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Food and Drink

Mario’s super world
glendabyline

In the restaurant business, there’s one thing you never say and that’s no, for one simple reason — you want to keep people happy.

That’s the bottom line for Mario Enero, who has opened, owned and/or managed more restaurants than most people frequent in a year, including his long-time Whistler stalwarts, La Rúa and Caramba!

Not that I was ever formally trained by anybody as savvy as Mario, but I understood the same principle when I worked at Orestes’ on Broadway in Vancouver way back when.

It was a debauched, over-the-top kind of place — the longest running show on Broadway is how owners Aristedes Pasparakis and Blaine Culling touted it — where patrons would joyfully, willingly stand in line for hours to get inside. Once in, just about anything might happen including lots that, in most places, would get you arrested. But while you waited, Blaine or Aristedes poured the retsina like water just to keep everybody happy.

“The people had a big smile even before they sat down,” recalls Mario.

We “girls” who worked the main floor, as we were known, also figured out how to keep them smiling, even when we’d run out of their favourite wine or dish.

I probably waited on Mario back then, for he loved the casserole made of stuffed squid in ink, a dish he’d enjoyed at home in Spain, which he left at the ripe old age of 27, intending to work in Canada for a year.

But he fell in love with the place. So there he was, part of the Orestes’ scene in between running various Umberto restaurants and starting up Emilio’s, another of Aristedes’ decadent creations. Neither Mario nor the restaurant lasted too long, but that’s another story.

Despite some challenges, Vancouver was “happening” in the early ’80s, as was Whistler when Mario arrived to manage Umberto’s Il Caminetto.

“That was the best of Whistler at that time. It was the golden years,” says Mario. “People who were coming here were all in their late 20s and early 30s. That was a big impact because everyone had a lot of energy — when you think about someone like Hugh Smythe, how much energy he had and how much he did at Blackcomb.

“All the key people in town were young and we all knew each other because of the smaller scale. If you were looking for a plumber or electrician you didn’t have to make a phone call — you just went to Tapley’s.”

Everyone, it seemed, had some kind of super stamina and/or good drugs that let them party till four in the morning, then go to somebody’s house and party some more. Then they’d head straight to work and start the cycle again.

Those were the days when there weren’t enough bars and restaurants around to serve the happy hoards, so places were packed. It wasn’t uncommon to have a wee visit paid by the local constabulary for overcrowding or, horror of horrors, because people were dragging tables and chairs outside to sit in the sun before patio dining was allowed at Whistler.

“We called the bar at Il Caminetto the Wrinkles Room,” Mario laughs, “because all the old people from Vancouver used to come in.”

Those were the days when anyone over 35 was “old” and Wrinkles played the best of lounge music, including Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones. In fact, Tom Jones was part of the big party to open the place.

Wrinkles or not, tables outside or not, running a place like Il Caminetto was second nature to Mario. He’d cut his eye-teeth at a small inn and restaurant his family still runs in Castilla, about 250 km northwest of Madrid, washing dishes and peeling potatoes — all the worst jobs people give to kids in restaurants. He’d make a few pesetas, enough for a movie.

“I was hooked from the start,” he says.

He had tried two seasons as a bullfighter, but when he was gored his dad put his foot down, saying that if the bulls didn’t kill him, he would. Hotel and restaurant school seemed like a much more sensible option.

It was the tail end of Franco’s reign in Spain, and it was a much poorer and more rustic Spain than you find today. But tourism was starting to take off as the “beautiful people” discovered its beautiful beaches, its crazy fun — running the bulls in Pamplona or diving into the world’s biggest tomato fight in Bunyol. La marcha , they call it — going out and having a good time.

Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, even a young Pierre Elliot Trudeau had a good time, hanging out on the Costa Brava, drinking sangria, getting into the sun-baked groove. And that’s where Mario thought he would have a nice little hotel.

“I did think I would go back one day. When I first came to Whistler, you’d work in the winter and then the place closed down in the summer — nobody was here,” he says.

But in 1984 the golf course opened. Whistler took its first tentative steps toward becoming a four-season resort and so young restaurant managers didn’t have time to go back to Spain.

It’s probably just as well, because otherwise we might not have had our own little pieces of Spain in Whistler. When you go to Caramba!, which Mario opened on Boxing Day in 1996, it’s la marcha — loud and lively and fun, with good food anchoring good times. If you wait a bit too long, don’t worry, Mario will have the chef whip up a pizza and pass out slices, just to keep everyone smiling.

Go to La Rúa, and you’ve been transported to an elegant restaurant in Madrid, calm and unpretentious, where food is king, and you’ll dine alongside the likes of bankers and businessmen or maybe even Sarah McLachlan.

Either way, you’ll share a piece of Mario and his ideas about hospitality that still shape everything he does, from welcoming you to checking out the kitchen, making sure everything will keep his guests happy.

That’s why they seek him out before they go, even waiting outside his office just to say thank you and tell him how much they enjoyed it, and coming back again and again to prove it.

“Really, what else could you want?” he says.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who got through journalism school without a student loan by working at Orestes’.