CO-OWNER/CHEF FIORE TEDESCO OF L’OCA D’ORO SHARES HIS HEART IN EVERY DISH
WORDS BY NATHAN MATTISE | PHOTOS BY RALPH YZNAGA
If you’ve had the polpette — lush pork and brisket meatballs in tomato jam — at beloved Austin institution L’Oca d’Oro, you’ve essentially also tasted chef/co-owner Fiore Tedesco’s most cherished childhood memories. And he has plenty of good ones. Chatting in the chef’s eclectic home kitchen, tidbit after tidbit about his past emerges. Any one of them could be someone else’s most interesting fact about themselves. For instance, Tedesco’s early aughts band (in retrospect, the very appropriately named Feast) used to share a practice space with TV on the Radio and Interpol in New York. He played drums growing up and would’ve attended a music conservatory, but he loved tennis too much. He followed an athletic scholarship to Hofstra instead.
Yet ask Tedesco why he’s in Texas preparing humble Italian food instead of touring Europe with a drumkit or teaching tennis lessons on the Upper East Side, and he doesn’t hesitate. “I grew up in kitchens; I have a background where I have an intimate relationship with the preparation of food,” he begins. “I had quieted any notion of cooking for a living for quite some time, but it honestly came back to me in dreams.” Tedesco shares how his parents’ difficulties led to a young Fiore growing up in his grandmother’s kitchen as he worked through his own struggles communicating as a non-verbal child. Even though he couldn’t tell his grandmother, he showed affection by mimicking her every move.
“I knew I loved my grandmother’s meatballs more than just about anything, so every Sunday morning I’d be at her hip ready to do whatever she wanted me to do — making pasta, rolling meatballs, anything. I loved doing it, maybe mostly because I’d be rewarded with eating a meatball,” he says. That eventually evolved into roles like making mozzarella at his uncle’s deli or baking bread at another uncle’s bakery.
“All of those things are kind of the foundations of what we do,” Tedesco says, tying it all to the present day at L’Oca d’Oro, which just celebrated its 7th anniversary. “The way you remember things, it can be hard to trust. We change memories. But in trying to honor the parts that are meaningful to me, I try to amplify those memories by refining the action that was in them. So my meatballs are decidedly different than grandma’s; the mozzarella I make is way better than the stuff I grew up with. But I am partly inspired by the memory of the comfort those things brought me as a kid.”
Despite all the local adoration and accolades his restaurant has received, Tedesco seems to constantly push himself. He’s hustling to open a new “New York meets grandma’s pies” pizza spot called Bambino in East Austin a few minutes south of L’Oca d’Oro (perhaps as early as this fall). And while the dish he’s preparing today — Ravioli alla Norma, stuffed with roasted eggplant and ricotta salata — currently appears at L’Oca, Tedesco actually developed it for someplace else entirely. He hopes to open what would then be his third restaurant serving “coastal Southern Italian — so a little bit of Italian, a little Portuguese, a little French” at a spot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, within the next few years.
“The idea I had for the food is: We make these assumptions about the authenticity of these different cuisines and places,” Tedesco says. “Having just been in Italy and having family live there, the assumptions we make — ‘This is real!’ — comes from a very specific perspective. That pasta dish is real, it’s traditional, but they’re making it for you, for you the tourist. Then you come back to my restaurant and say, ‘No, make it like that — it’s authentic!’ It becomes a bizarre conversation.”
“So authenticity can also be a fantasy, but we don’t recognize the fantasy we live in,” he continues. “So we should have a sense of humor and not take everything so seriously, and have some fun — let that be the label and don’t get trapped in what’s real and what is not. I won’t write that on the menu, but this is one of the dishes.”
Traditional Pasta alla Norma is a Sicilian dish with fried eggplant, salata, tomato and chile. In this version, “I just reconfigured the parts,” Tedesco says. He uses Japanese eggplant, which tends to be slightly sweeter and more tender since it’s smaller. Torn to look like a razor clam, Tedesco pairs that with the ricotta salata (which is dried, aged and salted to lightly mimic some briney-ness) and stuffs a soft, long ravioli. It impressed New York- based restaurant investors, and the chef quips that even his 18-month-old will try it.
If you’ve ever tried a pasta club kit from L’Oca d’Oro, watching Tedesco create his pasta at home feels like finally reading the book Hollywood based your favorite movie on. He promptly pulls the almost burnt-orange ravioli from the water to keep it just al dente. Then he finishes it for a few moments in the pan the next burner over, where he’s been browning a few other pre-portioned ingredients such as beautiful cherry tomatoes. It’s a simple process that has improved virtually any pasta made in my home kitchen, but none of those dishes rival this. The ravioli is lucious — bright bits of tomato working together with the savory stuffing — and probably the most flavorful eggplant dish I’ve sampled.
All through his cook, Tedesco notes this final product has been built by many hands over time. His family taught him the underlying techniques as a kid, local farmers and businesses supply key components, and L’Oca teammates past and present have enhanced his process (like former sous chef Angelo Emiliani, of Louie’s Italian American in Houston, who recently suggested Tedesco blanche his stuffed pastas instead of freezing them). That communal mindset is at least partially why L’Oca d’Oro has become as known for its business initiatives — like recurring charity dinners for Austin non-profits or a public commitment to a thriving base wage to all staff — as its food. So as Tedesco’s restaurant world grows in the near future, rest assured the community involved will, too.
“The thing I have the most gratitude for: I only live the life I do now because 40 other people [at L’Oca] agreed to do this with me. So if I’m going to honor grandma’s meatballs, I should honor their livelihoods as well,” he says. “I want to make it, in any way I can, worthwhile for them. Any life, anywhere can feel challenging. So if I have influence in it and it can be better or worse, if I’m not working to make it better, I’d have a hard time.”
About the Contributor
Journalist Nathan Mattise (@nathanmattise) is always working to perfect his sourdough bagels. He also enjoys bocce, amaro, road trips, and a good playlist.
