By Shawna Wright

Damien Dipaola, of Ristorante Damiano (307 Hanover Street), jokingly remembers the first thing he ever cooked—Kraft™ Macaroni and Cheese. “I was five years old, I was home alone and I was starving,” he recalls. Dipaola has certainly come a long way from just boiling water and mixing in powered-cheese. Damiano’s is a hit restaurant in the North End, making their mark in the eatery-saturated neighborhood. He credits both his mother and father for instilling within him a passion for preparing food. No dish on Ristorante Damiano’s menu has escaped his parent’s influence. The first thing he remembers actually cooking is his mother’s tomato sauce, which is used in numerous of the plates he prepares today.

When Dipaola was a student at UMass Amherst, like most college males, a good amount of concentration went into attracting members of the opposite sex. He quickly realized he had the secret to getting a girl’s attention—he could cook. “I could invite girls over for dinner,” and everyone knows that nothing impresses a woman more than a man who can do more than order Chinese take-out or heat up leftover pizza. In Dipaola’s case, it was a lot more.

DiPaola’s parents taught him the Golden Rule of cooking; have minimal amounts of ingredients in the fridge, buy fresh products, and use them. Being able to tell if the produce was fresh, a trick that he learned from his father, has practically become instinctive. Noticing that the eyes of a fish are clear and how firm the flesh is, for instance, becomes a skill every good chef has to be able to pick up. “It’s not something you can learn in culinary school,” he asserts.

DiPaola and his father would head out to the Gloucester fish markets, where his father was a friend to the Sicilian commercial fishermen who docked there. They’d gladly give his father first choice of the freshest picks, right off the boat. “You could practically eat the shrimp raw,” DiPaola recollects.

He also remembers heading down to the bay, where his father would wade into the ocean and collect sea urchins right out of the water. “We would sit on the rocks, cut them open with scissors and scoop them out with Italian bread.” His father also taught him the value and importance of using fresh ingredients when cooking. Once you’ve eaten something that was in the sea that morning, something out of a can can’t begin to compare.

“I grew up in a household where family was very important. We sat down as a family. We sat down as friends,” says DiPaola as he talks about the Sundays of his childhood. Waking up on Sunday morning he could tell what would be for dinner based on the different aromas that filled his house. Things like roasting peppers, simmering tomato sauce, the heavy tang of freshly made meatballs were the background scents of Sunday afternoon. All the delicious smells were the product of the love and work that his mother, who had gotten up extra early that day, had done to feed the fifteen or twenty people that would be coming over for the family dinner. “She did it all by herself,” he proudly reminisces.

A lot of chefs claim they love to cook because they delight in feeding people, they believe that food can be used as a way to build camaraderie, or they want to create something that no one has ever tasted before and will never find anywhere else. For DiPaola, it’s a lot simpler. He just likes being in the kitchen. “I like being on the line, putting together fresh ingredients, and getting the final result that looks good, smells good, and tastes good.” DiPaola’s favorite part is the assembly, handling and molding the raw ingredients into something people can’t help but be excited about.

The Pallotta sisters, Carla and Christine, of Nebo Restaurant (90 North Washington Street) didn’t start out in the restaurant business. In fact, they spent twenty years in an industry that can hardly be farther from food. As owners of a salon and spa, they hardly ever had time to cook, except for the occasional Sunday meal. They were going out to eat practically every night because their busy schedules didn’t leave much space for anything more than a quick bite on the go. However, as the years passed, the countless restaurants started to blur together. They realized that the appetizers, entrées and desserts were all the same, no matter where they went. Christine remembers thinking, “I’m bored with this and I’m going to open up a restaurant.” Carla was a little on the skeptical side at first, but Christine was adamant that within a few months they could really get something going.

The first problem, of course, was that the sister’s needed to create a menu. So they brought in the woman whose cookbook they trusted above all others, their mother. The experience, to put it delicately, was less than pleasant. The main issue, Mrs. Pallotta didn’t believe in using things like measuring cups. It was always by touch; a handful of flour, a pinch of salt, three dashes of spices. In response, the Pallotta sisters started doing the recipes in reverse. “We’d catch the handful of flour and put it into a measuring cup,” says Carla, “My mother never understood why. We had to explain that the chefs in the kitchen need a recipe.”

When Nebo Restaurant opened in 2005, the menu was stocked with plates that they had painstakingly recorded over the three weeks they’d spent in their mother’s kitchen. It was all worth it in the end. Christine exclaims, “We wanted to eat as if we were in my mother’s house,” thus the Italian tapas menu was created. For the Pallotta sisters, food is all about love and socializing, something they also learned from their mother. The tapas style plates allow guests to share and taste a lot of different things during one meal.

The Pallotta motto is that simplicity demands the finest ingredients. The sisters distinctly remember that their mother would base her meals off of whatever was in the grocery store when she went shopping for the day. As a result, the girls were conditioned to rarely, if ever, use canned or preserved food in their cooking. They were also taught the value of improvisation. “It didn’t matter if one person or ten people should up,” says Carla, “there was always something she could make for them.” They learned how to get the most out of every ingredient, as leftovers in their house always found a way to be transformed into something else for tomorrow. “Leftovers always got turned into something hip and new.” For instance, the sisters were recently preparing beef stock for one of their soups, when they decided to turn the bone marrow into bruschetta topping.

While the sisters often function as a pair, the two have very distinct reasons as to why they love to cook. For Carla, “The fun part is dealing with the changes of the season. The fact that you can change a meal with one ingredient, it totally changes the flavor.” While the spirits’ of the dishes rarely change, “why change perfection, these are the recipes our grandmother used,” she continues, Carla loves being able to play with the subtleties of the dish, incorporating the flavors of the season into the menu. Christine, on the other hand, loves the place she finds herself in when she cooks. “It’s very therapeutic. I just zone out in my own world.” In a world where relaxation is usually an expensive undertaking and rarely found, she has no desire to stop cooking anytime soon.

The two also differ greatly on favored dishes their mother used to make when they were children. Carla loved the minestra and beans, a thick, hearty soup filled with prosciutto, pepperoni, pork rinds, and escarole. Christine loved stroffoli, “Which is more of a dessert than a meal.” Stroffoli are honey and candied pastry balls, popular at Christmas time.

Prezza, 24 Fleet Street, is chef and owner Anthony Caturano’s contribution to the fine dining experience of the North End. Named for the small Italian town in the Abruzzi region where his grandmother Elana was born, Caturano credits both his grandmother and mother with giving him the drive and passion for cooking. The style of “peasant” cooking associated with the Abruzzi region plus the restaurant’s collection of over 8,000 bottles of wine gives Prezza’s customers an ever-evolving menu.

Caturano remembers waking up on weekends to the smell of roasting garlic and simmering tomatoes. “My mom used to make a lot of soups, like escarole with meatballs. Sometimes with scrambled eggs in it.” His grandmother and mother would team up for family gatherings like birthdays and anniversaries or holidays like Christmas and Easter, when twenty to thirty people from every branch of the family tree gathered for big, drawn out family dinners. “There was so much different food, sometimes too much.” Like many Italian families, these times are about more than the food; it’s about sitting down and being together as a family.

Caturano started out in a field as far from cooking as one could get. He was going to be an accountant, enrolling at Merrimack College. His father was a prominent accountant in Boston, but quickly realized that his son’s true passion lay in the kitchen, not in the numbers. “He pushed me in that direction. He saw that I liked it and encouraged me to go to culinary school,” says Caturano. He got a job in a restaurant’s kitchen, enrolled in The Culinary Institute of America and things started moving faster than he could have ever hoped.

Growing up in Revere, his father worked in the North End, so Caturano was always popping in and out of the neighborhood. When he was looking for a restaurant the North End seemed like the perfect place to start. “I walked into Prezza and loved the space,” Caturano remembers. “I was pretty lucky to find it.” Caturano was only 25 when the restaurant opened in 2000. Prezza has been receiving rave reviews ever since, earning recognition from Boston Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, and Wine and Spirit Magazine.

For Caturano, nothing can compare to the action of being in the kitchen. “Every day is like day one. It’s just the way it is,” he says. “No matter how much something is fine tuned, it still finds a way to go wrong.” While every day doesn’t need a disaster in the kitchen to make life exciting, the ever-changing activities of day-to-day life provide enough excitement to keep Caturano on his toes. Changing seasons bring different produce, new ideas revolutionize the menu, and the human element of Prezza’s staff working together day in and day out always keep things lively.