Emma Calcara makes music in the kitchen at Palladio Trattoria
Chef Emma Calcara is passionate, about food — and music. The owner of Palladio Trattoria, in Bonita Springs, left Italy for Los Angeles in hopes of finding fame as a musician. Instead, she ended up cooking for the famous and some of music royalty, such as The Rolling Stones, Barbara Streisand, Dolly Parton, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake and more. Those culinary connections landed her a gig as the chef on tour with Live Nation, a renowned concert and event promoter.
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A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in LA, she moved to Southwest Florida to be closer to family, and opened a restaurant specializing in cuisine from her northern Italian home of Vicenza. A carnivore’s dream, the menu has lots of grilled, grass-fed meats, Berkshire pork, New Zealand lamb and veal chops.
Wild boar ragu is a signature. Chef Emma slowly braises the lean rich meat until tender and juicy. The braising liquids are used to sauté onions and celery before adding tomatoes and a little cream to soften the acidity. It simmers with the meat until spooned over a plate of freshly made pappardelle pasta.
Venison is cooked in a similar method, slow roasting until it shreds from the bone, but it’s used in ravioli rather than ragu. She adds spices such as cinnamon and cloves to the meat, along with asiago cheese, then places dollops of the mixture on a sheet of hand-rolled pasta, where it’s formed into half-moon raviolis. The pasta is served with a light fresh tomato sauce. The meats may be heavier here, but the sauces tend to be lighter for balance.
Chef Emma also makes gnocchi from scratch, calling the process meditative. The types of potatoes and sauces she uses changes seasonally. Recently it has been sweet potatoes in butter and sage.
Brian Tietz
The menu is laid out in traditional Italian form with pasta as primi piatti, or first course. Patrons may still order pasta as a main course, but Chef Emma recommends having the full Italian experience when dining here — half portion of pasta, then a protein-based entrée.
Growing up, the chef spent many summers in Maryland where her family had a restaurant. She serves the state’s famous blue crab, over linguini. Also in the seafood category is decadent lobster ravioli in vodka sauce with shrimp, clams in a white wine sauce with linguine, cioppino (traditional fish stew) and a catch of the day, typically prepared in Mediterranean or Adriatic styles.
For dessert, place your order ahead of time for frittelle; it takes 20 minutes to make. Famously served during carnival, Chef Emma laughs, “I love it so much, it’s my restaurant, so now I can have it all year.” Balls of dough with golden raisins are fried until light and airy, topped with powdered sugar, and served with sweet cream.
If you prefer an after-dinner cocktail rather than dessert, try grappa — a spirit distilled from grape pumice, leftover from winemaking. She prides herself in searching for small producers and has an entire array of different kinds of grappa to suit all tastes.
The bar is a popular meeting place where everyone appears to be old friends or happy to make new ones. Happy hour is daily with discounts on food and drinks including half-off hand-tossed pizzas. Cauliflower crust is available for gluten-free diners.
Specialty cocktails are made with Italian twists. There are smoky drinks and house-made oranchino; think limoncello but with oranges. Artisanal beers from northern Italy include an amber made from radicchio. Most of the wines are from the Veneto region, however, you will find selections from other parts of Italy, Europe and California.
As one might expect from a musical chef, live performances are part of the dining experience. There’s a piano nestled in the back of the restaurant and played mostly for ambiance on weekends. The Hot Buttered Nuggets play more upbeat, vintage, blues and swing on Wednesdays.
In-between her touring gigs in LA, the personable chef taught cooking classes at Sur La Table where she was billed “Chef to the Stars.” Her cooking classes on Palladio often sell out. She also loves teaching and empowering her kitchen staff, which just so happens to be predominantly female.
“The professional kitchen is a man’s world. I’m a petite woman and starting out, it was a challenge, physically and mentally, delegating a kitchen full of men,” she says of first becoming a chef. “I like to share my knowledge with others... I want them to see someone like me and know it’s possible.”
Known as Chef Emma to regulars, she is like a magnet; people enjoy being around her, learning from her and love eating her hearty, well-prepared food. You can feel it when you walk in and when you leave, instinct tells you you’ll be back for an encore.
