Escoffier Questionnaire: Chef Dominic Orsini

THE CIA AT COPIA, NAPA

The CIA at Copia is investing in the belief that people don’t just want to eat, they want to understand food.

Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts first opened in downtown Napa in 2001, closing seven years later. The center reopened in 2017, under the ownership and direction of the nonprofit Culinary Institute of America (widely known as “the other CIA”), which feels like a perfect pairing. After all, what organization better understands how to educate people about food and drink than the preeminent American culinary school—and alma mater of many of the local chefs featured in this Escoffier Questionnaire over the years?

At Copia, the CIA has brought together two important elements to activate the sprawling space next to Oxbow Public Market: students and public dining offerings. While the iconic Greystone in St. Helena remains the CIA’s main West Coast teaching campus [they also have campuses in Hyde Park, NY, and San Antonio, TX], Copia hosts accelerated programs, the CIA’s business school and a master’s program, as well as educational opportunities for amateur chefs and food and drink enthusiasts.

The restaurants are the domain of Chef Dominic Orsini, this issue’s Escoffier Questionnaire subject. Chef Orsini has long had a passion for digging deeper to understand the play of wine and food, in the fields and on the plate. This focus makes him just the person to bring together this varied and vivacious space. “Doing so much can be a challenge for people to understand,” the chef explained in our interview. “What is Copia? We’re the public-facing side of the CIA. The point of the property is to be a community center. Everybody eats and everybody wants to learn. We can welcome people in and meet them wherever they are.”

As for himself, “I came here for the gardens. That’s what I fell in love with.”

“Phoenixville, PA, is my hometown. A lot of my heart for cooking came from my grandparents. My grandmother was a Pennsylvania Dutch woman who ran away from home at 14, lied and said she was 16 so she could marry my Italian grandfather. She lived her whole life two years older than she really was, trying to prove to her Italian sisters-in-law that she could cook as well as they could. My grandfather was from Benevento, Italy, and came to Philadelphia as a young child. I was always around fresh produce—tomatoes, corn and raspberries, you name it. We were the kind of family that always had Sunday suppers and I’ve continued this with my boys.”

Orsini’s first restaurant job was at a French bistro his senior year in high school. “I cut myself, burned myself, stood long hours. I loved it. They gave me a shift beer at the end of the night. For me, it was independence.” When he told his family he wanted to work as a chef, “It was as if I told my Roman Catholic family that I wanted to be a priest. They were over the moon,” he said. “‘You have to go to the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, New York,’ they directed. They had it all mapped out.”

“Hyde Park was a mountainous amount of learning and education. I remember we had to take a wine class and I was bored out of my mind, especially because I was 19 and they made me spit out all the wine. Then the professor starts telling about the famous 1976 tasting in Paris, where these Napa wines blew away the French wines. I found that fascinating, so I learned all I could about Napa Valley and the Sonoma Wine Country.”

His first job after graduation was on a cruise ship. “You’re in international waters, so there are no labor laws. I did it for about three months. It was seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day for three months and then you get a month off. I was so burned out.”

Thanks to his then-girlfriend, who was living in Healdsburg, he jumped ship and headed west, taking a job at Bear Republic Brewing Company’s just-opened restaurant. “I remember [one of the owners] Richard Norgrove Jr. came running in and said ‘Guys, I got this beer that was messed up, but it tastes really good.’ After further design, that “goof-up” became Racer 5. I loved working for the Norgroves, but I was ready to get serious about my career.”

“I had this mindset that I needed to be a sous chef. I replied to an ad for a restaurant that was opening up called Johnny Garlic’s, owned by Guy Fieri and Steve Gruber. I opened that restaurant and two others with them between 1996 and 2000. I learned so much about management, but I wanted to get back to fine dining.”

“I decided ‘OK, I’m gonna be a $12-an-hour cook for a while,’ and I took a job as a banquet catering chef at Vincent Nattress’s acclaimed St. Helena restaurant Roux, named in honor of his red head. He really taught me how to pair wine and food. It’s all about balancing salt, acid, fat and umami elements in your food. I apply that formula to the foods that are in season and what I want to cook.”

“One day we were doing this typical roasted lamb dish with an olive jus and we’re pairing it with a Merlot. I tasted the wine, tasted the sauce, tasted the wine again—our normal routine.

The wine tasted bitter, strange. Vincent came over and tasted the sauce. He added a little bit of salt and a little lemon. I tasted it again. The wine tasted great. It was magic.”

“My girlfriend had just graduated from the CIA and she wanted some experience and we had a connection at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, so I got a job as a sous chef at their casual restaurant. Every other place I had worked was ‘mom and pop.’ I liked the systems, but I could definitely see the difference in food quality and culture. In restaurants, it’s, like, push, push, push. Hotels have a large institutional team of people that are there day in, day out. We were enjoying New York life, but once we got married and started talking about kids, we wanted to come back to Napa Valley.”

“After a job as a banquet chef for the Meritage Resort and Spa, I was chef at Brannan’s Grill and Bar Vino in Calistoga. I bounced between the two restaurants. One evening, the owners of Silver Oak Winery, Tim Duncan and his fiancée at the time, Roo, came into Bar Vino. I asked how the tiramisu was and she said ‘OK.’ Hold on. You had to make a perfectly brewed espresso and then fill the ladyfingers and then the cream on top. So you got this cold tiramisu and this warm bottom. I must have remade it well, because they invited me to apply for the chef ‘s job at their newly remodeled facility.”

“I had to pair two Silver Oak wines for the interview. Instead of doing a heavy meat with the Alexander Valley Cab, I prepared mushrooms three ways. I lucked out because there is no pairing better with that wine than mushrooms.”

“My first son was about a year old, so it was perfect. I didn’t want to be gone for my children’s lives. We did six dinners a month, as opposed to six a week [in most restaurants]. I fell in love with the culture there. ‘We’ve yet to make our best bottle of wine’ was the mantra.”

“I started the culinary program at Silver Oak in 2008. Back then, there were only about a dozen winery chefs in the Napa Valley. Now there are at least three dozen. I was at Silver Oak for 14 years and I could have stayed another 10. But my sons are older now, and they need us a little less, so I got hungry to take on a new challenge. When I saw this position at Copia, everything fell into place. I’ve always held the CIA in high regard.”

“I feel like I was able to really crack the code of what works in a culinary garden in this area, after years at Silver Oak. What we can’t use immediately, we preserve. Our professional chef team runs our special events and restaurants, The Grove, The Lunchbox and 3D dining. The culinary students are there for an added fitnesse to everything that we do. It’s all about teaching the next generation of chefs how to cook. A great meal isn’t just one or two things. It’s thousands of little things.”