At Zaytinya, Hilda Mazariegos is the individual answerable for switching on the lights each morning. A middle-aged lady with a prepared snigger, Mazariegos by no means attended a culinary faculty. She was on monitor to grow to be a schoolteacher in Guatemala when she took a job at a restaurant in Virginia, pondering her work in kitchens can be short-term. 4 months after Zaytinya opened, she was employed as a line prepare dinner on the fry station. She went on to grasp each different station within the kitchen: salad, sauté, grill, oven, flat prime, bread and dessert. Now she is the restaurant’s govt sous chef. She will make every of its signature dishes from scratch and has skilled most of its cooks. Many have labored at Zaytinya for greater than 5 years. “I’ve been here for 13 months,” the top chef, Terry Natas, advised me, “and I’m still the new guy.”
On the Thursday that I came visiting, I discovered Mazariegos in Zaytinya’s closet-size cooks’ workplace, engaged on the following week’s schedule. About 25 cooks and dishwashers are within the kitchen throughout every shift, and at 8 within the morning the area already hummed with the sound of workers members’ scrubbing down surfaces with soapy water. Within the again prep kitchen, Antonio Machic, who was born in Guatemala and has been working at Zaytinya for a couple of decade, was trimming 80 kilos of hen, saving the spare bits in order that they might be added into inventory.
“The beauty of this food is that everything is made like you make family food at home,” Mazariegos advised me in Spanish, which remains to be her most popular language. Almost each dish is created from scratch day by day, which requires ability and a spotlight. There are machines that make dolmades, for instance, however at Zaytinya, they’re crammed and rolled by hand by a girl from El Salvador, Julia Hernandez, who produces them by the hundreds each week. She additionally makes the restaurant’s juicy kibbeh, a football-shaped, cinnamon-spiced meatball that’s encased in a crispy shell of bulgur wheat and floor beef.
That Thursday morning, Mazariegos made a batch of phyllo utilizing the method that she realized virtually twenty years in the past straight from Abdelrazzaq Hashhoush. She flattened a dozen baseball-size rounds of dough into single sheets, every bigger than a pillowcase. Then she layered these along with handfuls of cornstarch and ran a rolling pin over the stack till it changed into one skinny, silky sheet, practically the dimensions of a throw blanket. “This is my workout,” she joked as she flipped the phyllo for the fourth time, utilizing a protracted picket dowel, after which rolled it even thinner. Phyllo made this fashion is extra elastic than the sort offered in shops, so Zaytinya can stuff it with extra spinach and form it right into a cylinder for spanakopita.
