Portland Wine Week Chef Feature: Paolo Laboa of Solo Italiano

Wine and food are made for each other. Since the inception of wine, human beings have had wine and food together to stimulate our minds and our appetites. This year for Portland Wine Week we wanted to bring you in to meet some of the chefs that help make our Portland Wine Week so special and make this great city so renowned for its food. We will be showcasing five Chefs that we love, who will be hosting events and participating in this year's Portland Wine Week and bringing you closer to the kitchen than you may ever have gotten before. We love Chefs here in Portland and are excited to bring you the Portland Wine Week Chef Showcase series brought to you by Buoy Local.

Meet Chef Paolo Laboa, Chef/Owner of Solo Italiano here in Portland, and Solo Cucina in South Portland, and Solo Pane e Pasticceria up the coast in Bath, Maine. Chef Paolo was born and raised in Genoa, Italy, and was born into a family with a passion for cooking. He has been cooking ever since he was a child and has no intention of stopping any time soon. Chef Paolo cooks from the heart. Whenever he cooks, he seeks to bring the memories he has of his grandmother and mother’s cooking right to your table, and it truly shows.

Paolo says his earliest memory of his love for food is sitting in the dining room chair as a child and watching his mother cook meals for the whole family. When he was hungry, his mother would bring him bread and a bowl of pesto, and he would sit in the chair and savor every bite as his mother sang songs and created beautiful smells. He remembers that his “mother was always singing when she made food.” One day he asked her why and she said, “Because I'm going to be happy, the food is going to be happy, and your father is going to be even more happy.” This philosophy of love and happiness directly influencing the food is clearly apparent with every bite of his food. In his own words, he tells us, “My mother, she was an incredible cook. The mother of my father, she was an amazing, incredible cook. So I was just born with this love for flavor, and In my cooking, I cook with memories. I don't cook with the recipe. I cook with memories and heart, you know? I'm proud of the art of cooking, and I try to do my best.” It’s all about “sharing experiences and enjoying with people because food is energy. It keeps us alive. It is our first medicine.”

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Portland Wine Week Chef Showcase is Sponsored by Buoy Local.

When Paolo was 16, he began working in restaurants washing dishes, always watching the chefs as they did their work. He remembers one particularly busy day when the cooks and staff were out eating lunch before service, and he noticed that nobody had made the pesto for the day yet. He remembers that they were severely understaffed, so he decided he would try to be helpful, and he made the pesto he had watched his mother make countless times before. When the Chef returned from lunch, he was dumbfounded to see that the pesto had already been made and asked who had done it. Paolo raised his hand, and the chef asked him where he had learned the recipe from. Paolo answered that it was his mother’s recipe, the chef tasted it, and from that point on, Paolo made the pesto in the restaurant and no longer did the dishes.

That pesto, the same one his grandmother and mother made, passed down to Chef Paolo, that he won a global pesto competition with, and the same recipe that he serves today at Solo Italiano. At Solo, he cooks the memories of his family with wholesome ingredients that he feels confident serving to people. “Everything is farm to table here. I really try to use the most beautiful ingredients I can and then cook for people like I would cook for my family.” He believes that it makes cooking easier when you have the predisposition to buy good ingredients. “When you have this, I think when people taste, they taste the energy that's very important, good energy always.”

When asked if there are some other dishes in Portland he really loves, he tells me, “Ah, mamma mia, you know this is a good question. I don't want to say one and then not say the other one… But I like, for example, my friend Jordan does good sushi. I like the Chef at Izakaya Minato. I like all the restaurants of Dana Street, Chaval, EVO, you know it's hard because I think everyone does something very, very good.” For Chef Paolo he says that any time he can get out of the kitchen and be cooked for, he is always grateful. “I love all of them. I want to be nice to all of them right now, but it's not easy to list everyone. Everybody does something special. That's what makes Portland so special.”

Chef Paolo is just as excited for Portland Wine Week as we are. Coming from a culture of wine and food he knows that “these are beautiful things, wine and food, when they go together it is amazing,” Portland Wine Week is an “opportunity for all these people with a lot of knowledge to come together and teach each other about wine and food… it’s always a great experience, and it puts all the people together in great spirits… I think it is very important for Portland.” About his own love of wine, he tells me “I don't like to, you know, drink to be drunk, but if you drink for the enjoyment [of the wine and food] even if you drink one glass more, it makes your heart happy, that’s it”

We certainly agree, Chef!