Growing up, Libro at Laurelwood executive chef Mario Gagliano would rather shred guitar than a head of lettuce.
“I was definitely musically inclined at a young age,” says Gagliano, 27. “I got a cheap guitar from my mom for Christmas when I was in the fourth grade. Just one of those things I picked up on pretty quickly. Just strummed notes, messing around with my fingers, putting them at random spots.”
He was serious about music. “I was a rapper. I was pretty mean with it, too. But there was so much money going in and none going out. I was paying for studio time. Paying for discs. At that time, I had to pay to perform for shows and all this. And one day I was just, ‘What am I doing this for?’”
He helped out at Fratelli’s, which at one time was owned by his mother Sabine Bachmann. Gagliano, who joined his brothers Armando and John-Paul Gagliano, began as a server and dishwasher and later became head cook.
But, he says, “It was just a job. Granted, it was my mother’s business and all. I was in my late teens, early 20s. I just wanted to do other things. I wasn’t really focused on that.”
Things changed after his mother opened Ecco on Overton Park. “I was at Rhodes College playing basketball one day a few months after Ecco opened and Armando calls me and says basically they need somebody on ‘garm’ [garde manger]. I didn’t really have a choice. I dropped the basketball thinking I’m going to come help one day. I came back the next day. I was on that cold side for five years.”
Mario eventually began cooking. And he got feedback. “You would get servers coming back, ‘Hey, compliments to the chef.’ Or seeing the plates come back empty. I really started getting satisfaction: ‘Hey, I made somebody’s night with that food.’”
His cooking career was sidelined for a few months after he fractured his wrist. He couldn’t go to work, but, he says, “I was infatuated with cooking shows. I was able to read books. I couldn’t do anything because this was right when the pandemic was going on. Nothing much to do. Nowhere to go. All I had was food and trying to figure it out, trying to get as much knowledge as possible.”
Mario then went to work at Libro, also owned by Bachmann, inside Novel. “I was pumped. I was super excited to get back there and put what I learned to use.
“It was the first time I was cooking without Armando being there. He was at Ecco all the time. Any time I had a question about anything I would ask him. Because he wasn’t there, I had to do things the wrong way and figure out the right way to do it by messing up.
“I would just tweak things. Instead of doing this like this, I’ll do it like this ’cause it seemed to come out better. Trial and error.”
Monthly specials were daunting. “I figured out how to come up with a good dish. However, I’m still not one to understand, really, what it means when someone ‘puts themselves on a plate.’ I get that it’s something you come up with. But I just need to really understand the ‘express yourself through a dish’ kind of thing.”
His popular jackfruit pulled-pork vegetarian sandwich is one of his recent specials. “It was kind of left field.”
Mario is confident in his career choice. “Oh, yeah, 100,000 percent without a doubt. I get far more satisfaction doing this than music or anything else. I can’t imagine what else I’d be doing if it wasn’t this. You’ve got the camaraderie of the kitchen. You have a high-stress job. You have a challenging position. You have to be creative. You have to put in long hours. You’re going to make mistakes. These are all things I don’t feel like I could do anywhere else and get as much fulfillment out of it.”
