Il Fornaio

The Il Fornaio brand was established in 1972 as a baking school in Barlassina, Lombardia, Italy. It opened a retail bakery in Milan in 1975, and was licensed in 1981 to Williams-Sonoma, Inc. as a retail bakery concept. Williams-Sonoma opened four locations in California before selling the business to private investors in 1983. Initially unsuccessful, the chain was re-sold in 1986 to Larry Mindel, who had run local restaurant holding company Spectrum Foods and launched or bought a series of successful restaurants: Chianti in Los Angeles; Prego (one of the originators of California-style pizza), MacArthur Park and Ciao in San Francisco and Guaymas in Tiburon.

The new owners opened a total of 11 restaurant-bakeries in California in late 1980s and 1990s. The first restaurant location and headquarters are in Corte Madera, California, the second in San Francisco. They then branched out to Las Vegas, Nevada, Colorado, Seattle, and Virginia, opening a total of 22 by 2008.

In 1997 the company became publicly traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange. By 2000 the company had $124 million annual revenues. The company was eventually taken private again in a leveraged buyout. Mindel sold most of his equity and retired from daily operations of the group in 2001 (his son, Michael, continued and is Senior Vice President of Marketing as of 2014), and in 2003 opened Poggio at the Casa Madrona Hotel in Sausalito as a personal project.

Under the direction of Executive Chef Maurizio Mazzon, a native of Venice, the company launched a second concept, Canaletto Ristorante Veneto, at the Venetian in Las Vegas in 1999, with a second location in 2008 in Fashion Island shopping mall in Newport Beach, California however the Newport location closed in 2022.