Dan Rosenthal has been in the hotel and restaurant business for 45 of his 61 years. For the last 30 years, he has lived in Chicago, where he has developed such restaurants as Harry Caray's, Trattoria NO.10, Poag Mahone's and the Sopraffina Marketcaffe concept.

Rosenthal is an active environmentalist. He is co-founder the Green Chicago Restaurant Co-op, a 300-member organization dedicated to bringing green products and services to Chicago at reasonable prices. In 2008, Rosenthal started a new company, Chicago Composts, whose mission is to bring large scale commercial composting of food waste to Chicago.