Hurrying into the restaurant that bears his name at 16180
Monterey Road, Giancarlo barely has time for greetings. He quickly
throws on his apron, and in no time he is in front of the
stove.
”
Are you ready to eat?
”
he yells in a thick Italian accent from the back of the
house.
Hurrying into the restaurant that bears his name at 16180 Monterey Road, Giancarlo barely has time for greetings. He quickly throws on his apron, and in no time he is in front of the stove.
“Are you ready to eat?” he yells in a thick Italian accent from the back of the house.
Suddenly, the aroma of turkey is coming from the kitchen of his Morgan Hill restaurant, and in just minutes two plates with Suprema di tacchino alla valdostana – a northern Italian turkey dish – and garlic mashed potatoes are resting on a table with a glass wine and a lit candle.
“Salude,” he says, raising a glass of Peroni, an Italian beer.
Talk about not wasting your Thanksgiving holiday slaving in front of a stove.
Giancarlo, a 36-year-old chef, has been making Italian dishes all over the world. He began schooling in culinary arts at the age of 14 in Bari, Italy.
“Our method of cuisine was more like France,” Giancarlo remembered about the Italian kitchen. “In the kitchen, we spoke French.”
Since then, his love of food has taken him to France; Genoa, Italy; Germany; Holland; Australia and the United States. He came to Morgan Hill in 1992 and will celebrate his restaurant’s ninth anniversary Dec. 4.
The people of Morgan Hill are what keep him here.
“They are different,” Giancarlo said. “They are very loyal people. They become your friend, and they are a part of your life. I know these people by name.”
Giancarlo loves what he does not just because of the food and the people, but because of the way people look up to him.
“I love it because the status is like a doctor – but the chef is a creator,” he said. “It’s something that is given to you. It’s a gift from God.”
He describes his restaurant’s cuisine as “the closest taste to Italy” you can get in the United States, saying his Italian food is “light, not overpowering.”
Giancarlo also hopes to bring his love of food to Morgan Hill in the form of classes as early as February. He has been in discussion with the city to hold cooking classes at the new community center. His vision is to teach six- or seven-hour classes during the morning, with students cooking at lunch to help pay for the class.
“My idea is to create jobs,” he said.
He also hopes to hold two-hour classes in the evening for people with jobs who only cook for fun. He said the class would be a great opportunity for people to come and learn to make a new dish then sit down and eat it.
“We need some sort of entertainment in this town,” he said. “(The new communty center) gives us the chance to do something like this.”
Kurt Koessel
Executive Chef, Station 55
In the kitchen at the back of Station 55, 55 Fifth St. in Gilroy, a three-foot long sturgeon lay on the cutting board. With the precision of a surgeon, Executive Chef Kurt Koessel quickly cleaned it, cut the meat away the skin and fat, and prepared it to be marinated, smoked and served.
“I’ve always liked smoking things,” Koessel said as he dropped the cut fish into a marinade. “And since this place used to be a firehouse, I thought that would be neat as a signature-type thing.”
On a shelf above the cutting board, among many other cookbooks, sat a binder with the recipes for the menu served at Station 55. Each page, typewritten on white paper, was placed inside a plastic cover. But behind each clean version, on ruled yellow sheets of paper, were remnants from the countless trial versions of each dish, with numbers scratched off and rewritten and different ingredients added or crossed off.
“Cooking is a derivative art form,” Koessel explained. “Things grow from years’ experience or something you learn.”
Koessel, 46, has been at Station 55 since it opened in June, investing hard work and his own recipes to the new restaurant.
“We’ve been received pretty well critically,” he said. “But we’re still relatively unknown, and that’s a challenge we have to live up to.”
For Koessel, who has been cooking in restaurants since he was just 14 years old, the focus is on creating great-tasting food.
“Taste is paramount; presentation and speed is secondary,” he said. “If I put out secondary food on time, what is the point. I want to make something that will be remembered.”
In his 32 years working in restaurants – all in the Bay Area – Koessel has learned that to create great-tasting food, the natural tastes need to show through.
“Ingredients became more important,” he said. “You’ve got to let God and gravity take control. You have to let things happen around you.
“That’s what we’re trying to do here. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it or what techniques they use, it’s the ingredients that show through.”
Koessel’s creations in the kitchen also come from his life experiences.
“When I think about different things I’ve done, it relates back to my family and friends,” he said. “They’re honored in some way by that dish.”
Dorothy McNett
Owner, Dorothy McNett’s Place
It’s no wonder Dorothy McNett spends her days and nights cooking. It’s in her blood.
“I grew up on a farm in Iowa,” she said. “It’s been a long time doing what I love.”
And what she loves is teaching. After graduating from the University of Northern Iowa with a degree in food and nutrition education, McNett went on to work with microwave cooking. She had a microwave cooking shop where she taught cooking classes.
Now McNett owns her own Hollister cooking shop and school, Dorothy McNett’s Place, which teaches three classes of 30 to 50 people per week. However, She isn’t trying to create chefs; she just hopes to give people an idea about the joys of cooking as a hobby.
“I’m more interested in teaching people basic cooking skills,” McNett said.
She teaches people to make anything from a basic fruit salad to an entire Thansgiving feast and has thousands of recipes available online at www.happycookers.com. Instead of confusing people with complicated recipes and hard-to-make dishes, McNett teaches people to cook basic meals in a low pressure environment.
“It’s very happy and upbeat,” she said.
But that doesn’t mean her gourmet cooking shop, which has been in Hollister for 11 years, is at all below average.
“It’s a total gourmet shop,” she said. “It’s one-of-a kind.”
The shop has just about anything you could ever need to cook with, includes a wine tasting room and is even the home of McNett’s cooking show, “Cooking With Dorothy McNett,” which airs at noon Friday on CBS in the Central California area.
“It’s just like our cooking class,” she said. “It’s food and fun.”
The show, which is taped before a live studio audience, began airing in April, and McNett said the benefits are starting to pay off, as people from all over are coming to her shop and staying to see the show. McNett hopes the show will get more exposure.
“I hope to get my show out on the mainstream.”
McNett says if it doesn’t she won’t worry about it too much. She knows she is making a difference for people either way by giving them a chance to escape, especially with the hard economic times people are facing in the Valley.
“There’s a lot of pain in the world,” McNett said. “But here people can sit and be taken away by something.”
