and a Tuscan ribeye steak with a fried egg. They will also have fresh pastas – including hand-cut, stuffed pastas – in contrast to primarily dried pastas at the Joliet restaurant.
The Joliet restaurant will focus more on pizzas and pastas and function as a more family-friendly spot, whereas the Aurora location is meant to be more of a special occasion restaurant, De Laurentiis said.
But the goal is still to be accessible for residents, casino leadership said.
“The price points I actually expect to be very reasonable,” Moore said of Sorella. “They’ll probably be less than the average check currently in our Fairbanks Steakhouse.”
De Laurentiis said people involved in the project polled community members about what kind of restaurant they wanted, and that informed the decision to create a more upscale restaurant.
“They have a lot of lower-end type of food experiences (in Aurora),” De Laurentiis said. “They would love to have a fancier spot in their own area rather than having to travel to Chicago every time. I think that the traffic is something that is on everybody’s mind. A lot of people commute, and they don’t want to do the commute again to go to dinner.”
Approachability and variety is a major goal of the new casino project in general, Moore said. He said he wants the new casino to feel like a “choose your own adventure location,” with more amenities – like a hotel, spa and event center – than the current location in downtown Aurora.
In addition to Sorella, the new casino will have a sports bar restaurant, an Asian restaurant and a “social hall” with a number of different food vendors, Moore said on Wednesday.
The casino already has over 400 staff members as of February, but is looking to hire for around 50 positions immediately, Moore said, noting that the casino is holding a job fair from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at Waubonsee Community College’s Aurora Downtown Campus. They’re estimating a final staffing of about 800 by the time the new casino site opens, including dealers as well as staff like security and hotel and restaurant employees.
As for Sorella’s progress, De Laurentiis said they are beginning to talk design details: colors, fabrics, chairs, the like.
When she opens a restaurant, De Laurentiis said she typically spends time training the staff before it opens, and then checks in periodically once it debuts. She also has a say in the hiring of the cooking and management staff.
That means she’ll be spending a lot of time in Joliet and Aurora in the coming months – first at Sorellina in Joliet beginning in August, and then alternating between the two locations as Sorella in Aurora gets closer to opening.
As these are her first two restaurants in the Chicago area, De Laurentiis said she’s excited to be expanding to a place with a known restaurant scene.
“I’ve been involved in the food scene for about almost 25 years,” De Laurentiis said. “And I’ve seen (Chicago) evolve from just deep dish pizza and steakhouses to all sorts of different regional Italian food, regional Asian food. I think the people of Chicago have really embraced food in a way.”
And she values the chance to bring something like that to the suburbs.
“I think that there’s … a lot of people who don’t have access to always being able to come to Chicago for great food, so the ability for me to give it to them in the suburbs and make their lives a little easier … I think that’s wonderful,” De Laurentiis said. “Who doesn’t want to have a really lovely food experience in their own neighborhood?”
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
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