Italian chef brings Latin flavor to fund-raiser

• Drizzle some chimichurri on anything good to grill

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

DiCATALDO: Loves the ingredients of Latin food

DiCataldo, executive chef at the famed Patria on New York's Park Avenue South, grew up in New Jersey eating his mother's pasta and tomato sauce. He still loves to cook Italian food at home for wife Patricia and daughter Francesca.

But ever since he went south to Miami in 1985 after graduating from the respected culinary school at Johnson & Wales University, DiCataldo has been in love with the foods of Latin America and the Caribbean: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia (where Patricia is from), Argentina, Peru ...

"Just being around the Latin American people, I was really inspired. I fell in love with the ingredients," he recalled during a telephone conversation from New York.

He will bring his pan-Latin fusion cuisine to Hawai'i Saturday for the Big Sisters Big Brothers Gourmet Affair fund-raiser, an annual event organized with the help of chef Sam Choy, who gets his big-name chef friends to come over for the event (Emeril Lagasse, Masaharu Morimoto, Ming Tsai and Paul Prudhomme are among past guests). Also on the working-guest list: Stanton Ho, executive pastry chef at the Las Vegas Hilton and a Kapi'olani Community College graduate and honored master of chocolate, pastry and wedding cakes.

DiCataldo's longtime friend and college roommate Douglas Rodrigues may be the name most closely associated with Nuevo Latino cuisine, but DiCataldo was right there every step of the way.

The two traveled to Miami together, traded jobs at various restaurants, launched their own brand of Nuevo Cubano cuisine at Yucca in Miami and came north again about the same time, Rodrigues to open Patria in New York City, DiCataldo to honcho Mexicali Blues Cafe in New Jersey. DiCataldo joined Rodrigues as sous chef at Patria a short while later, even traveling with him to the Cuisines of the Sun event at Mauna Lani Bay Hotel & Bungalows a few years ago. The two worked together until Rodrigues parted with their financial backers and went off on his own. They are still great friends and, in fact, Rodrigues recommended DiCataldo to Choy for this appearance.

•	Big Sisters Big Brothers Gourmet Affair 6 p.m. Saturday, Hilton Hawaiian Village Tapa Ballroom Cocktails, wine and beer tastings, food stations Tickets: $200, of which $150 is tax-deductible 521-3811

DiCataldo said he's sending to the event planners a daunting list of foods he needs for the lavish five-course tasting menu he will prepare. Additionally, he will travel with a cooler full of such hard-to-find ingredients as Peruvian blue potatoes.

The menu he's contemplating includes:

• Langostino ceviche, a bright-flavored shellfish dish enlivened by carrot, orange, fennel and a touch of habanero chili.
• Roast suckling pig shredded with calamari and baby butter beans.
• Seared sea scallops with black trumpet/white truffle mojo (a Mexican-style sauce).
• Island snapper, seared to a crust and served with a mixture of white sweet potato and crab, with a spicy Peruvian ocopa sauce.
• Grilled beef tenderloin with Argentinian chimichurri sauce and Peruvian blue potatoes, finished with a bone marrow and red wine sauce.

DiCataldo says a big part of his job is researching hard-to-find foods. He has hand-carried seeds of panca (yellow chili peppers) and huacatay (Peruvian black mint) back from South America to growers in the East. He has established a partnership with two Chilean brothers — one catches merlusa, which he calls "the true Chilean sea bass," the other imports it to New York for Patria. He knows where in New York's ethnic markets to find malanga, which resembles taro, and huitlacoche (corn fungus) and bonato (white sweet potato). He can speak knowledgeably about such rare finds as tico roco (literally, the beak of the rock), a large barnacle harvested by divers in Chile that yields both a crablike meat and a custard-textured essence that resembles sea-urchin roe.

"I just felt I could do different things than other chefs were doing by working with these ingredients," he said in a telephone interview from New York. "What other chefs were making with potatoes, I could do with plantains or malanga or bonato."

To listen to him describe the foods he loves, and the way he prepares them (tico roco with truffle butter and a hollandaise gratin) is to dissolve into a salivating puddle.

"I'm just happy to come in every day and kind of mess around in the kitchen and play with these exotic ingredients," he said. "I feel like a chameleon in the kitchen, hopping from country to country."