Secrets of Success
An ongoing series of interviews with chefs, restaurateurs and foodservice operators, Secrets of Success looks at the paths taken to professional recognition and acclaim.
When Dante de Magistris was only four, the Belmont Fire Department responded to the family home to put out a kitchen blaze, created when the budding chef attempted to prepare stovetop eggs in Tupperware. His talent and technique evolved with age and by the age of 18, Dante was prepared to take his career to the next level.
His culinary journey was packed with special experiences, including a sojourn in Italy, where he not only honed his own skills but touched the lives of those he met along the way. After culinary stints in Bologna and Florence, he made his way to the Amalfi Coast, where he became sous chef at Ristorante Don Alfonso. What happened next was the stuff of legends. The chefs left Dante in charge while they traveled to Franc and while they were away, Michelin came to visit. The young "understudy" helped the restaurant win its third star in their absence, and won rave reviews of his own.
He opened Restaurant dante with his brothers in the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA in 2006, winning awards and praise. The three opened il Casale in Belmont last spring in the very same firehouse that housed the firefighters he had met years before!
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FSE: How appropriate that you've opened in the very firehouse from which fire fighters responded to put out the fire in your family's kitchen! Do you think that's some kind of fate?
DE MAGISTRIS: I think it's just one of the many coincidences that happen all the time in a small town like Belmont.
FSE: What got you into cooking at such an early age?
DE MAGISTRIS: Not only did cooking dinner with my grandmother almost every night growing up get me out of doing homework, it also got me to love and really understand food from a young age. I always liked watching my family enjoying something that I just made. From then on, my parents always encouraged me to cook and follow it as a career.
FSE: Many budding chefs go to culinary school. You chose to return to your family's native land to learn culinary arts - how did that come about?
DE MAGISTRIS: After high school I went to Italy to get some more practical restaurant culinary experience before going to a culinary school. The school semester started six months after I got back to Boston. So in the meantime, I worked at a popular new restaurant in Boston. When I had a week left before starting school, my chef convinced me to stay and to not go to culinary school. Now I am an advocate for culinary schools, but I am glad he convinced me to keep working. My schooling was from working in many restaurants for little or no pay. I would beg great chefs to learn from them and repay them by working harder than anyone for them and by making them proud. It seemed less expensive than having to pay for student loans after school while starting to cook my way up the ladder and still being paid a very low wage in order to get the experiences of working in the great kitchens of the world.
FSE: Was it always your dream to open a restaurant with your brothers?
DE MAGISTRIS: It has always been something I've wanted. And it has always been a dream of my father's. My brothers have always had other interests and studies. While both Damian and Filippo went to school for their own interests, they were always involved in the restaurant industry one way or another. Much like many people that work in restaurants, they became hooked and decided to pursue it as a career and to open a restaurant all together. This all came at the perfect time when I felt more ready than ever.
FSE: Who were your most significant mentors along the way?
DE MAGISTRIS: My dad (even though he is a hair dresser), my Grandmother and aunts and also, the man who advised me to continue to work for him and to not go to culinary school, Daniele Baliani. Now we work together again at il Casale! I also like to think that everyone I meet who teaches me something is a mentor. I try to meet one every day.
FSE: What are the major differences between Restaurant dante and il Casale?
DE MAGISTRIS: The food at both restaurants are now very similar except that at il Casale the food is strictly about food my brothers and I grew up with. At Restaurant dante we do the same but also have some additional dishes that we did not grow up with. Those are dishes I learned while working and traveling to other areas of Italy. The feel of il Casale is that of a cozy Italian home with lots energy. The feel at dante is that of some of my favorite restaurants and lounges in Italian cities.
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The Wright opens in New York’s Guggenheim Museum
NEW YORK - Food is art and art is food for thought at The Wright, a striking new restaurant here, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. With its own site-specific sculpture created by British artist Liam Gillick, commissioned for the space, The Wright seeks to expand and extend the art, architecture and innovation of the museum to the dining experience.
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Operated by Restaurant Associates, with 58 seats and a communal table, the restaurant was designed by Andre Kikoski, who drew inspiration from the original design of the museum. It features a menu from David Bouley protégé, Rodolfo Contreras, designed around seasonal, local and sustainable ingredients.
Executive Chef Contreras, originally from Mexico, grew up in his mother’s catering business where he began working at age nine. A graduate of the French Culinary Institute, his background also includes stints with chefs such as Rick Moonen, Christian Delouvrier and Jeffrey Zakarian and time spent cooking in France and Spain. A casual European-style bar offers small plates, panini, sandwiches, espresso and cocktails.
Menu items include Seared Diver Scallops, Gently Cooked Shrimp, Lump Crab Meat, Sea Urchin Sauce; The Wright Salad, Green Market Vegetables, Gently Cooked Egg Truffle; Maine Lobster, Chanterelle Mushrooms, Marcona Almonds, Clementine Sauce; Slow Roasted Suckling Pig, Quince, Violet Mustard, Apple Bacon Jus; and Spiced Pumpkin and Chocolate Cake, Pumpkin Sauce, and Pumpkin Seed Oil Ice Cream.
Prices range from $9 to $26 at lunch and $100 to $36 at dinner. Sunday brunch is also available.
The 1,600-sq.ft. space features a curvilinear wall of walnut, layered with illuminated fiber-optics, a bar clad in a skin of innovative custom metalwork and topped in white Corian, a sweeping banquette with blue leather seating backed by illuminated planes of a woven gray texture, and a layered taut white membrane ceiling canopy.
The Liam GIllick sculpture, known as "The horizon produced by a factory once it had stopped producing views," is said to trace the restaurant’s distinct architectural space and comprises a sequence of horizontal planks of powder-coated aluminum mounted to the walls and ceiling; a similarly constructed transparent screen marks the entrance to site. The resulting room-size installation creates a modular skin on the interior’s surface with parallel beams described by the artist, as "a series of horizons."
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