Passion for history drove chef Potenza to master craft

FULL PLATE: Chef Walter Potenza says that being a chef has allowed him to travel and be recognized, including his recent opportunity to cook for Pope Francis at the Vatican. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
FULL PLATE: Chef Walter Potenza says that being a chef has allowed him to travel and be recognized, including his recent opportunity to cook for Pope Francis at the Vatican. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Chef Walter Potenza has cooked for a lot of famous people in his 41 years of working in the kitchen, but his latest gig is a shining imprint on his resume – he cooked for Pope Francis at the Vatican in Rome in November. The event was a fundraiser to benefit programs for the poor in South America.
Potenza was chosen by the Association of Professional Italian Chefs. He was the only chef from the U.S., along with one from Brazil and 30 from Italy, chosen from a group of 300 to offer a regional dish at the event.
Cooking for dignitaries and celebrities is an invigorating experience for Potenza, but it’s just part of his repertoire. He thrives on digging into history and creating tasty cuisine that brings the taste of a unique time and place to the table. Teaching others – from teenagers to corporate teams – to understand and prepare food is the icing on the cake for Potenza, whose wide-ranging ventures expand the boundaries of even the professional kitchen.

PBN: What did you cook for Pope Francis?
POTENZA: I made a New England seafood dish – my Napolean of lobster tail and scallops with Newburg sauce. My food was flown in. It was New England lobster, scallops from New Bedford and some of the cream in the Newburg sauce was Rhody Fresh.

PBN: What was the event like at the Vatican?
POTENZA: The event had a very simple structure. It was a fundraiser with a lot of dignitaries and the food had to be pretty simple. It wasn’t a lavish buffet. Each chef made one dish. We made 500 portions. We had plenty of staff to help us out.

PBN: Did you see Pope Francis or meet him?
POTENZA: We saw him in the morning. He had an audience and there were thousands of people. The chefs were on the steps at St. Peter’s. There were always 10 to 12 people around the pope. It’s very tight security. The Vatican makes an airport in the U.S. look like nothing. The event was at 5:30 at night and the pope was there. You realize he’d been on his feet since 10 in the morning. He left his seat and came pretty close to us, about four or five steps away. He stayed for about 12-to-15 minutes.

PBN: Did you find anything especially interesting about Pope Francis?
POTENZA: One thing that struck me is that for about the first 30 minutes, he drove with all those [security] people across the piazza at St. Peter’s, side-to-side, mingling with the people. This is new for a pope. I heard from one of the people working at the event that a few days before the event the pope drove to meet the president of Italy in a Fiat. I also heard that he cooks for himself. One thing that was interesting was the irony of all the wealthy people there, dropping money for the fundraiser to support the poor, and I think this is a pope who reaches for frugality.

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PBN: Was there anything else about your trip to Rome that stands out?
POTENZA: I got an award as master chef and the master-chef ceremony was important to me.

PBN: Did you bring back any new recipes?
POTENZA: No. I already have a lot of specialties from all the research I’ve done on history and food. I have re-created terracotta cooking. I first got involved with it on one of my visits to my home in central Italy. Cooking with clay pots is the oldest cooking technique in the world. I also have a specialty in Italian Jewish cooking. We were raised Catholic and we found out my father’s mother was Jewish. I never met her, but I went on a quest to find out how I could honor her memory. I have one of a handful of restaurants in the country that does Jewish-Italian Sephardic cooking. I do special dishes for Hanukah and Passover. History is my real interest and cooking has given me an opportunity to bring that to people. I never had a culinary education and I didn’t really like cooking.

PBN: If you never went to cooking school, how did you become a master chef?
POTENZA: When I first came to Rhode Island, one of my cousins was a chef at Ballard’s on Block Island. I worked there for two summers. I started by washing dishes. Then I went to frying fish and chips, scallops and clams. Then I went to Camille’s Roman Garden and then I became a chef at the Blue Grotto. I loved history and literature and geography in college and thought I’d be a teacher, but I had two children and chefs made more money than teachers.

PBN: So do you like cooking now?
POTENZA: It’s OK. What I’m really proud of is that I became a scholar of my own trade. I studied for the past 36 years about the world of [cooking].

PBN: What part of being a chef do you enjoy most?
POTENZA: Being a chef has allowed me to travel and be recognized, like the opportunity with the pope. And we have so many people coming to our cooking school on Federal Hill. We have cooking parties for team-building for businesses. We have cooking classes for kids and we’re certified by the state for retraining for people who have been unemployed. The thing I enjoy most is I’m able to help people make memories, when they come to my restaurant for a birthday or even just spending two hours together when everyone is so busy. •

INTERVIEW
Walter Potenza
POSITION: Chef and owner of Potenza Ristorante in Cranston and owner of Chef Walter’s Cooking School on Atwells Avenue in Providence
BACKGROUND: A native of Guilianova in the region of Abruzzo, Italy, Potenza came to the U.S. when he was 19 to stay with his uncle and aunt in New York City and then with cousins in Rhode Island.
EDUCATION: Attended Hall Drafting Institute in Providence and attended Rhode Island College, majoring in history in the 1970s
FIRST JOB: Straightened out bent nails in a family furniture business
RESIDENCE: Providence
AGE: 60

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