Chef Celestino Drago’s outdoor kitchen in Sherman Oaks
By Mary MacVean Celestino Drago takes the top off a clay pot in which he’s roasting a chicken. One key: getting the right temperature in the brick oven behind him. The chef says he sometimes starts the fire the day before to make sure the interior chamber gets hot enough. When entertaining, Drago can take food out of the oven and set it on the travertine counter, which becomes a buffet. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Celestino Drago, the chef behind four restaurants, a bakery and a catering operation, has an impressive indoor kitchen at home, but it’s the outdoor kitchen with beehive wood-burning oven that he truly loves. The setting? Like cooking in the Italian countryside.
A rib-eye steak cooks in the brick oven. Drago also uses the oven to make vegetables, loaves of ciabatta, fish, quail, pheasant, rabbit, even suckling pig. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
And pizza, of course, cooked directly on the oven’s refractory cement floor. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Leslie Drago feeds her husband a slice of pizza while pizza chef Eduardo Castillo prepares more food in the background. The pavilion-like room has a big hanging market scale and curtains that can be drawn to keep out the wind. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The kitchen comes equipped with plenty of work space, a sink, two Viking burners, a gas grill, an industrial hood to carry smoke away from cooks and guests, a dishwasher and two small refrigerators, hidden behind rustic wood doors. Little decoration is needed: Just through the room’s arches is Drago’s prized garden, which winds in narrow rows around the pool and the edges of the yard. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Drago picks herbs in his garden. The list of foods he grows is long: tomato, lemon, zucchini, cucumber, artichoke, arugula, eggplant, orange, blood orange, apple, pomegranate, passion fruit, pepper, grapes. He grows Merlot, Chardonnay and Cabernet grapes for fun and because the vines are pretty. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Drago tastes from a clay pot just out of the brick oven. “Cooking at home is not like cooking in the restaurant. You can put everything out and relax,” Drago says. Relax. That’s the main theme of this kitchen, at least for Drago.
