Chef Rebecca White’s trajectory as a chef has been anything but conventional. She got her chops from pizza-making contests with her cousins and as a competitor on Food Network’s Cooks versus Cons — both of which she won.
She was introduced to the fine dining world as the personal assistant to Naomi Cambell. Her first restaurant shuttered within a year, but her unlikely New Haven-style pizza joint in the small surfing island of Rincón, Puerto Rico, the original Mangia Mi, later became one of the town’s most popular restaurants.
Mangia Mi Calistoga, which she opened in 2022, is just as unconventional. The Italian restaurant’s kitchen doesn’t have a freezer and isn’t hidden away like most fine dining restaurants. Instead it serves as a show for those sitting in the restaurant’s premier bar seats. The menu changes daily and is even open to requests from regulars. White’s general manager and multiple kitchen team members weren’t career restaurant staff — she met her general manager at the gym, and members of her kitchen team in the Calistoga High teaching kitchen.
Why? “Well, I think I’m mildly insane,”White said, laughing. She called over lunch from Fairfield County, Connecticut, where she’s currently opening her third Mangia Mi location.
“I think you have to be mildly insane to be in this business, to be a woman in this business,” she continued. “I jump and I don’t look back. My first restaurant was an ultimate failure, but it taught me everything that I know now not to do. I think if you know you don’t take a chance on things in life, then you’re not going to get anywhere. Ithought ‘If I fail, I fail, but if I succeed, then it’s going to be really cool.’”
While White’s Mangia Mi locations in Rincón and Calistoga have both been great successes — gaining popularity and earning accolades including recognition in three Best of Napa County’s 2023 award categories — she’s no stranger to failure.
In fact, White said that returning to Connecticut to open a restaurant is kind of a full circle moment to where her first foray, and failure, in the restaurant industry, took place.
White grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, surrounded by a large and food-loving Italian family. She said her earliest memories are in the kitchen, making fresh pasta and pizza with her grandmother.
“Everybody in myfamily loves cooking. Every Sunday we were in the kitchen with all of my auntsand my grandmother drinking wine, making fresh pasta, and eating the best food,” she said. “I just remember growing up with all the smells and the sights and the noise and everybody would play cards at the end of the night.”
She always loved to cook and eat with family, but didn’t think she would ever pursue a culinary career. White went to Emerson College to study film after high school, where she found herself working an internship that got her on the phone with famous actors like Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio. She moved through the ranks, becoming Naomi Cambell’s assistant in her 20s.
White said that traveling the world with Cambell jump started her interest in a culinary career.
“I lived in London and Milan and Paris — that’s kind of where I fell in love with food and different cuisines and cultures. That was really an amazing journey.”
After five years abroad, White gave it up and returned to New Haven, where she first tried her hand at opening a restaurant.
“I thought I was the coolest person in my small town, and I had a little bit of money, so I thought it would be a great idea to open up a restaurant with absolutely no experience. My very first restaurant was a miserable failure in less than a year.”
She’d lost the money earned in her first career and went back to Boston to become a server at a bar fittingly called Dick’s Last Resort.
“It was probably the best lesson in humility that I could ever probably go through,” White said.
She spent a few years getting back on her feet, moving to Key West and opening a food truck, competing on — and winning — a season of Food Network’s Cooks versus Cons in 2016, and ultimately settling down on Rincón, where she was determined to give restauranteering another shot.
“Again, everybody thought I was crazy because I wasn’t going to be making rice and beans, I was making fresh pasta and New Haven style pizza,” White said. “We were really doing the only authentic Italian food down there. But it resonated with some people. We got a lot of press and it was a good time.”
Within a few years, Mangia Mi had become a fixture on the island. White didn’t want to rest on her laurels though. She saw that the restaurant could be successful in an unconventional location, and decided to try to break into another challenging market: Napa Valley.
“I always came to Napa Valley with my family and I had fallen in love with it, so I said, ‘If I can can make it in Napa Valley, I really could make it anywhere.’”
She opened Mangia Mi Calistoga in 2022. The restaurant has quickly gained popularity, which White and members of her staff attribute to not only the quality of food, but the environment that sets it apart from many other Napa Valley dining options.
“The restaurant industry can be hectic, it’s a high stress, fast-paced environment. And I think the difference is that the way (White) has designed her restaurant is, she wants to have it feel like you’re coming to her house for dinner. It really does feel like a dinner party every night. People are happy when they get there. We do a lot of comfort food, the music is always good. It’s not stuffy and it’s not typical Napa Valley cuisine,” said Elly Galindo, the restaurant’s general manager.
Galindo wasn’t looking for a restaurant gig when she met White at a Calistoga gym. But she said that the two became fast friends, and White didn’t take no for an answer.
“I had no interest in working in a restaurant — I hadn’t since I was 19. But then it came time to open and I told her that I would just help her get open and then find someone to do the job,” Galindo said. “I ended up enjoying it so much that I left my job and I’ve been there ever since.”
She said working for White was different from other restaurant jobs she’d had. Just like the restaurant feels like a dinner party, White really does treat her staff like family.
“She cares. I realized this one day when we first opened up. It was very packed, we were all very tired at the end of the day, and the kitchen made food for everybody to eat. The first thing she did was make sure that everyone else had a plate. She really cares about her team and she really cares about the people that she works with,” Manny Santiago, a member of Mangia Mi’s kitchen team, said.
He met White when she was a long-term substitute teacher for Calistoga High School’s cooking class back in 2022. White was waiting for the restaurant’s construction work to be done, and took the role to stay out of trouble, she said.
The two hit it off, and she offered him a job though he had never worked in a restaurant before. Two years later, Santiago can see himself pursuing a culinary career after college.
While Galindo, Santiago, and the rest of Mangia Mi’s Calistoga team has been keeping the restaurant running, White has been flying back and forth, finalizing plans to open her Connecticut location. She said that this restaurant will be for her biological family.
“I’m literally opening this Connecticut location for my family,” White said. “My cousin has been a teacher all her life and she’s like, ‘I want to run one of your restaurants.’”
White said that having restaurants near her home in Napa Valley, and now her childhood home in Fairfield County feels like the best of both worlds.
“I love traveling. I’ll always get on a plane fromConnecticut to Calistoga. I’m here about half the time, but I’ve also got a beautiful staff that want to make it their own, and I want to support that. We’re just expanding and building and it’s another outlet where I can offer everybody inCalifornia more opportunities — it’s really about growing as a family.”
Mangia Mi is located at 1120 Washington St. in Calistoga. Visit mangiami.com for more information.
