By Linnea Covington

On a recent Friday afternoon, as the staff prepared Accademia di Vino Broadway for dinner service, Kevin Garcia sat at the bar trying to figure out how to recreate a dish he sampled on a chefs’ tour of Sicily. The photo he pulled up on his phone showed a generous ball of fresh mozzarella, which, he said, was kind of a farce. Beneath a mop of silver and brown curling hair, Garcia’s eyes shone as he explained the commonly dense dish was in fact hollow, a pretend ball filled with air, yet it had such a pure mozzarella taste, the 40-year-old chef was determined to figure out how they made it.

Kevin Garcia

After 20 years cooking and studying Italian food, getting surprised about a dish is an anomaly in itself. But for Garcia, food has always been a part of his life. When he was a child, his parents centered time around the kitchen, making meals in their Connecticut home or on weekends, at their apartment on the Upper West Side. Through their love of cooking grew Garcia’s as well, and from a young age he knew he wanted to be a chef.

“I never did anything else except have a paper route when I was 15,” he said.

After high school, Garcia attended culinary academy at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, where he simultaneously whetted his chops at the Italian restaurant Al Forno. It wasn’t until he came back to New York and got a job at Pino Luongo’s Coco Pazzo that he really started to dedicate himself to Italian cuisine. During that time he traveled to Italy for the first time, and met the man who would later change the way he viewed being a chef.

“It was a great entrée into the Italian world, and I met Cesare Casella who was my mentor and intro into all things Italian,” he said. “He taught me to be resourceful and cook regionally.”

Garcia stayed at Coco Pazzo for five years, honing his skills and eventually moving up to chef de cuisine.

When he left Coco Pazzo, Garcia bounced around, becoming the personal chef to Revlon CEO Ron Perelman, a chef at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Prime Steak House in Las Vegas, ran the kitchens at the Lucca in Florida and worked as chef de cuisine at Del Posto.

Almost every restaurant he has worked in has been Italian, which, given this devotion to a cuisine, proves unusual since he has no Italian blood in his family. His father is Cuban and his mother is from New York.

“Cuban cuisine is similar to Italian cuisine as it’s soulful, rustic and made with purpose,” he said.

Coincidently, Garcia’s current work at Anthony Mazzola’s restaurant ’Cesca and the two Accademia di Vinos brings him closer to where he grew up, and now lives. And, in what he sees as fate, ’Cesca lies 12 blocks away from where his parents met at St. Gregory the Great School when they were 6 years old.

“I thought it would be exciting to be at a restaurant in my parents’ old stomping ground,” he said.

To further his connection to Mazzola’s restaurants and the area, ’Cesca is also how he ended up with his fiancée and their 22-month-old son Jack. The couple met in high school originally, but never dated until three years ago when Elizabeth, whom he calls “Betty,” stopped at ’Cesca with his best friend, who is her cousin. Now, she is pregnant with their second child.

When he isn’t occupied making family ties, Garcia volunteers for special events at the Thanksgiving Farm at the Center for Discovery in Harris, N.Y., where he has volunteered since 2006. The farm works with disabled adults and children and has them grow all the organic vegetables, herbs and fruits that they eat and offer in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operation.

“It gives them purpose. They sow the seeds, feed the animals and pick the vegetables,” said Garcia. “They also come from the idea that nutrition is the best healer.”

Even when he isn’t volunteering at the farm, he supports it by supplying the restaurants’ kitchens with goods from the farm nine months of the year. He also gets the occasional cut from one of the rare Chianina cows that were brought over from Italy by Casella, bred in Texas, and then brought to the farm.

Back at the Accademia di Vino Broadway, the chef busied himself thinking about the new fall menu. Squash, he said, was definitely on the list, be it in ravioli, risotto or drizzled with chestnut honey in the antipasti. Also, he wanted to bring back the famous pizza alla griglia with roasted pumpkin, pancetta and caramelized onions, a sweet and savory combo that melts in the mouth.

As he contemplated the menu, the staff settled in for their own family-style meal.

Garcia looked around the restaurant, content, and said, “Most people’s best meal memories are at home, and I want them to feel like they are eating at home here, too.”

After careful deliberation, we chose a bottle of the Eugenio Bocchino Barbera d’Alba ($47), a full and meaty wine that worked swimmingly with the heady Italian fare Accademia di Vino offers. We toasted to the establishment’s clean décor, thus far friendly service and getting out of Brooklyn to try chef Kevin Garcia’s popular venture. Spoiler alert: We were not disappointed.

Accademia di Vino boasts an 800-bottle collection, much of it shelved on walls throughout the restaurant. Photo by Linnea Covington

For starters, we ordered a formaggi plate with three cheeses ($15): a smooth and sweet New York Coach Farm triple crème goat cheese, a hard and fruity taleggio from Lombardy and a buttery (with hints of nut) Ascutney Mountain, from Cobb Hill, Vt. We also tried the
prosciutto and Parmigiano fritters ($12), golf ball-sized orbs of bliss that melt in your mouth with a richness intensified by deep-frying. These beauties came six to an order, way more then you need between three people and most likely the cause of fullness well before the other courses.

Off the pizza alla griglia menu, or “grilled pizza,” we ordered the pumpkin, pancetta and caramelized onion dish ($18) and were shocked by its dinner-platter-size. You can easily eat this thin crust pie for your main course or share among the table. And share you must, as it’s too good to keep to yourself. The small, tender chunks of pumpkin retained their firmness and melded with the caramelized onion, creating a sweet but savory dish. These two ingredients overshadowed the pancetta part, but the cured meat added a nice salty kick to the pizza.

Dipping into the primi, otherwise known as the pasta portion of the menu, we sampled a divine spaghetti alla carbonara ($20). This often overdone and heavy dish turned out to be light and airy, with a pleasant pepper bite at the end. A true assessment of Garcia’s knack for Italian cooking, the flavors of the guanciale (an unsmoked Italian bacon), scallion, egg yolk and cracked black pepper in this pasta dish mingled well, with nothing overpowering the smoothness of the sauce or the flavor of the noodles.

At this point, it was time to order another bottle of wine. The Barbera was excellent, but heavy, so we opted to try something else. The waiter was more then willing to recommend something lighter (and did so without making us feel ignorant, as so many upscale wine bars can do). We ended up going for a bottle of the Hofstatter Pinot Nero ($56). Its light peppery notes and mild sweetness went down easily with the last dishes.

Since everything we tried proved heavy on meat, cheese and starch, we ordered a side of fried Brussels sprouts ($9), which came flecked with small chunks of salty pork. Despite being fried, they held their texture well and added a nice green kick to the heritage pork porterhouse ($32), which was one of the thickest pieces of hog I have ever seen. We all know pork can’t stand alone; it came topped with blackened bacon (think Bacon Bits, but real food and infinitely superior), a side of tender roasted potatoes and a crisp hunk of grilled radicchio. The porterhouse came out medium-rare, another first for me in the pork realm, but it worked well. Tender, juicy and with a nice dry rub cooked into the meat on the outside, each bite tasted like a savory sliver of a non-Kosher paradise. This leads me to the only issue (but not really a problem) facing Accademia di Vino: the lack of vegetarian or non-pork fare. I suppose the Italians never thought twice when they started adding cured pork to everything—and honestly, I am glad this restaurant sticks to tradition.

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Accademia di Vino
1081 Third Ave. at
East 64th Street
212-888-6333
Entrées: $16 to $38