Eric Hammond

The Essentials - Role: Executive Chef. - Restaurant: Coco Pazzo, Chicago. - Career history: His path includes the same restaurant, where his current title defines his public culinary work. - Specialty: Housemade pastas. - Craft focus: Traditional appetizers and seasonal pastas. At Coco Pazzo in Chicago, the work centers on a kitchen language built from housemade pastas, traditional appetizers, and seasonal pastas. The emphasis is on technique that can be repeated with discipline: dough made in-house, familiar Italian forms handled with precision, and the season used as a guide rather than a flourish.

Eric Hammond’s public role sits inside that framework, where the value is less in showmanship than in consistency, rhythm, and the steady production of food that holds its shape. Eric Hammond’s title as Executive Chef signals command, but the authority here comes through restraint and repetition: attention to the handmade, the seasonal, and the familiar. Coco Pazzo becomes the setting for that approach, where the restaurant’s Italian cooking identity is carried through exacting execution and a clear respect for the structure of the meal.