By Victor Greto
Ezio Reynaud wanted out.
Out of Pinerolo, a picturesque town at the foot of the Alps near the French border in the northeastern Piedmont region of his native Italy, and his family’s 30-acre farm where he tended sheep, pigs, goats, cows, geese, quail and one crazy turkey.
Even away from the handful of acres of vineyards that made the wine.
The youngest of four, he wanted – like many a young man before him – to get away from his father and his occupation, a man who started his career digging away in a nearby graphite mine but who had worked his way up to supervisor.
Reynaud wanted to travel.
“I grew up in a family obsessed with food,” says Reynaud, 56, sitting at one of the black tables of Culinaria, a restaurant tucked inconspicuously within a strip mall in north Wilmington he and his partner, Pam Grabowski, created a dozen years ago.
“I was always around it,” he continues. “It’s all we talked about. We pulled it out of our garden. We butchered the animals. And we critiqued every taste.”
He says his role as a chef is in part to “replicate the dishes I grew up with.”
As a young teenager, Reynaud wanted to work around food, and from the age of 15 when he finished school, he worked as waiter, busboy, cashier and host at restaurants and hotels from the Riviera to London to Bermuda and, finally, in Wilmington.
When he met his wife- (and ex-wife)-to-be, Christine Saunders while visiting friends in Wilmington when he was only 23, he fell in love; she had just opened a restaurant in Trolley Square, The Silk Purse. Ten years later, they both opened a more laid-back eatery, The Sow’s Ear, upstairs. Neither of the restaurants is open now.
“He knows exactly what the customer needs,” says his friend Jacques Amblard, who got to know Reynaud when Amblard, now retired and a consultant, worked at the Hotel DuPont for three decades, including a 10-year stint as general manager. “He has a set standard, pleasant, not stuffy, and has a clientele who are all regulars.”
After the couple split after 18 years, Reynaud teamed up with Grabowski and created Culinaria, her first venture into the restaurant business and created for himself a role that seems to have been his personal destiny – chef.
At Culinaria, Reynaud and Grabowski have gathered another set of regulars, including Amblard, who eats at the bar when he drives up after consulting at Dover Downs – or he’ll just order some of his favorite meals to go, including the salmon with mashed potatoes and creamy cucumbers, or the Black Angus Rib Eye, among other dishes.
The restaurant is always busy.
“We’ve been going just about every week since it opened,” said customer Nancy Karibjanian, referring to herself and her husband, Joe Nemecz. “We went for lunch with a friend when it first opened and had tomato parmesan soup. I fell in love with it. We used to make our own, but we don’t bother now.”
Reynaud’s road from Italy to north Wilmington was, at least at first, a circuitous one.
At 15, he left home – with the permission of his parents – and tended bar in Valle d’Aosta, a nearby province, and then moved on to Turin where he worked in a hotel.
“I wanted to get away from home,” Reynaud says. “I wanted to travel.”
He got his wish when through his Turin hotel connections he got a gig at a hotel in London when he was only 17. He knew no English. In fact, growing up he spoke what he calls “patois,” a commingling of Italian and French.
Reynaud was forced to learn English when he worked as a sommelier or wine steward at a private London club. He jumped at an opportunity to go to Bermuda when he was 19 and spent three years there, working and traveling the world, to New York, Washington D.C., Hawaii, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok – all by himself.
“It was thrilling,” he says, and he tasted his way around the world.
But he still hadn’t decided what to do with himself.
That is, until he tried his hand at insurance sales for two months when he returned to London.
After standing in a stifling suit along a row of numberless doors in an overheated government-subsidized apartment building, he said to himself, “What am I doing here? Selling them the last thing they need?”
He returned to his office and quit his job. Soon afterward, he visited some Bermuda friends in Wilmington. There he met the woman who would become his wife.
He learned the business out front, he says, while she prepared the meals in the kitchen.
After their divorce, Reynaud said he was ready for his own place, and Grabowski said she was ready to go into the restaurant business.
“It was based on what we wished we could find,” Grabowski says of Culinaria. “It started as a combination of retail and restaurant – we had a deli and packaged items – but the restaurant part of it took off, and we focused on lunch and dinner within the first six months.”
While Grabowski handles the front and business end – as well as the interior décor, which connotes a classical touch, combining a copper color with gray and black accents, and oversized tissue pom-poms pierced stalks of bamboo – Reynaud rules the kitchen.
The couple employs up to eight people, two of whom do the prep work for Reynaud.
“I put it all together,” he says, “and do all the turn-out, plating and cooking.”
The couple closes the restaurant six weeks a year. He loves traveling to northern France to indulge himself in oysters, one of his favorite foods.
He doesn’t serve them at Culinaria, however.
“It’s a bitch to shuck an oyster,” he says.
For one of those six weeks Reynaud returns to Pinerolo and his mother (his father died about 20 years ago) where he indulges in those roots he once longed to leave, but now enjoys – from the view of the Alps to the native bollito misto, a boiled meat dish.
In fact, if he had only one meal left to eat, it would be oysters to start and bollito misto as the main course, with salted boiled potatoes and fresh cheese.
There is no secret dish he cooks when he goes home at night, he says.
“I have nothing in my refrigerator but mineral water and wine.”
He and Grabowski go out to eat every chance they get, tasting and traveling, like he’s done all since he was 15.