Trento has never been shy about what it is. The Italian steakhouse at 1058 Broadhollow Road in Farmingdale, on the Route 110 corridor that feeds half the Island's business lunches, describes itself in five words: homemade pastas and prime aged steaks. Everything made from scratch, Kobe beef meatballs, a longbone ribeye that arrives like a landmark, pasta purses called troffolini that the house lists among its specialties.

Now the kitchen making all of that has a new boss, and he is a face Food Network viewers may recognize. Pierluigi Sacchetti, the Italian chef who cooks under the name Chef Gigi, has taken over as executive chef at Trento. The announcement came the way chef news travels in 2026, on his own public profile, where the new title now sits at the top of the page.

A working chef, not a name on the menu

Restaurants sometimes hire a known chef the way a building hires an architect, for the plaque. Sacchetti's arrangement does not read that way. His profile lists him as executive chef at Trento specifically, a hands-on title that means owning the menu, the sourcing and the line, and it lists Food Network's Guy's Grocery Games among his credits, the timed competition where chefs cook restaurant-quality food out of a supermarket cart.

Alongside the Trento role he holds corporate chef titles across a small constellation of Long Island Italian spots, among them Americano Pie, Italiano Pie, Bramalo and Gino of Tuscany. A corporate chef designs systems and recipes across kitchens; an executive chef runs one. Taking the executive title at Trento is a statement about where he intends to actually stand during service.

Why this matters at this particular restaurant

The Italian steakhouse is a crowded category on Long Island, and Route 110 is one of its most competitive stretches, a corridor where a restaurant has to win the weekday expense-account lunch and the Saturday anniversary dinner with the same menu. Trento's answer has been the scratch kitchen. A menu built on handmade pasta is a bet that repetition done perfectly beats novelty, and that bet lives or dies on whoever runs the kitchen.

Which is why an executive chef change at a place like this is real news for people who eat there, in a way it would not be at a restaurant that assembles its menu from a distributor's catalog. The pasta is rolled in the building. The difference between a good night and a great one is technique, and technique is exactly what a chef who has spent years running multiple Italian kitchens, and cooking against the clock on television, is being brought in to raise.

What to watch from a table

New executive chefs almost never blow up a menu that works, and Trento's identity is settled enough that the signatures are safe to assume. The tell will be in the margins: a new pasta shape that starts as a special and earns a permanent line, a seasonal dish that reads more Italian than steakhouse, the small recalibrations of a kitchen being held to a new standard. Regulars tend to notice that kind of change before anyone writes about it.

For Farmingdale, the hire extends a good run. The village and the corridor around it have been collecting food news all summer, and a Food Network alum choosing a Broadhollow Road kitchen as the one he puts his own name over is the kind of vote of confidence that tends to pull other talent along behind it. The steaks were already prime and the pasta was already made by hand. What changed is who answers for them, and he has put the answer on his own page: Chef Gigi, executive chef, Trento.