Our featured chef serves up a special dish using ingredients that were chosen from Melissa's list of quality fresh produce products. This seemingly simple dish has deceptively complex flavors using just three ingredients that are amongst Melissa's most popular fresh specialty items: Radicchio, Baby Spinach and Cipolline Onions. It is said that the most efficient engine is the one with the least amount of parts. If that is true, then Vincent DeAngelo’s Cipolline Glazed Radicchio is a recipe for understated perfection!

Each night, Chef DeAngelo celebrates the local bounty of California's Central Valley from the kitchen of his own DeAngelo's Italian Restaurant, located in the historic, old-brick section of downtown Merced, California. Many of his regular clientele are professional growers who produced the ingredients that the chef serves in an atmosphere that is comfortable, yet elegant in style. In fact, several loyal customers returned the favor by serving the chef, so to speak, with support beyond patronage, that enabled Chef Vinnie to open DeAngelo's in the first place; a story that needs a bit of background to explain.

Chef Vincent DeAngelo's culinary résumé includes formal training at New York's famed Culinary Institute of America, stints as Executive Pastry Chef at two of that city's premiere dining establishments, and a notable collection of autographed pictures with Hollywood celebrities who have trekked miles (in their limos) to taste his talents. While this dynamic chef’s career path has meandered from the Big Apple to the shores of San Diego and through a few of the most well-known kitchens in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chef Vinnie has found his own personal and professional comfort zone in the heart of California's Central Valley for the past eleven years. Here, surrounded by some of the most fertile farmland in the world, he serves the hard-working professional growers of the region, who appreciate better than anyone the diversity of fresh flavor that this area produces.

Vinnie's father, a career chef himself, worked at such iconic destinations as Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel and the famed Madison Square Garden in New York. So it is no surprise that his son remembers wanting to be a master chef since the age of fourteen. The chef snitches on himself with a story about growing up in New York: DeAngelo recalls that he used to ditch school to cook for his friends. While both parents were at work, he would invite his friends over to his house and, using vegetables from the family garden, prepare meals for his schoolmates. Parents today can only dream of this kind of harmless deception from their own little bundles of adolescent joy! Playing pretend restaurant chef with only live herbs as his weapons of choice, even counting the lost school days, sure beats the violence found in Nintendo-land these days!

Vince's specialty and focus at the Institute was pastry. His natural talents were spotted almost immediately, which graduated him right into the deep-end of the NYC culinary pool with early positions at the famed Rainbow Room and the Hemsley Palace Hotel. "The discipline learned through pastry helps prepare one for the necessary organization needed to manage the business part of a successful restaurant," he explained.

A vacation to the shores of San Diego turned into his first entrepreneurial experience, a successful bakery shop that gave him the confidence to return to his east coast roots a few years later where he expanded beyond desserts. "No doubt my early training, with pastry being a kind of heavy medicine-ball, made the transition to preparing main-course dishes a relative ease. I still love to bake. When I bake, I am a Master Pastry Chef to the toes. When I am working on the other courses of a meal, I am a committed and focused Chef de Partie. It’s all a part of the one kitchen for me and I love every part of it!"

Chef Vinnie has an infectious enthusiasm for his craft that keeps him going and going, like the rabbit with the drum in the commercial, but much more animated. He came to Merced with a friend to open a very successful eatery featuring Basque cuisine. However, when his business partner, who was the main underpin to the Basque motif, fell ill after only a few years in business, Vinnie's kitchen went dark for a time. However, it wasn't too long before a group of ex-patrons approached him with an offer to provide some financial support that he could not refuse and DeAngelo's Italian Restaurant was born.

This group was comprised mostly of local growers in the Merced area who wanted to see this talented chef stay in town. It took the chef only five years to buy out his benevolent partners, and his drum has been pounding out new ways to practice his craft ever since.

To capture a clientele looking for more casual fare than what the main dining room offers, the bar of DeAngelo's has been expanded into a pizzeria called Bellini's, serving light entrees, and inventive pizzas from a huge brick oven i.e. THE CENTRAL VALLEY - Grilled eggplant, olives, basil, sun-dried tomato, goat cheese, caramelized onions and basil oil.

This industrious chef is currently developing a pickled product with one of his grower partner/patrons for export to the Far East. He is also about to rekindle a long-time feature in the local newspaper, The Merced Sun-Star, called The Valley Chef. The feature involves the chef visiting growers in their fields where he interviews them about the proper growing, storage and handling of the crops they produce, and then includes the many approaches to preparing the spotlighted crop for his readership. The Valley Chef has also been hired by local producers to put on both informative and entertaining shows right in the field, demonstrating recipes from a tent kitchen for promotional events.

It is worth noting that this writer was lucky enough to experience the dish first-hand during a recent visit to DeAngelo's with, you guessed it, a local grower. My dining partners were members of the Marchini family – Joe, Jeff and Mark – Melissa’s radicchio suppliers who led me to Vinnie's table in the course of doing another feature for the Melissa's website last spring. But that night we were all simply appreciative guests, who found ourselves giving the exquisite meal a spontaneous and well-deserved round of applause at the evening's end. Your own need to applaud will definitely happen if you ever get a chance to visit DeAngelo's; but the same sound of both hands clapping by family and friends can be experienced in the privacy of the reader’s own kitchen through the attached recipe. Enjoy!

One of the main ingredients in Chef Vinnie's featured dish is Radicchio; to learn more about this versatile leaf item go to this month's Produce Corner.