Before St. Anthony Hotel’s fine dining restaurant Esencia opens, Chef Leo Dávila serves the wait staff a family meal.
They line up outside the kitchen at a counter to plate food prepared by Chef Jeremy Casas, Dávila’s culinary school classmate. Deep baking dishes simmer with leftover spaghetti noodles, meatballs, bits of rotisserie chicken and a variety of vegetables. They grab strands of spaghetti with tongs and spoon rich, red sauce over mounds of pasta.
Then they sit at polished wood tables in an adjacent dining room, where gold and red Asian dragons dance and writhe across black wallpaper…