Vinnie Cimino Talks Tiger Meat, Farms, and Inspiration.

EHC: Tell me a little about yourself - Introduce yourself to Memphis.

VC: My name is Vinny Cimino, and I am the chef-partner of Cordelia in Cleveland, Ohio. Cordelia is my partner Andrew’s great-grandmother. He attributes her to everything that he knows about hospitality and taking care of folks. To me, this restaurant is a great partnership revolving around people. We set out to open up this restaurant, really at the onset of a pandemic, and we knew that coming out of a pandemic, restaurants were, you know, solely about people. So we wanted to create a restaurant that was really invoking hospitality, not just outward to our guests, but focusing inward with our folks who choose to spend their time with us day in and day out. And that's kind of where we lay our head at night. So, Cordelia is really intended to be about people.

EHC: What story are you trying to tell with your work?

VC: Our story is one of modern Midwest heritage. We celebrate people, we celebrate food, we celebrate the bounties of the land. We break bread at a table and talk and tell stories and laugh and pass plates; We narrate the story of Midwest living through our food.

EHC: What’s your philosophy on food and dining?

VC: We celebrate Midwestern fare. You know, we refer to our cuisine as “modern grandma” which is a kind of fun, Kitsch, interesting way to put it. It's just familiar flavors, re-imagined. We celebrate the bounties of Northeast Ohio, and we partner with anywhere between 16 to 20 different local farms and purveyors. We rely on what we have in our backyards to set our menus. With that, we don't really build menus based on ingredients, we build menus based on the farms and the farmers; We allow them to come to us and tell us what they're planting, what they have coming up, and then we build our menus around that. We don't come up with an idea and say “I want to find this from somebody” and then put this on our menu, we start those conversations early on and allow them to tell us what they're growing and what they're excited about, then we bring in those things and figure out how to use them.=

EHC: What sources do you use for continued inspiration?

VC: I draw a lot of my inspiration for cooking and hospitality from my grandparents. I come from a big family. On my dad's side, a big Italian-Slovenian family (he had eight brothers and sisters), and then on my mom's side, English, German, and Irish. She had three brothers and sisters who then had a litter of cousins and children themselves. And we were all very close together and all our family functions on both sides of the family were centered around food.

I spent a lot of time with my mom's parents, traveling around the country, and going to dog shows. My mom's from Alabama, so we spent a lot of time in the South, a lot of time in Southern Alabama shucking oysters together, and. eating a lot of very soulful food. You know, Southerners and Midwesterners are very similar in nature - it's a lot about family, a lot about sharing and coming together around food. There are a lot of similarities when it comes to Southern hospitality and “Midwest nice,” as they say. Whether it's saying hello to somebody on the street, or feeding you heartily. So that's kind of where my roots are, and that's really what continues to inspire me today, to continue to take that Midwest nice mentality and continue pushing that forward, day in and day out through our food and creating very comforting foods, and a very warming kind of familiar cuisine, but giving it to you in a more interesting light. It’s the same with our hospitality - We know that a restaurant takes more than just two people to run, and we rely on our people day in and day out to invoke that Midwest nice hospitality, pay it forward to our guests and to be able to create this environment where people want to come in and feel like they belong.

EHC: Tell me about a significant food memory of yours.

VC: Around the holidays, my grandfather would always eat what he called “tiger meat sandwiches,” really it was just like stale-ass white bread with ground beef from the grocery store and raw onions and yellow mustard. I remember it seemed horrible, and my mom would tell me “Don't eat them” and I would tell her “DON’T WORRY.”

But, you know, remembering something like that, and then thinking about how do we make this something modern now. So during the holidays, we do our version. We call it a cannibal sandwich. It's a house -made Japanese milk bun, and we do essentially a steak tartare that's emulsified with a spicy English mustard and mayo, some malted pickled onions, some Kool -Aid pickles, some preserved green tomatoes from last season and make just like little like tartare sandwich situation and it's become part of our identity during the holidays. So, we do these fun, nostalgic nods to the foods we grew up with, and then in that same breath we take the seasons that we hold so dear and utilize the produce that surrounds us.