The white truffles arrive once a week from Piemonte. By the time this article is published, they’ll be gone, just like the black truffles from Umbria, whose precarious shelf life dictates a twice-weekly shipment. Each variety is flown from Italy to grace the pappardelle at Donato and Co. only when they are in season.
Upon suggesting to executive chef Gianluca Guglielmi that he might use truffles from another region—say the geographically closer Pacific Northwest—I receive a polite kind of scoff. One can smell the difference, he says, all the way from the end of the table.
I’m not sure I’m qualified to make such a distinction, but Guglielmi has several decades of practice. It began with a childhood of grunt work helping his parents run a gastronemia in Conegliano, roughly 40 miles north of Venice, and expanded into a storied career in luxury hotel kitchens and at the helm of Michelin-star restaurants in Italy and Greece. The experiences have led him to form passionate opinions about food: Freezers destroy texture, eggplant isn’t that great, and chicken parmesan will never grace his menu.
Yet the passion that brings tears to his eyes has nothing to do with truffles or ingredients or even the process of creating what he calls “creative Italian cuisine.” That kind of passion is reserved for the people who eat it.
“I believe that when you see happy customers around you, you’re happy,” he says. “That’s, at least for me, that’s the reason why you do this. That’s the purpose of your work every day.”
Today, as Donato and Co. in Berkeley celebrates its seventh anniversary, Guglielmi is perpetuating that happiness, without compromising his culinary vision.
The Spot
In the early hours of a bustling Thursday night, Guglielmi watches each person who comes through the door into the restaurant’s open, industrial space. His eyes follow them as he shares with me, sotto voce, their particular quirks.
“This guy,” he says to me, eyeing a guest at a table next to us, “I’m surprised that he’s sitting there.” He gestures, subtly, to the table behind me. “That’s his table.”
Guglielmi shares several examples, going through a mental catalog of his most loyal visitors. And indeed, this guest relocates as soon as “his” table opens. Later, Guglielmi will greet him with great familiarity, as he will many others. While employees affectionately joke about his conversational nature, it’s clear that it’s core to the Donato and Co. experience.
“You don’t go to a restaurant anymore because you’re starving,” he says. “You go to a restaurant because you need to have the pleasure of going to a restaurant.”
He knows that the food matters—one could eat any ordinary thing—as well as the setting—one could meet someone anywhere. The pinnacle of his work is when he can bring those two elements together, to the point where a customer might reach out to him to share how much they enjoyed themselves.
“Can you get more satisfied than that? No, how can you?” he says, as his eyes begin to water.
Peak Satisfaction
The night I dined at Donato and Co., I first met Guglielmi through his food. My introduction was an almost missable menu item listed in tiny font under four columns of Italian offerings: “ASSORTED HOUSEBAKED BREAD served with GREEN OLIVE TAPENADE $5.00.”
It arrived a verdant green, the antithesis of the kalamata-heavy, chunky and audaciously salty tapenades of other institutions I believed I had loved. Its taste was pure olive essence. Heavenly.
Next up, an order of baccalà, which typically refers to salted cod. In Guglielmi’s version, it is a light mousse atop a satisfyingly spongy polenta cake bearing proud statues of homemade polenta chips.
Then Guglielmi himself began to arrive with more food.
A charcuterie board with six different varieties of beef, pork and duck, all cured in the restaurant’s basement. Spaghetti neri, an umami-rich homemade squid-ink pasta featuring bottarga, a salted and cured tuna roe. The pappardelle with white truffles I happened to catch in season. Branzino, salted only by the Grecian sea of its former home. For dessert, a pile of eggy sbrisolona e crema with a side of perfectly pale pistachio gelato. With every dish, an origin story, of produce or process or philosophy.
By dish number four, I was ready to give up, so full it was hard to sit still. Instead, I gave in. I gave in to the warmth of Guglielmi and his melodic Italian. I gave in to the languid hours that passed and the Friday night energy that brought people streaming in. I gave in to an old feeling, too, the nostalgia of my family dinners, where we lingered at the tables of old restaurants and enjoyed each other’s company as much as the food.
“At a restaurant, you don’t eat what you love,” says Guglielmi. “You eat what a chef loves.”
And when a chef loves his patrons, one feels it.
Donato & Co., Tue to Thur noon-2:30pm and 5-9pm; Fri–Sat, noon-2:30pm and 5-9:30pm; Sun noon-2:30pm and 5-8:30pm. 2635 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. 510.838.1131. donatoandco.com.
