Gino Angelini

Gino Angelini Can’t Drive 55

Angelini
Angelini Photo: Tatiana Arbogast

This past Saturday, Gino Angelini cooked a five-course dinner at a private Bel-Air home neighboring Gordon Ramsay’s new digs. The chef was on the scene to celebrate Italian tire maker Pirelli’s launch of a stylish book of Italian recipes called Miles and Meals, putting his own touch to the dishes of company chef Fabrizio Tanfani. Inevitably, the talk of the table turned to those old Italian past-times of fast cars and dangerous driving. Angelini revealed an early encounter with the California highway patrol while new to our freeways, telling the diners, “I just moved here and was working at Vincenti in Brentwood, with the first car I lease. First day, I was going 170 miles per hour on the 405.”

The police pulled Angelini over and as he tells it, “I don’t speak English. They talking to me, and I tell them I don’t understand. They say “you go to jail, you go to jail,’ and I say ‘huh?’”

“And they use the gun and so I was like this,” he explains, with his hands trembling. The skilled chef left both his fellow drivers and police captivity unharmed. But speaking of jangling nervous, Angelini tells Grub Street he’s looking forward to the opening of his latest project, the 8,000 square-foot restaurant he’s collaborating on with IDG on Sunset Boulevard.

Noting that the new restaurant is a lot bigger than his Beverly Boulevard Osteria, the chef says he is looking forward to the opening later this fall. “I’m half-excited, and maybe a little half-nervous. There’s a lot to do in the next few weeks and we will be serving a lot more tables every night. It’s a new challenge for me,” Angelini says of the restaurant which will bring a wider range of his Italian dishes to The Strip.

Earlier: IDG Brewing Chinese Concept in West Hollywood [GS]

Gino Angelini Can’t Drive 55