Gilbert Gourmet: Chef Kenny Cuomo brings big-city flavor to the East Valley

Picture a cook’s life in Chicago. Long, loud nights in hot, mean kitchens. Your sharp-elbowed co-workers all vying to go from line cook to the next celebrity chef. You’re so amped up after shifts, not even a few drinks can calm you down.

Kenny Cuomo lived that sprint. When he describes it today, the pressure still seeps through.

“There were points in my life where, you know, going out drinking all night, then maybe laying down for an hour, getting a shower, going to work,” he says. “And that was 10 years of that lifestyle.”

One night, at the legendary steakhouse Charlie Trotter’s, he burned a dish in a copper rondeau. Those wide, shallow pots were important — every one was polished by hand. Panicked, he snuck the pot out of the kitchen. He had to hide the evidence.

“I was so embarrassed that I threw the pot, not in our garbage. I ran down the alley, threw it in a different Dumpster,” Cuomo says.

That sort of manic pressure forged Cuomo in his youth. Today, as the driving force behind Maeva — a new Heritage District destination for French cuisine, and almost certainly the best restaurant of any kind in Gilbert — he has traded the big-city grind for streets lined with palm trees.

He maintains an intense focus on perfecting his food and his hospitality. His new all-day restaurant has set the bar for dining in the East Valley. Now fully in control, Cuomo is ready for the moment. But is Gilbert ready for him?

A taste of France in Gilbert

I first met Cuomo in December when I made the trek from central Phoenix to the East Valley for dinner roughly six weeks after Maeva opened. The trip required a 30-mile drive, mostly on the wide lanes of Interstate 10 and U.S. Route 60, to reach the multistory parking lot behind Maeva.

Plenty of people have made that drive, and not looked back. Gilbert has ballooned by some 80,000 residents since 2010, to nearly 300,000 people. It’s now the fourth-largest city in Arizona and is trying, sorta, to shake its reputation as the world’s hay-shipping capital. Young professionals with above-average salaries and an above-average number of kids have filled a sea of sand-colored starter houses over the years, looked around, and wondered what, exactly, there is to do in Gilbert.

The downtown’s historic Heritage District pulls them in like moths to a lamp. An area with a deep history in agriculture and the Mormon Church is now home to a buzzy entertainment district that tilts conservative and accessible.

Outside Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row, customers in cowboy boots and wide-brimmed hats wait in line for their chance to dance to twangy country pop. At O.H.S.O. Brewing, millennial parents sip craft beer while their kids pinball around and munch on chicken fingers. Postino, a casual upscale chain, attracts moms who share bottles of wine and bruschetta boards at happy hour.

Maeva, by contrast, promises classic French cooking, carefully plated and delivered with fine-dining-level service. It seemed so out of place, I had to see it for myself. 

On my first visit, just before the holidays, strands of sparkling lights decorated the streets outside. Inside, the restaurant was moody, romantic. Small lamps bounced light off white marble tables.

At that time, dinner at Maeva was a four-course prix fixe menu for $90 per person. The meal wowed me from the jump. It started with a plate of intricate, carefully crafted bites. A honey-drizzled, layered Parmesan crisp challenged expectations of the Italian cheese. A pork trotter croquette made me wonder how adventurous Gilbert diners might get.

Plate after plate hit the table. Refreshing albacore tuna crudo. Herbaceous, tangy goat cheese served with tender slices of grilled squash. Somehow, the four courses kept multiplying. At one point, Cuomo popped out of the kitchen to present a chicken soup en croute. Its cross-hatched pastry lid flaked as it gave way to a savory medley of meat and vegetables. 

The chef, built sturdy, with a tightly shaved head, excitedly told us he learned to make the dish while studying in Lyon, France. I wondered: How did a classically trained chef and world traveler end up in the East Valley ‘burbs?

On a sunny Friday this spring, I returned to ask him just that. I got more than I bargained for.

Thriving amid the chaos

When I arrived, Maeva was at full brunch pitch. I made my way to the host stand, pausing to wait behind a mom in a floral dress wrestling her stroller through the doorway. A group of young women in pastel athleisure outfits, expensive headphones around their necks, rushed to meet friends sipping bright green matchas and snacking on cheffed-up avocado toasts. 

Behind the white marble bar, the espresso machine whistled. Chatter flowed through the open doors from groups squeezing the last out of patio season. Sunlight filled the space, revealing the subtle greens in the dark walls and the pops of color from funky artwork hung throughout the space.

The art belongs to the restaurant owners’ private collection. Dawn and Treg Bradley are local real estate investors who dreamed of bringing a taste of their world travels to Treg’s hometown. The inspiration? Monaco. The location? Gilbert. Amid the brunch chaos, the owners sat at a central table in matching butter-yellow outfits, sampling teas, symmetrical sandwiches and petite desserts for a new tea service. 

Then, I showed up for an interview. No way the chef has time for this right now, I thought.

The hostess showed me to a table, and a petite woman with thick hair and a warm smile brought menus and water. I’d later learn that this was Nina Cochrane, the chef’s business partner and wife. 

“Hello!” a familiar voice boomed. Cuomo was dressed in a striped mustard and white button-down with a black apron tied in the front. He shook my hand and launched into the day’s “itinerary,” intending to walk me through lunch. When I explained I was just here for the interview, he reluctantly settled in.

In the seven years I’ve covered the Valley’s dining scene, I’ve found that most conversations with chefs follow a template. Chefs are busy, so they want to stay concise. After a minute of small talk — some heat we’re having! How’s business? and so on — we talk about their inspiration, what they’ve got on the menu, what’s next. Then I close my notebook, and they head back to the kitchen.

But when chefs have more time, it’s a joy to dig deeper, to have a real conversation. Even if they don’t have time, some are so passionate, they talk anyway. On the day of my visit, that was Cuomo: totally slammed, yet game to keep dishing.

Fishing and finding a passion

Cuomo is from northern New Jersey, and food is in his blood. His great-grandfather moved from Italy to New York City, where he worked as a fishmonger. Cuomo remembers gardening with his grandmother, “a real adventurer,” who grew her own celery and shallots. His dad was a food distributor and his mom was among the first women to work in contract food sales. 

Cuomo talks about his parents as if they were celebrities. More than recounting memories, he describes them with a sense of awe. 

When he tells stories of his father’s food warehouse, his eyes sparkle. He talks excitedly, waving his hands and leaning on the table. 

“He made me start working in his warehouse at nine years old,” Cuomo says. “And I will tell you, that first week, it was hard. He said, ‘You don’t stop moving. You keep going.’”

From then on, Cuomo worked there during the summers, learning from a dad who was encouraging yet tough. When Cuomo wasn’t in the bustling warehouse, he’d head to the lake.

Before he learned to drive a car, he learned to drive a boat. As a kid, Cuomo became a skilled bass fisherman. He competed in tournaments around the Northeast and secured sponsors who paid his entry fees. 

“It was truly a passion of my life, and I was getting tremendous at it,” Cuomo says. “By the time I was in high school and I could have my own driver’s license, my parents would let me leave school to go fish these bass tournaments.”

When he was 17, away at a fishing tournament on New York’s Cayuga Lake, his mother died. She’d lost her battle with cancer. For years, Cuomo couldn’t bring himself to return to the water. Instead, he leaned into the lessons his mom taught him.

“My mother was a brilliant woman,” Cuomo says. “She was always like, ‘Travel the world. Go.’ She always pushed me to go and do things. To not be afraid. Be fearless.”

Cuomo’s eyes well up behind his thin-framed glasses as he reminisces about his mom. As he talks, I think carefully about my next question. Then, in a blink, three beverages hit the table.

Cheyenne Sullivan, the head barista, delivers a signature lavender latte, a matcha cortado in a thick cup, and an iced creme brulee latte topped with cold foam and chocolate biscotti.

Are these for tasting? For photographing? Unsure, I do both. The chef gathers himself and steps away to check on the kitchen. Sullivan sits down. She has a bouncy dyed-blonde bob and a soft smile. She came to Maeva from Flagstaff, where she helped open the renowned all-day restaurant Sosta. At 22, she curates the entire coffee program. In the mornings, the bar is her domain and she creates new drinks for the ever-rotating cafe menu.

Five minutes after he left, Cuomo returns. “She’s a rock star,” he says with hands extended, “Literally. She has, like, three bands. She goes to shows. Part of my job as a leader is to identify talents. People’s weaknesses, people’s strengths. Push them to where they can go. But I truly feel she’s been becoming this super creative person.”

Cuomo has a way of heaping praise on his staffers. It’s a way, I gather, to pull them into the spotlight and perhaps to deflect a little from himself. He also nudges them to dive headfirst into their passions, as he learned to.

Chef on the move

Cuomo attended the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California, before moving to the Napa Valley. After many long nights in the kitchen, he was driving home one night when his car was hit by a garbage truck. It was a wakeup call, he says. He was ready to stop studying what he calls “the grande cuisine” from afar. He wanted to start living it.

He left California and took six months to drive back to New York. Along the way, he staged at restaurants across the country, from San Francisco to Chicago and “everywhere you could possibly imagine,” Cuomo says. 

Then, he kept going. Cuomo headed to Europe, where he worked and traveled for two and a half years. He made a home base at his aunt’s house in the Rhone River Valley, before working in San Sebastian, Barcelona, Paris and London, absorbing everything he could about each city’s and country’s cuisines. He filled his free time at bookstores. Too broke to buy the books he wanted, he’d camp out and read for hours about food and culture.

“When I lived in London, I worked at a butcher shop,” Cuomo says with a grin. “They gave me 200 pounds a week and all the meat I could eat.”

After having his fill, and dining at as many Michelin-starred restaurants as he could earn invitations, Cuomo returned to the States and moved to Chicago, where he picked up a gig at Charlie Trotter’s. He took more than a shiny pot away from that kitchen.

“Charlie, to this day, I feel, is one of the greatest hospitality heroes we have ever had,” Cuomo says. “He really, truly taught us: Treat it like it’s yours, and someday, it will be. And I will tell you, that meant painting the garage. That meant cleaning the dumpsters. (But) the level of people that came there, the level of hospitality, it just took my mind to another level.”

From Chicago, Cuomo returned to New York. He worked in various roles at Del Posto, Per Se, The Lambs Club and Blue Hill NYC. Then he struck out on his own and founded his first restaurant consulting company. He connected with a hospitality company called Restaurant Associates, which handles culinary programs for large companies. 

Restaurant Associates was where Cochrane happened to work. She was in sales, and they often crossed paths.

“However, he had a girlfriend, and I had a boyfriend,” Cochrane says, with a laugh.

It wasn’t until 2014, when the Super Bowl landed in New Jersey, and they bumped into one another working at a dinner held at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. 

“It was every football team owner and whoever they had on a table of 12,” Cochrane recalls. “I walked into this one room, and it was just, like, Kenny with 800 salad plates.”

They chatted for a moment before Cuomo had to get back to salads. When Cochrane got to work on Monday, she found an email inviting her out for coffee, or, even better, dinner?

“I was telling a friend of mine, ‘It’s kind of weird, you know? I know this guy through work. I don’t think I’m gonna do this,’” Cochrane says. “And she was like, ‘So you’re just gonna stay home and watch “Dateline”?’”

She worried about their 10-year age gap. When they met, she was 43 and he was 33. 

He won her over anyway.

“I just found his energy really intoxicating,” she says. “He just seemed so passionate about what he did for work, his friends, his life. And I really liked it.”

In March, the couple celebrated 10 years of marriage. Three years ago, they went into business together. 

They run Orbit Collective, a company that works with aspirational restaurant owners to bring their visions to life. Cochrane tackles menu development, logistics and front-of-house operations. Cuomo focuses on the back-of-house, bringing in talented chefs, sommeliers, baristas and bartenders from his “orbit.”

For Maeva, he tapped head chef Ben Klein. The slim chef, who stands with exceptional posture and wears his dark hair in a tight ponytail, worked at top restaurants in Portland and was living in Las Vegas when Cuomo met up with him in New York. 

“We’re having dinner together, and I was like, ‘Ben, it’s your time, bro. You’re ready. Let’s talk about a business thing,’” Cuomo says.

At this point, Cuomo looks up from our table as a busser clears the coffee drinks. Lead bartender Jacob Leon carefully carries a black tray laden with colorful cocktails and mocktails. Cuomo pops up once again, and Leon and sommelier and general manager Ehecatl Perez sit down.

Leon presents the Muse, a sour-apple mocktail; the Surreal Socialite, a strawberry spritz; and a drink in development, tentatively called the Thorn of the Desert. Cuomo found Leon — an earnest former Marine working in IT and structural engineering for General Motors — by posting a job opening on Nextdoor. He wanted to find a local who had the pulse of Gilbert. 

Perez, the sommelier, met Cuomo after he stopped by for dessert and got chatting with the chef. They realized they’d worked at the same restaurant, at different times, in Mexico. Cuomo brought Perez aboard to manage the front of house and make wine recommendations that pair with each dish customers order.

He presents a bottle of Georgian orange wine. Orange, or skin-contact wine, is a staple on menus at trendy local wine bars. It’s old news in places like New York or Chicago. I wondered how diners in Gilbert were receiving it.

“I’ll explain it by the numbers,” Perez says in a thick Spanish accent. “We are selling way more orange than rosé.”

Rent a house, bring the cat

At most of their restaurant gigs, Cuomo and Cochrane come in, hire staff, get the business humming, and move on. In the Valley, something felt different. The duo are keen to put down roots.

A particularly cold New York winter drove Cochrane to seek warmer climes. When the Arizona opportunity came up, she admits, “I had to Google where Gilbert was.”

Cuomo was more familiar, having visited Arizona as a kid. His grandmother, aunt and uncle lived in the East Valley, the chef says.

“This area means a lot to me,” Cuomo says. “I want this to be a home here. We got a little place. We brought our cat Fettuccine from New York. She’s lived her whole life in this apartment, and she’s a tiny little cat. Now, you know, I open up the door, she goes outside, she’s never been happier.”

Cochrane sees the booming, wide-open Gilbert market as a promising space for new restaurants. 

“In New York, it can be very frustrating to be a chef because there’s so many great restaurants,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re opening up an Italian restaurant? How unusual. There’s only 50 excellent Italian restaurants in this neighborhood alone.’”

Maeva is staking out new territory in Gilbert. That could work against the new restaurant. But if East Valley customers are willing to step out of their comfort zones, and others are willing to drive in from Phoenix, they might just find something exceptional.

Putting down roots in Arizona has other benefits for Cuomo. He has concepts on the West Coast that are easier to reach from his newfound Arizona hub. The Maeva team is thinking about expanding with a bakery next door. Cuomo dreams of bringing Maeva to Scottsdale one day.

He spent his life cooking in some of the world’s best kitchens, eating at Michelin-honored restaurants. The Michelin Guide is coming to Arizona for the first time this year, with a new Southwest guide focusing on restaurants in our state plus Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. Recognition from the world’s most famous restaurant guide could put his adopted city on the map.

Cuomo insists he’s not working for accolades. He’s pushing his team to achieve excellence, and if that impresses Michelin inspectors or James Beard Award judges, then so be it. He seemed more moved at the memory of a recent visit from his father, who came west to see the new restaurant.

“He told me, this food, the service, this is the best you have ever been,” Cuomo says. “It meant a lot.”

Three solid hours into our chat, I move to wrap things up. The chef tries once more to feed me lunch. “Maybe a salad?” he asks. I decline, and he begins a string of thank yous. He thanks me for my time, my interest in the restaurant, for talking with his staff.

As he does, he slips: “You’re so talented,” he tells me. Of course, he hadn’t yet seen a word of my article. But it felt like words of encouragement he’s used to giving his staff. At Maeva, young culinary professionals are pushed to dig into their talents and passions. Something about how he says those words makes you feel like you ought to live up to them.

As I get up to leave, a parting course lands on the table after all: a heavy brown paper bag packed with neatly wrapped pastries and a half-loaf of crusty, homemade bread. A little something for the long drive back from the East Valley.