Downtown eatery provides assortment of dining area options
Published in the November 27, 2013 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Staff Report
Chef ConradoChavez prepares fresh sauce at Mama Mia’s MediterraneanItalian Cuisine restaurant. (Photo by Marty Cheek)
Despite sharing the same name as the famous ABBA pop-song, don’t expect to find anything Nordic at Mama Mia’s Restaurant. The downtown eatery focuses on offering the best in Mediterranean cooking. Offering a perfect dining experience for everything from family evening meals to corporate and wedding banquets, Mama Mia’s emphasizes quality ingredients that provide delicious culinary choices for diners.
“The reason I love Mediterranean cuisine is because it’s something I grew up with and it’s very healthy, very light,” said Majid Bahriny, Mama Mia’s owner. “The only items that we have that are deep-fried are calamari and artichoke hearts as appetizers. We make everything in-house… Early in the morning and between lunch and dinner, basically all the desserts, breads, sauces, and salad dressings we make in house.”
Mama Mia’s executive chef Conrado Chavez can tailor most of the dishes on the menu in any way customers might like. The few exceptions are items like lasagna and meatballs or meat sauces which need to be made ahead of time, Bahriny said. “The rest of it, everything you want off the menu, we can make it to order,” he said. “We have a lot of people with different dietary needs, so we can adjust our food to suit their needs.”
When Bahriny bought the former Camelot restaurant and turned it into Mama Mia’s, his plan was to create a fine dining establishment that would emulate family-owned restaurants in the Mediterranean region. So when people come into Mama Mia’s, they find an assortment of dining areas that create the sensation of being in someone’s home.
“You go to Greece, for example, and they don’t really build a dining place as a restaurant,” Bahriny said. “They take a house and take each room and give it a different theme. I try to accomplish the same here, to have that feel at Mama Mia’s. That’s why I try to separate it in a way that if guests are sitting in the pizza room, it feels like they are sitting in somebody’s kitchen. Then we go in the back, it has a banquet room feeling. The tea room becomes more like family-style dining.”
Patrons truly love Mama Mia’s patio. Bahriny said that when he was a pharmaceutical student in Germany, he enjoyed the outdoor beer gardens for socializing. And that’s what inspired him to develop the restaurant’s patio area into an inviting exterior dining space where diners can enjoy the California sunshine. Dining al fresco, Mama Mia patrons relax to the sound of a small waterfall in the corner of the enclosed courtyard. At night, festive lights and a stream of fire light by gas jets make the patio a warm and welcome place for patrons.
“We have a good-sized outdoor patio and people can enjoy the great weather there,” Bahriny said. “It’s a shame to be inside all the time here.”
