Wichita chef is moving out of town, but Italian restaurant he helped open will keep going

When longtime restaurateur Lory Wooley opened Bella Vita Bistro, the reliable Northern Italian restaurant at 120 N. West St., back in 2010, she lured the best chef she knew from Florida to run the kitchen: her son-in-law, Adrian Prud Homme DeLodder.

Since then, “Chef Adrian” has become well-known in Wichita: in his early years as a chef who would occasionally stop at tables to serenade customers with his beautiful singing voice and in his later years as an involved member of the local chef community who always participated in (and frequently won) charity cook offs.

But now — 14 years later — Prud Homme DeLodder is ready to move on. He and his wife Crystal, who is Wooley’s daughter and a front-of-house mainstay at Bella Vita, are leaving Kansas, bound for Tennessee. The chef’s last day in the kitchen will be Tuesday, Aug. 27.

Wooley said that Prud Homme DeLodder — who in 2019 was named the Kansas Restaurant and Hospitality Association’s Chef of the Year — is ready to do something different with his life, and the couple and their sons are relocating to Tennessee to be closer to his family.

“I knew they didn’t have much longer here, “Wooley said. “They already told me a year ago they had one to two years left, max.”

But Wooley wants customers to know that Bella Vita Bistro is not closing. Prud Homme DeLodder has several longtime kitchen staffers — including sous chef Pierre Allen — who he’s trained and who will be able to run the kitchen just as he did, she said. The menu won’t change.

“Adrian has shown him everything he needs to know to keep my kitchen going,” Wooley said.

She plans to do without a head chef for a bit but said she’ll hire another one “at some point.”

Wooley said she’s worried that, with the chef’s departure, customers will assume the restaurant is closing, but that’s not the case. In fact, she said, over the past couple of months, the restaurant has added and brought back a few special offers.

One is the Friday lunch buffet, a once-popular feature that stopped happening during COVID but was recently reintroduced. From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Friday, people can pay $19.95 and feast on a buffet that includes items like lobster mac and cheese, osso buco, chicken cordon bleu, pork marsala, garlic knots, salad, smoked salmon and more.

At the insistence of Chef Adrian, the restaurant also recently started offering specialty pizzas on Monday nights. Customers can choose from options like a short rib pizza topped with slow-roasted short ribs and sauteed onions and peppers; a scampi pizza topped with shrimp and crab; and the popular Carnivore, which comes loaded with pepperoni, sausage, meatballs and prosciutto.

Bella Vita also offers half-price pasta dishes on Tuesdays. It serves its popular Prime Rib Wellington on Wednesdays. And on “Thirsty Thursdays,” cocktails and martinis are half price.

It’s been a rough year: Back in May, Wooley’s ex-husband and longtime Bella Vita waiter Steve Limberis suddenly died, and she still hasn’t recovered. But restaurant life is in her blood, Wooley said, and she doesn’t plan to quit.

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“Adrian didn’t want their life to be consumed by the restaurant, but I like it,” she said. “That’s who I am. I don’t know who I am without my restaurant.”

The hours at Bella Vita Bistro are 5 to 9 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, and it’s also open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Fridays for the lunch buffet. It’s closed on Sundays.

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