Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Facundo DeFraia, Daniel del Prado, and Shawn McKenzie
Facundo DeFraia, Daniel del Prado, and Shawn McKenzie—friends who really cook.
Danny del Prado, currently the chef behind the trio of Minneapolis restaurants Martina, Colita, and Rosalia, had a child’s-eye view of the violent, drug-infested nature of Buenos Aires in the 1980s and 1990s. One of his memories in particular, of being unable to get up to his apartment with his mother because an unconscious person with a dangling hypodermic needle blocked the door, left a big impression on him. Walking home late at night was dangerous: At 13, he decided he should leave the neighborhood where they lived, get a job downtown in Buenos Aires, and find his own apartment close to that job. A job in advertising.
“I’d pick up the paper, cut the classified ads with a razor, send them to the client with an invoice, run errands, go to the post office—I loved it,” del Prado recalls today. “I’d make pasta every night, or take leftover lunch that the office paid for home—I wasn’t really a cook at the time. I loved being on my own. I’d roam around at night doing whatever I wanted—which sounds pretty crazy to an American, I guess.”
Yes. It does.
But del Prado is one of the strongest driving forces in Twin Cities food right now, and it’s not surprising to find that he emerged from something extraordinary. I mean, he’s really transforming this city right now. In addition to the melodious three—Martina, Colita, Rosalia—del Prado is adding a rhyming fourth, Josefina, in Wayzata’s former Bellecour space. He’s also part owner and an involved mentor of the team at Café Cerés, the coffee shops and bakeries headed by del Prado’s former pastry chef Shawn McKenzie. Additionally, he is something of a godfather guiding Facundo DeFraia’s empanada-and-pizza restaurant, Boludo, which just opened a second location downtown. DeFraia is del Prado’s best friend, and occasional roommate and bandmate from teenage-hood in Buenos Aires.
How did del Prado turn from a tween ad worker to the chef who looks like a rock star and collects loyal chef friends like a sun collects planets?
Rosalia pizza oven
The new pizza oven at Rosalia makes long, thick-crust Argentinian pizza, and delicate round Italian Neapolitan pies too.
It all started with Pearl Jam. “When I was 12 or 13, I started really getting into grunge music,” del Prado says. “There was no internet; you got records from a record store. The guy at the record store said: ‘Pearl Jam, you’ll love it.’ I did. Then Eddie Vedder got me into surfing culture. In Argentina it was all one thing: surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, punk rock, Soundgarden. It was like a big chain all connected. We went to clubs. We were really into Point Break. I think I was 15 when I met Facundo”—the fellow child who would one day help del Prado open Martina and would go on to open Boludo. “It was really strange to be into what I was into, so when he saw me on the street in a Pearl Jam shirt, we started talking.”
“I was playing drums; he would come to rehearsal,” remembers DeFraia, of their earliest friendship. “Then he started playing guitar with us. At night, these clubs, everyone was there—musicians, celebrities. We were 15, 16, but we were tall and looked old, so we could go anywhere. It was so bizarre, but badass.”
At 18, del Prado and DeFraia both took jobs at the center of that Buenos Aires alt scene: selling snowboards at a surf shop. Then one night at a bar, a friend announced that her dad was going to get married in Miami. “Do you want to come?” del Prado recalls her asking. “I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ I could be very impulsive. We asked for vacation time; they didn’t give it to us. So we were like, ‘We’re quitting.’” Which is the beginning of del Prado and DeFraia’s American story.
Miami didn’t last long. The key problem was that it lacked decent snowboarding, inspiring del Prado to head to Vail, Colorado. There, he picked up a cooking job at a simple Italian place where the main attraction was that del Prado could snowboard all day, drink all night, and cook to pay the bills. But he was surprised to find he was good in the kitchen. Really good—and inspired. Six months in, del Prado was the restaurant’s sous-chef. “I just loved it. I stopped playing music and poured all my creativity into it.”
He knew he could use more skills, so he took a second job at a French restaurant to learn classical technique. Then impulse struck again: He fell in love and followed the girl home to Minneapolis.
Using the internet to look up Minneapolis’s best restaurants, he went into them cold with his résumé in hand. At the now dear departed high-end tapas spot Solera, del Prado met chef Erik Sather—who turned out to be a fellow snowboarder and knew his Vail restaurants. Sather, currently the owner of Lowry Hill Meats, introduced the newcomer to Isaac Becker, whom del Prado describes as his true cooking mentor and hero. The three became the dream team behind Bar La Grassa.
The woman del Prado moved to Minneapolis for, briefly his wife, inspired a short-term move to Portland, Oregon, where she did her med school residency and he cooked farm-to-table at Paley’s Place. That’s where he met pastry chef Shawn McKenzie. When del Prado returned to Minneapolis to help Becker open Burch, he invited McKenzie along to become opening pastry chef. She sold everything that wouldn’t fit in her car and made the journey.
With this, we have, roughly, the foundation of del Prado’s current empire, if you add in Bill Summerville—the former sommelier of Solera, famed for the Cities’ best-ever sherry list, who is wine director for del Prado’s projects. One day, God willing, Summerville plans to debut some form of Solera’s sherry list at Café Cerés once it rolls out small plates, a bar, and night hours post-pandemic.
After talking to del Prado and his friends, it becomes clear that del Prado’s charismatic Pearl Jam rock-and-roll side is only half of the story, and his cerebral and inquiring side is just as important. A vintage film buff and World Wars history aficionado, he was also a cookbook fanatic for a time with a collection that reached several thousand. “He was reading every single book out there,” DeFraia laughs.
The final two pieces to understanding del Prado are his perfectionism and his creativity. First consider his perfectionism: He didn’t take a day off the first nine months after Burch opened, not even for his father’s funeral. And before Martina opened, DeFraia estimates they fed a thousand people through mock services. “All the employees were like, ‘I’ve never seen this before. It’s a lot of money you spend. And the passion!’” he says. “That’s an Argentine thing.”
The creativity comes from a process of taking a classic dish and then charismatically and stubbornly driving his coworkers to find how they can add a twist to make the dish something new. This intense creativity is what inspired McKenzie to follow him to Minneapolis. “Working with Danny, ‘creatively bored’ isn’t a thing,” she explains to me. “His brain is a maze of craziness, in a good way. Plating, ingredients, technique, everything. If you can latch on to him and go along for the ride and not get completely overwhelmed, everything will be really good. He pushes me forward just by saying, ‘That’s good, but what’s the little thing that can turn it on its head? Find some way to make it stand out. Find some way to make it better.’ Then you try it, and when something clicks, it’s like: That is so cool. The creativity, the betterment he tries to instill in you—you just end up pushing and pushing yourself,” she says. “If I had stayed in Portland I would have been happy, but professionally I wouldn’t have had the career I have. I wouldn’t have pushed myself and seen what kind of chef I could be.”
Independence, passion, rock and roll, cerebral inquiry, perfectionism, boundary pushing—so what? So this: It all comes out on the plates, which is why he’s got some of the most in-demand food of the moment.
But how to describe it? When Isaac Becker, del Prado’s mentor, makes a dish, he takes nearly everything out of it while increasing the quality of the ingredients that remain and amplifying the technique used in the process. In the end, a dish that seems to have 10 ingredients actually has only five, but they’re all better—and the final dish is simplified until it becomes both exquisite and unique. Del Prado seems to do exactly that as well, but then swerves at the end to add bright acid, heat, and four surprises.
Argentinian and Italian Neapolitan pizzas from Rosalia
I got a couple pizzas and salads from Rosalia recently, when it was still takeout only. The cucumber salad was made of hothouse cucumbers smashed into irregular ragged chunks and tossed with lumps of feta cheese, pumpkin seeds toasted and spiced, every bright green fresh herb in the garden—including mint and cilantro—translucent discs of serrano peppers for heat, fried shallots for depth, and sumac vinegar for a double dose of sour. If it had been on a set of scales that only measured flavor, this salad would have been the equivalent to four entrées created by some other good chef.
The funghi mushroom pizza has a crust both ethereally light and rustically chewy, gilded with different layers of mushroom flavor—some fresh and some pickled—creating a taste like the essence of all mushrooms just beneath the cream and roast scallions and gruyère. This ability to do more, more, more—but never touch the hem of too much or illegibility—that is del Prado’s style.
And now he’s taking his creativity to another level, reaching beyond the kitchen and into real estate and the heightened opportunities it can provide. “The creative part of cooking is cool,” del Prado tells me, “but it’s also creative to set up the front of the house in a way that can create more sales. I’m a chef. I love food, I love wine, I love all that. I also understand it’s a business. You have a space—what can you put in there? That’s creative too.”
And so, this leader of friends is now immersing himself in real estate.“I’m working toward owning buildings, buying buildings,” he says. “That gives you the most creative freedom of all. You have investors, and they say: ‘I have a good idea. Put a chicken sandwich on the menu at night.’ No. I’m 43 years old. I’m going to give it all I have, because it’s not many years left I have of this lifestyle. I don’t know why Minneapolis picked me, but I pick it back. Let’s go.”
