The Chefs of Massachusetts Restaurants

Posted on October 29, 2015March 15, 2016 by Staff Writer

From Biotech To Restaurants, Rose-Ellen Padavano Isn’t Hiding

Rose-Ellen Padavano outside of Padavano's on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, MA

Rose-Ellen Padavano, chef at Padavano’s Place and Rosalina’s Kitchen, thinks she may be the only guest who ever got bleeped on “Phantom Gourmet.” That may or may not be true. What feels true after meeting Rose-Ellen is no one who knows her would likely be the least bit surprised to hear she dropped an f-bomb in the kitchen with the cameras rolling. Probably more ended up on the cutting room floor. Who knows? You get the sense either way Rose-Ellen isn’t hiding who she is from anyone. “In the kitchen I am nuts,” she laughs. “I think most chefs are. You have to be nuts as a chef-owner.”

Listening to Rose-Ellen and digging into her restaurants’ generous and beloved plates of from-scratch Italian home-style food, you think, “This is someone who has never lacked confidence.” Which is why hearing her say these words are so surprising: “I can’t do this. I just can’t.”

The Avalanche from Rosalina's Kitchen on Hamilton Street in Worcester, MA — The Avalanche from Rosalina’s Kitchen on Hamilton Street in Worcester, MA

That’s what Rose-Ellen thought in 2010 before she opened Rosalina’s Kitchen on Hamilton Street. Today, the restaurant is renowned for its ravioli, Ricotta Puffs, 4-Parm Avalanche, and a tiny dinner-only dining room that’s packed four nights a week. In 2014, Rose-Ellen and her partner Angela opened a sister restaurant, Padavano’s Place, and in 2015 comes the opening of a seafood shanty, Somethin’ Catchy Seafood Shanty. People have noticed: She recently earned best chef honors from Worcester Living and runner-up finish in Worcester Magazine. But back in 2010 before that all started?

“I had been in the biotech industry. I was at the top of my career. But I was not happy to be there. So I left, but I wasn’t sure which direction I was going in. I started doing a little catering. Then I saw this cute little restaurant for sale in Grafton Hill and a friend of mine told me I had to inquire about it.”

So, she finally realized her dream of being a chef?

“No. No. NO!” she laughs. “Are you crazy?”

“You weren’t even a very good cook!” her partner Angela screams from back of Padavano’s.

“No shit,” she yells back (we understand, Phantom). “I loved food but I totally sucked at cooking.” Not that she hadn’t tried to cook before Rosalina’s. She just didn’t do it well, but free from her corporate life, she developed techniques and fundamentals to match her palate. “Everything I have learned – except my partner’s mom’s meatballs – I have taught myself as an adult with cookbooks, lots of Internet, trying things out in the kitchen.” Legions of fans are glad she did.

So, how did she end up making the jump into restaurants? “I always had big parties at home. We were constantly entertaining. 50 to 60 people for turkey dinner and the next day I’d say, ‘We are going to do brunch at 11. Leftover turkey tetrazzini for breakfast.’ And the next thing you know the turkey is flying around. I just loved it.” Soon, the party people started asking Rose-Ellen to cook for them and she started catering out of the house. That’s when a friend told her to check out the restaurant that became Rosalina’s.

Rose-Ellen Padavano Cooking — Photo by Alex Belisle

Despite having a quick following, for the first six months, Rose-Ellen still lacked her signature confidence: “I drove up with a knot in my stomach. I was scared. I never even worked in a restaurant. Not just the cooking. I didn’t know how to write a guest check. My partner is a civil engineer by trade. She can build you a bridge, but we needed a waitress from the previous restaurant to teach us how to write checks and use the cash register. You don’t use those in biotech. We had to learn the chef and the business side together.”

And they did it, maybe because they did not know any better – a little naiveté and nerves never hurt if it keeps you thinking anything is possible. Neither does success. As a result, even with Rosalina’s open only for dinner four days a week, Rose-Ellen was putting in 14 to 16 hour days. Then, she would study in bed before passing out exhausted – only to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas to write them down. The consequences went beyond sleep deprivation.

“Within a couple of years I knew Rosalina’s was always going to be successful. It was growing exponentially,” she recalls. “We were turning away so many people all the time. We have sixty seats and we’re open for four hours. We were watching customers and money going out the door. So we said, ‘What are we doing? Let’s try and plan something else.’”

She and Angela spent eighteen months looking at spaces and locations before stumbling on what became Padavano’s Place on Shrewsbury Street, which in many ways seems the polar opposite of Rosalina’s. If the first is a homey, humble, BYOB place that feels like walking into a boisterous aunt’s house, the latter something different – not a Rosalina’s II but more refined with a full bar and live entertainment though very much the same food to try and capture a piece of the booming Shrewsbury Street scene. “And we’ve caught on,” she says, especially as Rosalina’s shut-outs found just what they were looking for and more at Padavano’s Place.

That said Padavano’s has become the place where Rose-Ellen can play in the kitchen. She’s been sautéing and experimenting with stuffed breads and soups and strews for the season. The space also serves as the test kitchen for her ravioli specials in honor of Padavano’s one-year anniversary like pumpkin ravioli with a brown sugar cinnamon cream sauce in fall or “turkey dinner” ravioli for November or “beef stew” ravioli for winter. She entered Worcester’s Best Chef contest with grape-leaf ravioli she concocted at Padavano’s, and she’s thinking about ingredients like lobster, shrimp, crab, and mushroom.

She also concocted her third restaurant in the Padavano’s kitchen, playing with chowders and batters for the seafood shanty, Something Catchy. “No one would expect us to open a fish place, but it makes sense to have one and no one else is doing it so why not us? I had a goal to open three restaurants by the time I was 40 [she’s 39 now]. I asked, ‘What does Worcester need?’ A seafood shanty! It’s a no brainer and fun.”

In the end, though Rose-Ellen likes being part of the crowd too. She and Angela actively support local businesses and eat out every Tuesday. “I like the speed and the pressure. I love the craziness of the kitchen,” she says. “But I like visiting with people. The most fun is the socializing. I like to party with people. The most gratifying part is people like what I am doing. Rosalina’s is a destination because there is nothing else there. Padavano’s success is even sweeter, because people chose to come to us from all the great places here. I love to cook but coming out and seeing everyone love it? That’s why I act like a maniac every day.”

Posted on June 26, 2015May 16, 2016 by Staff Writer

Alina Eisenhauer Creates More Than Sweets

Alina Eisenhauer from Sweet on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, MA

The thin slices of pig heart “pastrami” look impossibly ruby colored, almost purple – a stark contrast to the sheen of pale yellow mustard topping the small mason jar of rillettes (a pâté-like spread of pork cooked in its own fat) next to them on the charcuterie board. There are ribbons of house-cured ham too. And a tempting fat-studded headcheese that belies its name. (Who gave such deliciousness such an off-putting moniker?)

Standing over the board is the person who made it all: Alina Eisenhauer. Yes, that Alina Eisenhauer. The “pastry chef.” The one who deftly incorporated rambutan (a tropical fruit) into a cupcake on The Food Network show “Sweet Genius.” The one who has been dazzling Worcester and beyond since 2008 with her signature cupcakes, which line the entrance to her restaurant, Sweet Kitchen & Bar, and adorn its logo. For sure, those pig parts, especially that heart pastrami, would make any carnivore scream, “Sweet!” But they are decidedly savory.

And if this confuses you, well, you may know her cupcakes but you don’t truly know Alina or Sweet.

Chef Alina Eisenhauer preparing a dish from her new Savory Menu at Sweet on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, MA (Photo by Erb Photography)

Don’t worry. Alina still makes a “damned good” cupcake and she still has that wicked sweet tooth that led to her “dosant” and other popular dessert creations. (She’s aware that rebellions might form should they ever disappear.) It’s just that Alina waxes equally rhapsodic about her restaurant’s growing and evolving savory side, which actually takes her back to where she started.

“Everyone – including me! — is so quick to think that I started in desserts, but I started as a cook in restaurants,” says Alina. “I have a love/hate relationship with the structure that pastry requires. My natural personality is not that of a pastry chef. A savory chef doesn’t need to be that exacting. You don’t have to stand over the candy thermometer because if you go over or under one degree you’ve ruined the whole thing. Because that isn’t my personality in the kitchen, I guess I took a certain amount of pride in forcing myself to do desserts and accomplishing the challenge when the opportunity presented itself. I learned pastry and desserts from my mother but I taught myself at sixteen when there was no pastry chef at the restaurant I worked at. I became the pastry chef. I was obsessed. That’s how I am.”

That explains Alina’s current savory obsessions. Her eyes may light up passing a flat of strawberries from Lettuce Be Local but maybe even more so when she explains how to scrape the fat off the inside of pig skin with a spoon, fry that skin into crispy chicharrones (pork rinds), and use them as a foundation in place of chips for the ultimate paleo nachos. The skin and all the aforementioned bits came from a whole pig she got from Lilac Hedge Farm in Berlin; she plans on doing even more with their porcine tastiness in the near future. Lilac also provides Sweet’s ground beef, which Alina used as the foundation for her entry to The James Beard Foundation’s Better Burger Project™– a nationwide challenge to blend ground meat with 30% mushrooms to create a tasty but more sustainable burger.

The burger has been a hit but overall Alina still struggles for acceptance of her savory treats designed for sharing because have you tasted those cupcakes? “So many people around here identify me for the sweet and have yet to realize that we make really good food not just desserts. We are working on changing that. I have the confidence I can do it. People even joke that pastry chefs are the better chefs because we have to be more technical. We are taught to follow recipes, and if you give me a recipe for anything, I can cook it.” Alina stops and laughs, “If you’re a recipe kind of person.”

Balancing her sweet and savory sides accomplishes two things for Alina. The first is purely business: “There’s a lot of competition for the sweet side. Desserts are such a small segment. Not everyone eats desserts every day. Some just for special occasions. Supermarket bakeries are getting better. You have to do other things to survive.”

“But the bigger reason for me is creative,” she continues. “My mom always told me I was looking for the next thing. I love a challenge. To be locked in the box of just sugar and chocolate didn’t give me as much creatively.”

It also doesn’t let her push boundaries, which is the biggest challenge as the Worcester food scene grows: “Like other great chefs in the city, we try and educate the consumer. There are things I would love to be able to do that people are not ready for like incorporating more vegetables into dessert. I know they will like it but will they try it? When you are using fresh local ingredients, you don’t have a lot of room for people not to try it because there is a lot of waste.”

So, she pushes gently. “We did a sorrel ice cream, which is a weed that grows on your sidewalk, and made ice cream that was very popular but the fact that it came with strawberries and whipped cream probably helped. That’s the way to do it. Sneak it into a dish that they might not be 100% sure what it is but the rest of the dish sounds so good that they will try it anyway. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the burger has been received just because people do not think of us as that kind of place.”

That’s certainly true of Alina’s favorite part of Sweet’s menu too: brunch, which is unlike any in the city right now and which she would love to expand from weekends to a Friday “Business Brunch” or even a gospel one on Sundays. She’s playing with more than pig too, including the first “nitro” cold brewed coffee tap (pours like a Guinness and tastes unlike any iced coffee you’ve had) behind one of the most inspired and best stocked bars in Worcester.

The important thing for Alina is the restaurant scene in Worcester is getting so much richer: “We are getting enough chefs here who are pushing boundaries and doing interesting things and informing and educating consumers about what they are doing. We are buying local. It’s not competition. The more there are of us doing it, the more it grows the demand for it and people want more and more.”

As she pushes to satisfy this demand, Alina also tries to remember to celebrate what she has not just what she can do better and different for her customers to give them the best experience and the happiest memories. For someone who makes madeleines, she sounds appropriately Proustian: “Everything we do here is because we are trying to provide an amazing experience and a memory for someone. That is what food is. It is memories.”

That goes for herself, too: “I do this because I love it. This is a passion for people like me. You are so driven, so focused on what you are doing in the kitchen, you forget to appreciate what you have achieved. Usually it catches me on a Friday night, walking up the stairs. I turn around and see the place full of people having a good time, my kitchen turning out great food, and my dedicated staff serving it, and I think, ‘This is cool.’”