River Cities Business Journal: Business Profile

Kingman eatery draws attention; Mattina's unique dishes spark feature in Arizona Highways

Kingman Daily Miner

KINGMAN - Many local restaurant goers may have called a certain downtown restaurant Kingman's best kept secret, but not anymore.

Mattina's Ristorante Italiano at 318 Oak St. is bringing quite a few tourists off the road to experience “fine dining with a little danger,” thanks to some exposure from a recent feature on the NBC television program “Arizona Highways.”

The 10-minute feature highlights Chef Carlo DeCicco, “known for having fun with his restaurant and cooking,” and the dishes as “authentic as the building,” referring to the location, a house built in 1899.

No stranger to the media, Mattina's was featured in The Arizona Republic earlier this year, and, according to DeCicco, will be in the magazine version of Arizona Highways in August. So far, the broadcast has given the restaurant a nice boost.

“At the moment, we've had about 78 tables,” DeCicco says.

“I've been counting them.”

DeCicco said all the customers he's talked to who have seen the broadcast are travelers who have driven through Kingman before, but are dropping in for the first time.

The comments he said he received were “we love the video, and we love the restaurant, we'll be back.”

Most of them are travelers who go to Las Vegas three to four times a year, some to California, he said.

In the video, Chef Carlo introduces viewers to his mafia themed menu.

“Our escargot is the first appetizer on the menu, and it's called ‘six dead guys in a trunk,'” DeCicco says, naming a few other items such as ‘Bruchetta Bugsy Segal' and a Lucky Luciano chicken dish.

DeCicco describes his menu as mostly Sicilian - seafood prepared Sicilian style, Sicilian pasta dishes, for example.

“One or two Italian dishes (are) on the menu, but most of it is Sicilian,” he says.

DeCicco is shown cooking over a high flame, in the sauté pan appears to be a meat dish in oil and garlic.

“All of our foods are cooked on a very high flame. Most people cook on a low flame, which is the worst thing you can do to food, you take everything out of it,” he says.

DeCicco reflects on his experience cooking in his grandfather's restaurant in New York, beginning when he was four or five years old, a restaurant he says Frank Sinatra used to visit.

“This was Frank Sinatra's favorite,” he says over a flaming pan.

“We call it ‘Spinach Sinatra,'” or spinach and steak.

His wife, Pam, makes the desserts, most of which are her own recipes.

The narrator says that DeCicco knows the recipe for success, and according to the chef, a lot of love is entailed.

“If you don't cook from the heart, it doesn't taste good,” he says, and the production crew apparently agrees the food is “top notch.”

“People are shocked coming through to find a place like ours with the kind of food we serve,” DeCicco says.

“The people that live here don't want us to go anywhere, because they enjoy coming here, and we enjoy having them.”