At Zaytinya, Hilda Mazariegos is the individual liable for switching on the lights each morning. A middle-aged lady with a prepared snort, Mazariegos by no means attended a culinary college. She was on observe to turn into a schoolteacher in Guatemala when she took a job at a restaurant in Virginia, pondering her work in kitchens could 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 high, bread and dessert. Now she is the restaurant’s government sous chef. She will be able to 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 right here for 13 months,” the pinnacle chef, Terry Natas, instructed me, “and I’m nonetheless the brand new man.”
On the Thursday that I came over, 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 employees 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 few decade, was trimming 80 kilos of rooster, saving the spare bits in order that they could possibly be added into inventory.
“The great thing about this meals is that the whole lot is made such as you make household meals at dwelling,” Mazariegos instructed me in Spanish, which continues to be her most well-liked language. Practically each dish is constituted of scratch every day, which requires talent and a focus. There are machines that make dolmades, for instance, however at Zaytinya, they’re crammed and rolled by hand by a lady from El Salvador, Julia Hernandez, who produces them by the 1000’s 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 approach that she discovered virtually twenty years in the past immediately 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 became one skinny, silky sheet, practically the dimensions of a throw blanket. “That is my exercise,” she joked as she flipped the phyllo for the fourth time, utilizing a protracted wood dowel, after which rolled it even thinner. Phyllo made this fashion is extra elastic than the sort bought in shops, so Zaytinya can stuff it with extra spinach and form it right into a cylinder for spanakopita.