My most heartfelt thanks to Erasto and Pablo for being such wonderful business partners, cooks, chefs, critical taste buds, now published authors, and big time good humor guys. I would also like to thank Maria and Adriana Jacinto—being a chef’s wife is a much more difficult job than being a chef! Sara and Filiberto Jacinto, I’m forever grateful you let your two wonderful sons come to California.
To my dear friend Dianne Fraser, who pulled me from a muddle back into a functioning person, always going beyond the extra mile for me, a very big thank you! Without Sherry Fournier’s drive this book would never have gotten started, let alone finished. Thank you, thank you!! Many thanks as well to Michael Wolf, and to Anne Baker who kept us laughing and full of everything sweet and nice.
A million thanks to the management teams at Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen—Jennifer Ingellis, Jamie Skelly, Philip Walsh, Federico Ambrosio Reyes—and at Mustards Grill—Michael Ingellis, John Lombardo, Tim Scully, Alejandro Quiroz Ledesma, Javier Soriano Duran—for helping out so we could do this book.
Thank you to all the recipe testers: Maxine Bloom, Sid Bloom, Kelly Cash, Kate Curnes, Kathy Dennett, Sherry Fournier, David Graham, LouAnne Hackett, Nancy Johnson, Marilyn Marchi, Gail Monahan, Aimee Newberry, Sylvia Guenza Pestoni, Valerie Presten, Ann Putnam, Shanti Singh, Sally Tantau, Garth Waters, Kris Waters, Michael Wolf, and Lynn Zachreson.
Thanks to Lois and Verna Meyes for telling me once I was too small to be a chef! Thanks to Sean Knight for being there when I couldn’t be. Thanks Mom for watching over the photo shoot, and to Mary and John for all those great small plates.
Thanks to Lorena Jones for once again thinking I could write a cookbook—you are so patient. Many thanks to Nancy Austin, Carrie Rodrigues, Clancy Drake, and Toni Tajima for making it look good and read well, and to Jackie Wan for every battle she fought and won. To the dashing duo of Laurie Smith and Erica McNeish, thank you for making our food so beautiful! Martha Navarrette, without your making all the hard work easy, we never would have made it. To those of you I didn’t include in the first edition, mea culpa! You were in my heart the whole time. —Cindy
This book is dedicated to my mother and my father, Sara and Filiberto Jacinto and my wife Maria Jacinto. And to all my brothers and sisters.
A special thank-you to Cindy Pawlcyn for her belief and trust in me. And thank you to my whole team at Mustards Grill, for all of their hard work. —Erasto
I dedicate this book to my mother, Sara Jacinto, and my grandmother Benita Gutierrez, because they have cooked all of their lives and they were the first to teach me the difference in the food when you use the very best ingredients. They have had a profound influence on my career as a chef and I am grateful to them. I also dedicate this book to my father, who worked very hard to raise his family.
Others have supported my career and inspired me, namely, my two daughters, Jacqueline and Vivian, and my wife, Adriana. Adriana keeps Jacqueline and Vivian on track while I am working long hours. I know it’s not easy being a chef’s wife.
Many many thanks to chef Cindy Pawlcyn for giving me the opportunity, enthusiasm, and criticism to help me grow in this career.
Finally, I would like to give thanks to my team of talented cooks at Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen. —Pablo