Photo: The Rosenthal Group

Dan Rosenthal (above) teamed up with Michael Sheerin on a new restaurant, Cicchetti, scheduled for November.

Michael Sheerin didn’t stay out of the trenches for long. After leaving the formerly fraternal Trenchermen in late July, he teased his next project within a week. At the same time, vague hints of a new project emerged from Dan Rosenthal, the man behind Trattoria No. 10 and Poag Mahone’s as well as one of the original creators of Harry Caray’s.

As you’ve surely already guessed (or read in the headline), these two projects are in fact one. It’s called Cicchetti (661 N. St. Clair St., no phone yet), and it’s scheduled to open in November.

The 9,200-square-foot restaurant will serve small plates tinged by Venice, Italy, where the word “cicchetti” refers to small dishes served by bars and simple-food restaurants, much like tapas in Spain. Advertised as less modernist than Sheerin’s past experience at Blackbird and New York’s WD-50, Lutèce, and Jean-Georges, the food at Cicchetti runs along the lines of pork belly–polenta buns with cabbage and agrodolce, and sardines with gremolata, fennel, and rolled bread.

It sounds like Rosenthal and Sheerin are meeting somewhere in the middle with this project. “Being able to work with Mike is really a perfect pairing of my conservative business practices and his cutting-edge cooking style,” Rosenthal says by e-mail. That’s probably better than the other way around. When we tried to pair cutting-edge business practices with conservative cooking style, our steak au poivre food truck failed within a week.