Our food editor cooked for Taqueria Feliz's Lucio Palazzo

From pastry prep to cocina Mexicana, Lucio Palazzo’s story took a surprising turn after a visit to San Diego.

TABLE FOR TWO: Lucio Palazzo and his wife, Sally.
Neal Santos

Editor’s Note: In this series, Turning the Tables, food editor Caroline Russock writes about what unfolds around the table when she invites some of the city’s best chefs to a meal in her South Philly home. 

When I invited Lucio Palazzo and his wife to my house for dinner on a recent Monday night, there was one question that I had to ask: How does an Italian-born, French-trained pastry chef make the transition to cooking lamb barbacoa, grasshopper tacos and arguably the most authentic Mexican fare in Philadelphia? 

Palazzo’s story of his journey from the kitchen of Georges Perrier’s Brasserie Perrier to his current post as head chef of Taqueria Feliz in Manayunk unfolded over a Middle Eastern-accented meal of za’atar-spiced chicken, chickpeas with labneh and a Lebanese pilaf of rice and lentils (a happy accident, having planned the meal before learning of Palazzo’s stint at Zahav). And of course, there was plenty of wine.

“I started at the bottom,” Palazzo says. With exactly no restaurant experience he landed a gig (he calls the position “assistant pastry assistant”) in the kitchen of Brasserie Perrier, a place that in the ’90s and early aughts was the Walnut Street go-to spot for the Rittenhouse expense-account crowd. Unlike the savory kitchen, the pastry line provided room for rookies to grow. 

“With pastry there’s opportunity to advance. You’re on the line, you’re plating. It’s not just deboning fish and picking fennel fronds. You’re actually involved. Yeah, you’re as bottom as can be and totally inexperienced, but you’re not too far removed from the top. It was motivating. You’re on the line with those dudes, surrounded by these guys who are seasoned line cooks, veterans.”

Brasserie was a proving ground for a huge part of the city’s current crop of culinary talent and that was due in a big way to Georges Perrier’s daily presence in the kitchen. “Georges [Perrier] was gold at the time and anything he was associated with was gold. He was very hands-on with it. He really gave a shit,” Palazzo says of his days in the Brasserie kitchen. “There was a lot of testosterone in the air. It was a phenomenal place to learn because if you were doing anything wrong, they’d fuck you up instantly. There was no room for anything like that, and that’s what was great about working for that kind of place.”

From Brasserie, Palazzo moved on to South Street BYO Pumpkin, which turned out to be his last pastry position. “I like pastry. I really like it, but I don’t do it. With pastry you learn about precision.  You have to be really patient … and I’m not patient. My goal was always to jump to the savory side, but it’s tough. You get in any way you can. And I got in with pastry.”

Palazzo worked next at Stephen Starr’s now-closed Washington Square restaurant and then went on to be the opening grill cook at Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook’s Zahav. 

“I saw it go from struggling at 30 covers a night to becoming the best restaurant in the city. And it happened overnight,” Palazzo recalls of his year and half at Zahav. Palazzo stayed with Cook and Solo as he put in some time at their Percy Street Barbecue, and he eventually landed at Xochitl, where the Mexican connection was made, or rather revisited. 

After emigrating from Friuli, a region in the northeastern corner of Italy, at age 11, Palazzo grew up in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. “For us there was Taco Bell and that’s what Mexican food was. It wasn’t until I went to San Diego that I ventured into real Mexican.”

When Palazzo was 21 he visited his mother, who had relocated to San Diego. He vividly recalls eating a fish dish in a Mexican restaurant in the beachfront town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. “I remember eating it and thinking, ‘Is this what Mexican food is? Yes, this is what it is.’ That changed it for me forever. 

“And after that, I saw it everywhere. It was like you tripped on Mexican food, Mexican food was like acid, you had it once and then you saw it everywhere,” he says.

After that transformative Carmel meal, it took Palazzo nearly 10 years to start cooking Mexican, but now that cuisine really is everywhere for Palazzo. 

It’s in his South Philly backyard where he grows papalo, epazote and guajillo chiles; in the kitchens of La Calaca Feliz and later, Taqueria Feliz, and research trips to Mexico. 

Palazzo sees plenty of crossover between Italian-American food and the cheese-and-refried-beans fare that most folks think of as Mexican. Both are immigrant cuisines that got mixed up along the way and are now being brought back to their roots.

 “I think the guy who really introduced real Italian cooking in this country was Mario Batali,” says Palazzo. “Being new to this country and watching Molto Mario, I was a teenager. I was five, six, seven years off the boat, it was mind-blowing. This is shit you know and it’s part of you and it’s in your blood, and here’s this guy introducing it to a mainstream audience,” he says. 

And although Palazzo’s background is firmly Italian-American, the approach that he takes with Mexican is strikingly similar, getting back to the cuisine’s storied roots, taking it to that sweet spot that’s true to the regional magic of Mexico.