Slow Baja - Travel Talk With Massimo Zaretti Owner Of Il Massimo Cucina Italiana In Ensenada

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

In today's Travel Talk with Slow Baja, we sit down with Ensenada Restaurateur and Chef Massimo Zaretti. Born in Rome, Zaretti moved to Las Vegas with his family when he was a teenager. He grew up working in his father's restaurants in Las Vegas and Santa Monica. When it was time to get out on his own, he landed a position with Fleur de Lys in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Attention to the smallest details, anticipating your guest's desires, and working with the highest-quality ingredients were lessons learned in the three years he spent at Hubert Keller's famed restaurant. Tripadvisor recently rated IL Massimo number one for Italian cuisine in Ensenada. Zaretti keeps it authentic by importing olive oil, Calabrian chilis, and San Marzano tomatoes. His seasonal menu of housemade pasta and local seafood paired with Valle de Guadelupe wine is Slow Baja approved! Visit Il Massimo Visit Il Massimo on Facebook Follow Il Massimo on Instagram

Thanks for tuning in to travel talk with Slow Baja. This podcast is brought to you by my good friends at Baja Bound Insurance. Are you driving to Mexico? And then check out BajaBound.com. Their website's fast and easy to use. That's BajaBound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. Hey, it's Michael Emory and I'm delighted to be in Ensenada today with Travel Talk with Slow Baja. And my guest is Massimo.

Well, we're going to let Massimo introduce himself and tell us where we are and about his restaurant. So yeah, my name is Massimo Zaretti. I'm the chef owner of Il Massimo Cuccine Italiana here in Insenada. We're located in the main road, you know, in the very central in town. We've been open about two years now, focusing on Italian food that's a little bit different from what is offered at the moment in the city, basically. So the idea with the concept was, you know, Encinada is a city that's growing very rapidly. It's attracting, especially now with a wine country, it's attracting a lot of tourists,

tourists, a lot of people outside of Ensenada, a lot of international people. And so the city with its growth is starting to become a lot more diverse, a lot more talent is coming down here. And same goes for Italian food. I mean, before I came, there was maybe one or two actually authentic Italian restaurants, let's say, you know, like driven or owned or managed by Italians or with imported ingredients. The rest of them, I like to put in the category of commercial Italian, which there's absolutely nothing wrong with. There's a market for that too, and there's definitely pallets for that, you know,

and there's a lot of very successful ones. So, you know, most locals here are familiar with that. kind of Italian cuisine. So, you know, we're talking pizzas and Alfredo sauce and pesto and, you know, bolognese, lasagna, you know, these kinds of things. So it happens in my restaurant all the time, you know, people come in and say, well, how do you not have pizza on your menu? You're an Italian restaurant.

Yeah, well, you know, it's, in Italy, it's not, you know, you have pizzerias, you have, you know, you have restaurante, you have trattoria, so you have different things. So that's basically the idea with my restaurant is I wanted to kind of offer a little bit more variety of what the country has to offer. You know, because just like in Mexico, let's say, you know, you can go to different regions of the country, and every region will have its completely different dialect, ingredients, you know, ways of cooking plates. And so, you know, in Italy is the same. You know, and Italy, you can go 20 kilometers in any direction and find a completely different culture, language, even, you know, dialects are so heavy. And that translates also in the food, you know, there's different, you know, things you can find only in the north of really as opposed to the south.

So I wanted to kind of, you know, introduce some of these products, these plates to the city. So tell me a little bit about your background in your restaurant. work and your restaurant journey. Where you're from, where you're born, how you got going in this chosen field? So, yeah, I was born in Rome. Family and I, we moved, I was very young, I was about 13, we moved to the United States, moved to Las Vegas, a very small town in the west side of the U.S. You know, my father was in the business about 40 years, so he had restaurants in Santa Monica. and in Las Vegas. So that's kind of how I started out, really.

So I was 13, 14, going to school, and on the weekends, I would help out my dad in the restaurant, cleaning tables, vacuuming, making cappuccinos, things like that. So I did that for a little while. You know, always was around food. I was around, you know, my family loved to cook. And, you know, then I got to an age where, I'd kind of

go out on my own, find a different job. So I did. I went and applied for the casinos in Las Vegas and happened to land a job in Fleur de Lis, which was a fine dining French contemporary restaurant in the Mandalay Bay

where I spent three years where I learned a lot of, you know, a lot of my bases, let's say. You know, it was very fine dining. We did synchronized service. which was, you know, you couldn't go to the table alone. You had to have always somebody with you and pick up everything at the same time, do everything at the same time, very elaborate. So yeah, I worked at, I actually started out in the front of the house, you know, not cooking.

So it's funny that, you know, in all of my experience, actually in actual practical cooking is not as much as my service aspect, let's say, which is quite interesting. Tell me a little bit about that fleur-de-lie experience. Who's the chef there? Is that the same fleur-a-li as San Francisco? It sure is. Hubert Keller. Yeah, Hubert Keller.

Famous, famous, famous fellow. So what did you learn from that? I mean, you have a beautiful restaurant here in Encinada. What sort of experiences from your family, from being in an environment, that was so over the top and its elegance and its preparation and its presentation synchronized serving. How does all that filter into what you're doing here? The main thing I can say from that experience and from many of my experiences is the attention

to detail, which I think is one of the most important, you know, aspects of what we're doing in the hospitality industry, you know. It's the little details that make big things happen. I think this was the main thing that I learned at Flurte-Elis. And throughout my experiences, it's just being exposed to this high standard of service, of being attentive to the guest, anticipating their needs in the kitchen, plating, you know, making sure that plates are clean, you know, the restaurant is clean, you know, there's a lot of these little details that go into taking care of the guests and providing a good

product that is, you know, that's where I learn my basis, basically, is in Mandalay Bay. Interesting. Well, you're in an incredibly rich environment here for ingredients and climate here. So, You've got local wine, local seafood. It's a bit like Italy here in Baja, southern Italy anyways. What do you make of that? How do you source your ingredients? How do you infuse your plates with what's available locally? So definitely that was one of the many incentives for coming down to.

Encinata is the richness in local produce, local products that are available. So definitely the climate is a lot more meta. Mediterranean, so I like to say it's very similar to southern Italy in the sense that, you know, there's a lot more sun, there's a lot more warmth. It's very coastal, so the ingredients reflect on that. You know, so there's, you know, there's a lot of great herbs and spices. There's a lot of, you know, organic, we use organic arugula, organic basil grown locally. We have these special heirloom tomatoes from a place called heirloom farms which you know basically caters only to us in the city with their tomatoes you know fresh seafood octopus all of these things are locally sourced so you know my idea here is as authentic as I want to be with the Italian restaurant you know obviously I can't have every single thing imported and you know that wouldn't make much sense plus you know the the the products here are so similar that it you know it really it really kind of

intertwines almost seamlessly you know so our Pesto for example is made with imported you know Italian extra virgin olive oil but the basal is organic local you know and and the flavor comes out amazing you know so definitely you know there are certain products that we use that you know to maintain the authenticity of the restaurant have to be imported, you know, so that's why we have the Calabrian Chili's from the south of Italy. We use, I think we're the only, I'm pretty sure we're the only restaurant in the city that actually uses Italian tomatoes for their tomato sauce.

And they come from also the south of Italy, which have, you know, San Marzano and these kinds of areas. They're known for some of the best tomatoes in all of Italy. Again, because of the warm climate, the tomatoes get this nice balance between the, you know, the organic sugars and the natural acidity, and makes a great tomato sauce. And again, simplicity is the key to Italian cuisine. So, you know, if you're working with great ingredients,

that's 75% of the work. You know, our tomato sauce is done with, you know, these hand-crushed, we hand-crushed these Italian tomatoes, olive oil, salt pepper, onion, and a couple bay leaves, and that's really about it, So it's just very simple, very clean. And that's really, you know, the base of the cuisine is keep it simple. You know, we do point on, focus on, you know, freshness and trying to make as much as we can in-house.

So, you know, 99% of our pastas are made in-house, all our ice creams as well. So tell me, how can people find you? What's the best way? We do have a website. It is www. www.ilmasimoincenada.com. We just recently created this website

and we definitely took into consideration the situation we're in now and trying to make it as convenient and easy as possible for the guests. So within the website, not only can you look at menus, you can look at some history of myself and the restaurant,

gallery of the plates, but also you can you can reserve directly on the website. You can reserve a table, and also there's a button to where you can order for pickup. So there's a little button that takes you directly to my WhatsApp number, and with that, you can easily pick up something to go. And your current capacity now, we're talking here in early October, current capacity for indoor dining is about 50%.

Correct. Correct. So the city has just allowed us to operate at 50% at the moment. So we are definitely, you know, taking very seriously, you know, all the necessary protocols. We have a patio on the way, which will also be a, you know, a nice option for outdoor dining. But yes, you know, the place is small. It's homey. reservations aren't required, but they're definitely suggested. And it's part of the experience. Again, my biggest philosophy with this restaurant is, you know, a good restaurant is a recipe, really, of three ingredients.

It's good food, good service, and good atmosphere. But the key is that these three ingredients have to be in balance. They have to be in harmony, you know, because you can have the best food and all. all the city, but if your service is not up to part, it's going to affect the experience of the guest. So, you know, we want the experience, we want you to have an experience when you come in here, you know, so that starts with the reservation, you know, that starts to where you call me directly or you make a reservation on the website or call us, and, you know, you walk in,

you have the table already set up for you, you know, you're being welcomed, you know, by name, You know, and you get this personalized attentive service with good food and hopefully a good atmosphere as well. So I think, you know, doing all of these three things are very, very important. We're also on social media. We're on, you know, Facebook and Instagram. Just look for Il Massimo Encinada. And that's about it. And you gave us a little gift of, was it a lemon cello last night that we had a chance to try a little?

Yeah, absolutely. That was a lovely way to finish the night. So that's actually part of the culture in Italy. So if you go to Italy, a lot of the restaurants after dinner, you know, the owner, the manager will come out and he'll drop off several different types of digestives on the table. You know, so the idea is to have a little glass of it after dinner to just kind of help digestion.

So this ranges anywhere between the most common being limoncello to grappa, Amaro, all of these can be offered. Sambuca is another one. So I took this part of the culture, this idea, and I wanted to bring it to my restaurant. So after dinner, every guest that comes and dines with us gets a complimentary glass of this limoncello, which we actually make in house. So we make limoncello, we make it out of orange chello, we make it out of orange chello, We make it out of grapefruit.

We have a chocolate liqueur. So we always have two or three different varieties that we just offer complimentary to the guests to kind of finish off the experience. Yeah, and it was a lovely way to finish off the experience. Thank you. It was something unexpected and thoughtful and really tasted great as well. Thank you. All right. Well, Massimo, you've been a delight to speak with, almost as good as the meal we had last night.

So thank you for that. Thank you for having you. forward to coming back and visiting you my next trip to Ensenada. I look forward to it. And like we always say, you'll always be welcome back with open arms. All right. Thanks, Massimo. Thank you.

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