Downtown has a New York-style Italian family-friendly restaurant
Printed on page 8 of the July10, 2013 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Morgan Hill foodies looking for good New York-style Italian deli-restaurant cuisine don’t need to travel back east to find it. Ricatoni’s right in the heart of our community’s downtown is a family-friendly restaurant specializing in mouth-watering Italian dishes and hearty deli fare like you’d find in the Big Apple.
The restaurant’s menu provides diners with an offering of classic lunches and dinners of pasta, salads, soup, seafood, smoked meats and sandwiches.
Inside the restaurant you’ll find a casual and friendly ambiance. Frank Sinatra music plays in the background as diners relax at tables covered with checkerboard table cloth. A brightly-painted mural of the Tuscany countryside accents one of the walls.
Outside, sidewalk dining is available to enjoy the downtown street scene. People heading to the Thursday Night or Friday Night Music series often call in their orders (the menu is available online) and pick up a delicious picnic meal they can enjoy while listening to the performers. Ricatoni’s also has a private banquet room that seats up to 40 diners.
Ricatoni’s chef-owner Norberto Hernandez said his cooking style was influenced by his travels in the Tilamook region of Oregon as well as Yountville in the Napa Valley.“I liked these kinds of restaurants in a small town in a small place,” he said. “I wanted to create a place that’s cozy and that’s fun to eat in. And like Napa, right here in the Morgan Hill area are a lot of good wineries. So after wine tasting, you can come to downtown Morgan Hill and eat here.”
Hernandez has a long-time passion for good food. “I love cooking. I’ve been cooking since I was a child,” he said. “My mom all the time, she was busy. And we would ask her, ‘Can you teach us how to cook and we’ll make our own food.’ And that’s how I started learning and my interest grew. And then I learned a lot working at restaurants as a manager and a chef.”
He worked as a chef for the Peppermill Casino in Reno and at various restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area including San Jose’s Bella Mia’s. Traveling also helped him develop his culinary art skills. In 2001, he worked as a manager chef at barbecue place Armadillo Willies when the chain decided to open up several stores in Texas. Traveling through the Lone Star state, Hernandez saw a cornucopia of different dishes and kept thinking to himself, “I want to make something like that.”
Ricatoni’s is locally famous for its Italian deli sandwiches — the restaurant’s meatball sandwich is a special favorite among many Morgan Hill diners. Pasta is made fresh in the kitchen by Hernandez using a machine imported from Italy.
Signature pasta dishes include lobster ravioli, Mafalda chicken alfredo, and clam and prawn spaghetti. To finish off a meal, diners are tempted by a large selection of Italian desserts including chocolate fondue, tiramisu, cannolis and flute limoncello.
“Nothing comes from a can or something like that,” Hernandez said. “The sauce and everything we make from scratch. We crush the tomatoes and make the sauce fresh. Same with the meat. We grind the meat and we cook everything here. Everything is fresh. It makes such a difference in the flavor and the taste really pops out.”
