Lots of kids grow up playing restaurant, doling out plastic pizza or even strange combinations of real food to their parents or anyone else who will pretend with them.
But it is a bit unusual when siblings grow up to work in the hospitality business, and decades later, open a restaurant based on their shared childhood food memories — from preparing traditional Italian dishes to the songs that were playing in the family kitchen as they helped cook.
“We had this idea about 10 years ago: ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could have people eating the things that we grew up with?'” says Antonella (Mucé) Fernandes.
On April 8, she and her brother, Nick Mucé, opened Cibo on Cove Road in Orleans. Pronounced “chee boh,” and named for the noun meaning food in Italian, the new spot is a marketplace of cooked dishes and Italian groceries familiar to the Mucé kids from their memories.
“We based it on the Autogrills they have in Italy — (they are) like a kitchen and a market in one,” says Fernandes, 53.
Food from their childhood
Besides a business, she shares a birthday with her younger brother.
“Same day, but two years apart,” says Fernandes, the oldest of three siblings and the only one born in Italy before her parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles immigrated with their children. The family started and operated LoCicero’s Italian restaurant in Orleans for decades, she says.
“At 4 years old, I was stirring bechamel and pomodoro sauces in the family kitchen,” Mucé says.
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At Cibo, he is in the kitchen once again with a staff of four, making nearly everything on site, from 100 ciabatta rolls a day to a dozen piatti caldi (hot plates) including arancini (rice balls the size of a fist and $5 each), chicken cutlets ($6 each), panelle (Sicilian chickpea fritters at $8 per pound), meatballs ($2 each), and pasta e fagioli (Tuscan white bean soup at $6 for a 12-ounce bowl). The daily menu also involves 10 kinds of panini, four or five varieties of bread, three to four sauces, and two dozen more mostly Sicilian specialties.
“In Sicily, there are a lot of influences from Northern Africa and the Middle East on the food,” Mucé says, explaining panelle. “We try to (provide) the classics with stuff that’s really, really not familiar to people in the United States.”
The only thing not made in the market/restaurant is pasta. Fernandes says the family can make its own but they are holding off on that because it is labor-intensive and the owners are unsure whether they will be able to hire enough people for what they are anticipating will be a busy summer season. Cibo sells and sometimes uses in its dishes Garafalo dried pasta and other shelf-stable foods which were in the pantry at home when Antonella and Nick were growing up.
While her brother handles most of the savory dishes, Fernandes oversees and makes most of the sweet specialties, including Italian classics such as cannoli. There is a bar — more like a soda fountain — offering a dozen flavors of gelato plus Italian coffee drinks.
‘Very grateful for the turnout’
A customer calls Cibo to ask that two chicken cutlets be set aside, and Fernandes yells out the order. One of the clerks grabs two cooked cutlets from the long glass case and wraps them to go. It feels like a routine, a call from a customer who knows Cibo often runs out of that specialty on Fridays.
“We’ve been very grateful for the turnout,” Fernandes says, when she gets a quiet moment at the register. In the hallway nearby hang at least two dozen photos of family visits to Italy.
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She says it helps that Cibo is located, in the space formerly occupied by VERS, on a busy side street that runs between Routes 28 and 6A and was being used as a roadwork detour when Cibo opened. “We owe our success to the DPW,” she says with a laugh about the town’s Department of Public Works route choices. On a serious note, she adds that residents of the condos across Cove Road have been responsive, with some visiting twice a day.
At 1 p.m. on a warm Friday, the back deck is filled with customers at wooden tables and there are even patrons at a few tables inside the marketplace. Cibo has no liquor license nor table service, but guests are welcome to buy their food hot and eat it a
t Cibo.
Fernandes says Cibo can accommodate 50 people on the deck for a catered function and plans to apply for one-day function liquor licenses for events.
As people greet Fernandes and each other in the busy marketplace, popular songs like “That’s Amoré” (written for a 1950s Dean Martin movie but often associated with an Italian theme) alternate with a “Figaro” aria. No question of authenticity. The playlist, too, is homemade: It’s from Antonella Fernandes’ phone.
Cibo
15 Cove Road, Orleans
774-207-0541; cibocapecod,com
Hours
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday; closed Monday