Featured Pros: Stefano & Tammi Bernardi of Osteria Monte Grappa

SARAH HOWERY HART

OSTERIA MONTE GRAPPA

Talking Food: Chef Stefano Bernardi and wife Tammi Bernardi

If any business had to prove its resilience during the pandemic, it was restaurants. It especially hit hard for Stefano and Tammi Bernardi of Osteria Monte Grappa (OMG) because Stefano’s family is from northern Italy, where early covid-19 outbreaks in the early spring of 2020 dominated headlines.

“During the beginning of the pandemic, we were in disbelief,” said Tammi Bernardi. “We didn’t know what to make of this virus spreading through China and making its way to northern Italy. This is the area where Stefano was born and we still have many family members and friends there.” As it became clear that the virus was becoming a pandemic, with borders closing and restaurants’ capacity being reduced, “we started to get nervous. We started serving strictly outside, and finally we went just to take out. How could we make this work?” the Bernardis said.

Fortunately, many of their front-of-house and kitchen staff wanted to continue working, “so that became our new takeout crew ... that was not the norm at Osteria Monte Grappa but we found a system that worked for us and moved forward with just takeout.”

STEFANO BERNARDI, CENTER WITH TAMARA (TAMMI) RIGHT, WITH FORMER CHEF CIXTO CHAVEZ, LEFT

Each week they partnered with local restaurants to provide meals for elderly and high-risk residents of Ojai. This was a wonderful program that kept my entire staff afloat for more than a year,” Tammi Bernardi said.

Coming from a family line of restaurateurs originating in northern Italy, it seems natural that Stefano Bernardi would follow that culinary path. It began with his grandmother, who owned a small osteria. After the family moved to California, his brother opened two restaurants in Montecito, Via Vai and Pane e Vino, where Bernardi bused tables.

He eventually took over as manager, then moved to Ojai more than a decade ago with his wife, Tammi, to open their own restaurant, Osteria Monte Grappa. It also meant a new influence in his culinary life, Ojai’s farm-to-table loving atmosphere.

Now Bernardi creates the perfect fusion of his two countries, two cultures, and two ways of looking at cuisine.

Ojai Monthly: It appears that your family’s history with food and restaurants in Italy played a significant role in your own life both in Italy and in the United States.

Stefano Bernardi: My grandfather was a farmer in Italy, but my grandparents moved to California after the San Francisco earthquake (1906) to help rebuild the city. Then, they returned to Italy, where my grandmother ran a little osteria in the 1920s. That kind of started the family tradition.

My brother, Pietro, started working at a restaurant as a waiter, then as a bartender and in the kitchen. He was only 24 when he opened his first restaurant. He has Via Vai, and our family owns Pane e Vino also. I started working in my brother’s restaurant when I was 13.

OM: When did you first seriously consider becoming a chef? SB: My family also owned the San Francisco Pane e Vino, so then I lived there during much of the ‘90s. That was my first management position. I worked in the front of house, but spending so much time in a restaurant, you also spend a lot of time with the chef. I started going back into the kitchen and working with Chef Bruno Quercini, who is now a partner there, and I enjoyed that part of the business because of the creativity.

OM: When did you decide to move to Ojai, and why? SB: I was again working in Montecito with my brother, and married to Tammi, now. We had two small children, and the Santa Barbara area seemed to be getting a little too big for us. We had talked about having a restaurant, and I was very involved with the menus in Montecito. My wife was also very involved; she has a great palate.

So, we thought the move to Ojai would be a great time to open our own restaurant. We saw that 2009 was kind of a rough time for restaurants, but our first location on Signal Street was a good size for us to start with.

OM: Did you also have formal training? SB: No formal cooking classes. This is all what I picked up and tried and researched, all on my own. My wife, too. She’s a very good cook and is also an executive chef. She’s very good on flavors.

OM: How does your Monte Grappa team work together? SB: My day starts at Earthtrine Farm with owner, BD Dautch, and I work with Rio Gozo Farm, too. The owner there, John (Fonteyn), and I text back and forth. He tells me what’s looking good for the week.

The way I build a menu, then, is according to what is happening on the farms that day — it’s like those cooking shows on TV, where the chef contestants have to cook using a basket of surprise ingredients

I try to work with seafood the same way. We get fresh and local calamari, prawns and right now some rockfish. Using these is like one of those cooking shows, too. We go through all of the fresh foods we bring back, and say, “This would be good with that.” We create our daily specials menu this way.

OM: How does your northern Italian heritage impact the menu at Monte Grappa? SB: Northeastern Italian food is my background, but at Monte Grappa we’ve kind of moved away from that. We’re concentrating on the farm-to-table concept of cooking now, and if I were to follow a recipe from northern Italy, the farm-to-table aspect might not work, so we’ve changed. OM: We hear that you make a lot of your sauces in an Italian wood-burning pizza oven. SB: Yes, we brought in a wood-burning oven from Italy. It uses 100 percent oak, no gas involved, and we do much more than pizza in there, including our sauces. For instance, we put our tomatoes, cut in half with herbs and seasonings, on a tray, put them in the pizza oven for just a few minutes so they get a little char on them. Then we take them out and make the sauce.

OM: What other uses does the pizza oven have? SB: We’ll finish off a lot of plates in that oven. We do our Filetto de Manzo al Montello in there, the roasted beef tenderloin steak, sliced and topped with truffled mushroom sauce. And our Gambe e coscie Di Gallina Al Crespanse, which is fresh chicken legs and thighs, roasted, with local vegetables and potatoes in fresh tomato and garlic broth.

OM: What are your customers’ favorites? SB: It all goes back to the pasta, especially the Agnolotti Della Casa, which is our homemade ravioli stuffed with braised beef, prosciutto, mushrooms and mozzarella. People come back for it over and over. We use Italian cheeses and local Watkins beef, so again, there is the blend of different worlds coming together.

OM: And, your wines? Are they all from Italy? SB: The Monte Grappa wine selection is very similar to what we’ve been talking about with the food. Mostly the wine is from Italy or the Ojai Valley, like Noble Oaks, with only a few from other areas of California. We pride ourselves on using the local products, along with some great classic choices from Italy. We have a lot of wines from my family’s region, but also a good selection of Tuscan wines.

OM: So you blend the new and the old and familiar? SB: It’s the same as the way we’re fusing two cultures. Most of our products are local, but I still get products from Italy, such as Italian prosciutto, Italian cheeses. Working with two regions is a very nice fit. Fusion is a very positive word, a positive idea, and I’m constantly finding new dishes that will fuse Italy with Ojai. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but there’s something from Ojai in every bite at Osteria Monte Grappa.

Thanks to the vaccinations, we are finally able to open to full capacity. We have found that the public is embracing the restaurant industry after the terrible setbacks of the past year and a half. It is amazing to see all of the faces we have not seen in quite some time. We are also grateful, and humbled to bounce back into action!

(Osteria Monte Grappa, 242 East Ojai Ave. Ojai, 805-6406767 www.omgojai.com) Portions of this interview originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of Ojai Monthly, written by Sarah Howery Hart.

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