A peek into Emanuele’s kitchen

Rashed Islam | foodcritic@jeddahfood.com



Emanuele Esposito

I arrive on time the following week and find Emanuele, executive chef of Jeddah’s Il Villaggio restaurant, dressed in his white chef’s uniform.

He tells me he thinks we should see the kitchen and meet some of the 17 persons he has on staff in the kitchen alone. We are faced with a multinational team: Filipino, Egyptian, Indian, Saudi, Italian, Bangladeshi and Syrian. In all there are 55 restaurant employees.

I ask about the hierarchy and Emanuele explains. First he is the executive chef followed by an Egyptian sous chef and a Filipino junior master cook, Italian pastry chef and many more assistant pastry chefs and cooks. All are rated according to performance with performances reviewed every three to six months.

Working in the kitchen is not easy. The days can be long and hard. A typical day starts about 9 a.m. and involves receiving orders, checking ingredients, receiving deliveries from purveyors and then preparing the food for storage. Two eight-hour shifts divide the workload between the staff and make it more manageable.

Naturally some items and ingredients are delivered in bulk, so after receiving, for example, a shipment of chicken, the portions are carefully divided and then vacuum packed for freshness before freezing or refrigerating. It was something I hadn’t expected to see and it made me realize how much forethought goes into everything.

“Seventy-five percent of the items are imported, including many of vegetables,” Emanuele said. Have they had difficulties with any purveyors I ask? Do you ever get bad quality vegetables from your purveyors?

“Well, sometimes they put good vegetables on the top and hide bad ones underneath. However, we always send them back so eventually they learned to send us only the best quality. People might say we are expensive, but we use the best ingredients. I personally don’t think we are expensive. If you buy a Ferrari it will cost you. We focus on quality and do not adjust our prices according to the season.”

Sous chef Nour Wahidi announces an order to the kitchen and instantly the team gets to work. All the staff members know their duties and responsibilities. At the end of every week Emanuele sits down with the team and goes over all comments and issues raised in the week; mistakes, complaints and suggestions are all discussed. He believes this makes a successful team that he describes as a “family”.

We move on to an area where a cook is rolling out green layers of spinach pasta while another is working on lasagna. I see an open refrigerator filled with chilled platters of lasagna.

On to the pastry chefs where different cakes are being prepared, I catch a glimpse of fresh tiramisu on the side. The area is a dessert lovers’ dream. The smell of fresh meringues wafts across the room. I see them in the oven and make a mental note to order these on my next visit.

Next I was shown the machine where chocolate gelato was already spinning around. The ingredients were listed precisely as: milk, cream, glucose, inverted sugar, egg yolks, Italian hazelnut paste and a form of pectin made from sea kelp.

The process is not quick, and although the spinning may last only five to six minutes, the mixture must spend a whole night in the fridge before being put in the pasteurization machine. The last step involves the gelato being put for a night in the freezer. The team dishes out over 20 flavors, including ones you wouldn’t normally expect to find in Jeddah, such as rosemary, saffron and apple crumble.

Waiters are suddenly rushing in, hesitating over which order is theirs. They are directed to the correct trays and there is a feeling of pressure. As the orders pour in the workload in the kitchen increases at a rapid pace.

The visit to the kitchen has enlightened me. I don’t know how they do everything they do. I leave Il Villaggio with a greater respect for kitchen staff, my camera in one hand and a box of penne arrabiata in the other.

Emanuele kindly gave us the recipe for his Penne Arrabiata, which serves six.