...with Chevonne Miller-Centini

BY QUINN CURTIS AND LINDA GARSON

PHOTO BY DONG KIM

Chevonne Miller-Centini grew up on a cattle ranch outside of Lacombe. A country girl at heart, she developed her love of food from her mother. “My mom was like Martha Stewart before there was Martha. She was growing everything, making everything, and knew how to do so many things. We had a really spectacular garden,” she explains.

At 17, she moved away from Alberta to study journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, and after graduating, began her career in publishing, working on everything from medical journals to fashion magazines. Her stint in Montreal eventually led her to Latini, a restaurant led by charming chef, Fabio Centini. “He'd been involved with that since 1979. He started in restaurants very young, polishing glasses in banquet halls as a boy and then helping in the kitchen,” she says. “Latini opened in ’79, and Fabio quickly moved into the top role. I was quite intrigued by this because it was an intimidating big-city restaurant with an extensive wine list and an imposing doorman,” she adds.

When Miller-Centini developed a personal publishing interest in Latini, she decided she had to meet Fabio. “An afternoon drink session turned into dinner. And what do you know, we had a lot in common - it was like a lightning bolt,” she says.

During a trip back to Alberta, while visiting Miller-Centini’s parents, the couple began flirting with the idea of moving back to Calgary. “Montreal was just achingly beautiful - the look of Montreal, the feel of Montreal, the restaurants, the buildings, the history; I was all in when I moved. The reality was that it was probably a lot harder than I anticipated because my French was never Quebec French,” she says. But it was her boyfriend Fabio who ultimately convinced her to make the move to Calgary.

After living in Calgary for a few years, the couple caught wind of a restaurant space for sale on Eighth Avenue SW. With Fabio’s knack for cooking and Miller-Centini’s business acumen, the unstoppable team opened their restaurant, Centini, in May 2001. Staying strong for 19 years, unfortunately, like so many other restaurants, Centini was impacted by the economic effects of COVID-19 in 2020, forcing them to adapt and rethink their strategy. Drawing on her business background and creative flair, Miller-Centini launched a new project, Centini Foods.

“I had to conjure up a mindset of saying, ‘What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?’ So we did things very quickly. We built an online store and then explored the idea of producing sauces. We were closed as a restaurant, but all the servers came back and went into production making pasta sauce with me,” she says. By early January, Miller-Centini was shipping a tremendous amount of high-quality Tomato Rose, Puttanesca, and Arabia pasta sauces, and they haven’t looked back since. So, with access to some of the finest wines available, what bottle is MillerCentini saving for a special occasion?

“What kept coming to my mind was this bottle that just arrived in Calgary, brought from Montreal. It’s a bottle of homemade Italian white wine made by my late brother-in-law.” In 2011, Fabio’s twin sister Vicki and her husband Lou Parissi were killed in a tragic car accident, but their cellar remains intact at the family home, still containing wine made by her late brother-in-law.

“That wine has aged, and it’s gone from light yellow to this beautiful amber colour. I’m told it’s drinking really well,” she says. “When you think back over a 25-year period, I can’t help but reflect on the losses along the way, of some of the most important people in my life. To have the essence of an individual in a bottle of homemade wine takes me back to the mid-nineties when I started dating Fabio and was introduced toand warned about - the power of this homemade wine, because who knows what the alcohol content is? I thought it was a beautiful wine. To be able to revisit that will take me back to a happier time when we had all our family around us. Maybe at a family holiday we'll open it up and, toast them.”