Don’t expect to find food cooked sous vide or any molecular gastronomy at Dino. It’s not the way Dean Gold, owner-chef of this Cleveland Park Italian restaurant, likes to eat. He prefers the food he eats now that the friends he's made on visits to Italy no longer try to impress him with meals at fancy restaurants. They know that what he and his wife Kay Zimmerman really want to do is to eat like them - at places where the owner probably won’t even ask what dish you're ordering unless you’re obviously not a local. You'll get served what he believes you’re going to love.

And don't expect in Gold a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. Gold came to running his own restaurant via a massive heart attack, in early 2002. Once he’d recovered from quintuple bypass surgery, he and his wife took a trip to Italy. And although traveling regularly to Italy as the buyer and coordinator for wines, cheeses and specialty foods for Whole Foods in Southern California had made him intimately familiar with Italian products, “That first trip got us down to the true simplicity of Tuscan cooking.” Impressed, they floated the idea of opening their own restaurant. 18 months later, they launched Dino, serving rustic classics like Ribollita, the thick Tuscan bread and vegetable soup, a confitted-then-roasted milk-fed pig, pasta dishes from across Italy, unusual Italian cheeses, and a wide-ranging list of Italian wines to drink with them.

Gold had first experienced Italian food at a serious level working for owner-chef of Angeli Caffe in Los Angeles, Evan Kleiman. He’d come to her via the wine trade. And he’d come to the wine trade via economics. Yes, Gold is not a cooking school graduate. Although he describes his mother as a "great" cook - amending that after a fraction of a pause to “fabulous”, she had a limited repertoire. “She was best around Jewish holidays.” But she gave him a taste for the kitchen, not to encourage him, but to keep him out of the way. “I was a pain in the ass,” Gold grins. “She needed to give me jobs in the kitchen to keep me out from under. As time went by, she gave me more and more. I’d grate the gefilte by hand! And the chicken. She just loved it. 15 minutes with the blender - or two hours by hand?”

It launched his enthusiasm for cooking. At seven he learned to cook omelets for his classmates. He cut his young teeth on Julia Child recipes with the resolve of Julie Powell but not the same outcome. “I started at page one and by page 240 I said, I don’t need to do this any more.” It was always his eventual goal to have a restaurant.

Yet after college he went into economics. Why? “I was just damned good at it. I loved the whole academic process, going to a workshop and tearing the research to shreds.” He chuckles. “But I hated academia.”

When he opened Dino in 2005, he wasn’t its chef. With the Italianization of his name above the door, he felt it important to be visible, to greet his guests and pay them attention. Then in early 2008 his chef at the time had to take a sabbatical to deal with family matters. “So I stepped into the kitchen as a stop gap to keep things running,” Gold recounts. “For the first few weeks I was doing the ordering, picking up a few loose ends. We had enough people in the kitchen to cover shifts. But I started observing the way we were struggling due to the complexity of the menu. Our biggest complaint was inconsistency. So I started making changes, making things simpler. And as they got simpler, they got better. People started coming to me with ideas. We started playing around with things as a team.”  

The restaurant continued in this fashion until early that June when Gold began to realize that running the kitchen had become a reality, not just a stop gap. And that it was time to forget about anyone else being the chef but him.

So now it’s Gold who makes or oversees the stocks that take three days to produce, and the pasta sauces which need at least four hours’ cooking. Yet he manages to maintain a strong presence as the front of house. And keeps up his connections with the Italian artisans whose products provide much of the backbone of Dino’s kitchen. He met many of them while working for Whole Foods, through the man who has become his best friend. An Armenian with 25 years in Italy under his belt, Gold was taken by him to get his hands stuck in vats of Parmiggiano Reggiano curds, dip his fingers into decades-old Balsamico and eye the pigs that would become Parma ham. He taught Gold how to understand the culture of the country and the difference between the way an Italian in a small village bar and one in a big city would order a cappuccino.

Gold loves his trips to Italy. Flying back into DC he feels like he’s leaving home, not getting back to it. But he doesn’t see himself in Italy running a restaurant. What he and his wife would like, though, once they’re through the first five years of Dino’s existence, is to buy an out-of-the-way place there, probably in Le Marche, the eastern side of central Italy between the Adriatic Sea and the Apennine chain. Until then, he’s happy cooking what he likes to call “Nonno” cuisine – “Grandfather”, instead of the familiar "Nonna" or  “Grandmother” food.

“The Grandpa cooked on Sundays, and bought stuff that was more expensive. And he was at the meal drinking while the grandmother was in the kitchen cleaning up.” Gold gives another grin. With his food - and the opera that he and his wife have become passionate about, he’s clearly a very fulfilled heart attack survivor.

Dino, 3435 Connecticut Ave NW, 202 686 2966.

Photo of Dean Gold courtesy of Food & Friends.

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