A New American Town - Bentonville, Arkansas

Farm-to-Fork Italian Cuisine Coming to Bentonville with Mezzaluna Pasteria

• Visit Bentonville • Season 7 • Episode 20

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In this episode of A New American Town by Visit Bentonville, award-winning Chef Soerke Peters joins us to discuss the highly anticipated opening of Mezzaluna Pasteria in downtown Bentonville. Originally from Germany, Chef Peters shares his journey to becoming a renowned chef and falling in love with Italian cuisine.

Chef Peters shares the inspiring story of expanding the beloved restaurant from Pacific Grove, California, to Bentonville and his passion for sustainability. 

Mezzaluna Pasteria is opening this summer in downtown Bentonville. Learn more at Mezzaluna Pasteria & Mozzarella Bar. 

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Beth Bobbitt:

Welcome to A New American Town, a podcast proudly presented by Visit Bentonville. I'm your host, Beth Bobbitt, broadcasting from Haxton Road Studios near the beautiful downtown Bentonville Square. Join us as we share stories, insights and happenings from our city, connecting you with the locals who make this town worth visiting. Okay, so we've got an exciting one today. We're here with Chef Soerke Peters. Welcome to the podcast.

Chef Soerke Peters :

Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yes, Chef and owner of Mezzaluna Pasteria. Chairman of the Board of American Culinary Federation for Monterey Bay Chapter, Chef Peters is a leader in sustainability sourcing fresh ingredients, organic farm to fork. He was awarded the Ocean Hero Award from Monterey Bay Aquarium for his responsible sourcing, preserving our oceans. So Mezzaluna is opening in downtown Bentonville very soon. Very excited about all this. Before we talk about the restaurant, let's talk about you, your origin story I read you were born in Germany and knew you were going to be a chef at the age of five. That's incredible. Tell us about your background and how you fell in love with Italian cuisine.

Chef Soerke Peters :

Yeah. So you know, as I grew up in Germany, you know I was cooked with my grandmother. You know it was great, great memories and great food experiences and we pretty much made everything in-house. So it was like super, super cool and always loved cooking. So when I was five years old, I always wanted to be a chef. It was the craziest thing, because nobody was a chef in my family and it's always funny Like we don't have Halloween in Germany Maybe they do it now, but I'm not sure but we have a carnival where the kids dress up and I always was a chef and that's not something you could buy off the shelf. So my mom had to custom make it and every year she told my dad she's like please tell him, can he be something else than a chef? Because we can't, maybe a fireman, we can't buy that stuff you know Right.

Chef Soerke Peters :

And every time my dad said what do you want to be for Carnival this year? You know, it's like maybe a fireman, maybe an astronaut? Nah, I think I'll be a chef. So she had to make me a new uniform every year. That that was a pain in the butt.

Beth Bobbitt:

Well, eventually, I'm sure they embraced it after they saw your talent. Yes, yes, yes, yeah. So I'm very happy it all worked out. Yeah, and then Italian food. You know it's like I fell in love with Italian food once I came to America. You know it was around the 90s when I moved to New York from Munich, Germany, and my whole training was basically French and classic cooking techniques and so forth. Never cooked Italian food. Loved eating Italian food yeah, and that's the first job I found that hired me in New York City was Pino Luongo with Coco Pazzo restaurant, and ever since fell in love with the simplicity of the Italian cuisine and the complex flavors and just the freshness of products. And you just throw it together, tastes delicious.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yes, I'm already hungry thinking about it. So Mezzaluna Pasteria in Pacific Grove, California. For our local listeners, this is a coastal city on Monterey Bay. I've never been there. It looks dreamy, but we're taking the concept, we're moving it here to Bentonville. Can you talk a little bit about that decision and the process?

Chef Soerke Peters :

Yeah. So we wanted to expand. And California, as everybody, especially that area, is getting really expensive. And my life partner here and she worked for Rope swing for a while and did some other things and does some consulting now and so forth so she says, like why don't you open a second location in Bentonville? And I'm like where's Bentonville? And she's like that's in Northwest Arkansas. Well, that sounds interesting, but I've never been there.

Chef Soerke Peters :

And they flew us down here for a week and entertained us and showed us around and it was an amazing experience Met all the chefs from all these restaurants and Chef Marshall from Brightwater Culinary School and farmers and et cetera, et cetera. And it was really, really an amazing experience and we really fell in love with this town and so, okay, so like how can we make this happen? And they said why there's not much available when it comes to restaurants? Because everybody seems to be doing pretty well, right, and they were building it or starting to build a new project right on a street, uh, right in front of that bentonville water tower, and it was just a concrete slab. But I looked at the renderings and stuff like that we have two restaurant spaces in this building and pick whichever one you like. So I picked the one closest to the downtown square. And here we are, you know, almost two years later.

Beth Bobbitt:

That's so exciting. Yes we could walk there from here. So you've been to Northwest Arkansas for a little while now. Are you going back and forth between California and Arkansas?

Chef Soerke Peters :

Yes, we moved here about a year and a half ago and we spent about one week out of the month in California checking on our chickens, as I call them, and make sure everybody is okay and doing a good job. But they're doing a great job. They're an outstanding job. We communicate with them every day and we didn't even hire a chef to oversee the kitchen. I just do it remotely because most of my kitchen crew works for me for probably over 12 years now. So they're a very good, fine-tuned machine and everybody knows what they're supposed to do.

Beth Bobbitt:

So we're really very lucky can you talk about the distinction between this menu and the one in California? Is there one?

Chef Soerke Peters :

well, there probably will be slightly different ingredients, uh, when it comes to local food, because we like to source things locally and seasonal as well. So we change our menu every three months to make sure keep up with the season. Like, for example, we use California Dungeness crab in one of our raviolis right now, but that season will end in July 30, I believe. And then we're going to replace that with something else and you know asparagus season will be over. We replace that with something else english peas, fava and all these great things. So we're going to turn it into fall vegetables and summer vegetables and so forth.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yeah, so you touched on local sourcing. Talk a little bit about what farm-to-fork means to you and share about the connections you've already made with local farmers or communities.

Chef Soerke Peters :

Yeah, well, that was always close to my heart because of my upbringing in Germany, as I mentioned earlier, cooking with my grandma, and sustainability and local the community is always very important to us because the community really keeps us alive and we saw that during COVID. ; No-transcript, California, where. we are in the Monterey Peninsula, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Pacific Grove, Pearl Beach. We are a tourist destination. People travel there. They want to see the ocean, they want to play golf and none of that was happening and we did actually extremely well during COVID, which I was shocked. So we always want to give back to the community and also our restaurant in Pacific Grove. We're a certified green restaurant.

Chef Soerke Peters :

No-traveling going on then were the first in Pacific Grove to be, a certified green restaurant, and so sustainability is very close to my heart, and we're going to do the same thing with the restaurant over here in Bentonville. So not only will we be the first certified green restaurant in Bentonville and in Northwest Arkansas, but also in the state of Arkansas, so really want to be a leader in sustainability, you know, encourage other restaurateurs and restaurant owners to do the same thing and follow the lead and try to like my dad always said, it's never wrong to do the right thing. So that's what we're trying to do. So we want to make sure that we stay as local as possible and we sourced out some farms already. I'm still new here, so it's a little difficult.

Chef Soerke Peters :

Some of the chefs helped me out with some of the things, like Chef Luke from Oven and Tap and Molly and Matthew Cooper from Conifer and so forth. Everybody's very, very helpful and welcoming, which we appreciate. And then we have some farms like Bainsley Farms for Berkshire pork, Hunter Farms for lamb, which we're going to make lamb meatballs. We have Bella Vista microgreens and we're going to grow our fresh life pea shoots that we use on our dishes, and then SGC, one of our local vendors over here. They've been here for a long time and Matthew and Sue shout out to them because they sourced all my ingredients that I couldn't find anywhere else, like my flour from Italy and my tomatoes and so forth, so they got me all the ingredients that I need that I can be as successful as we are in California, with the same flavor profile and the same consistency and quality, which we're really super happy about.

Beth Bobbitt:

Sounds like you've been very busy made a lot of great connections already.

Chef Soerke Peters :

Sounds like you've been very busy, made a lot of good connections already.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yes, yes yes, so how will you handle sourcing seafood?

Chef Soerke Peters :

Seafood. You know, it's like I just mentioned SGC. They have a lot of connections where I can get direct distribution, like fresh lobster from Maine, scallops from Massachusetts, soft-shell crabs from Maryland and fresh seafood from the Gulf, and that's what we're going to go about. And then we also have a fortune fish company which helped me out with a lot of my Italian ingredients that I need, like Chikuwa, even though it says fish. But, they have a lot of other ingredients that I need that they bring in for me, which is amazing.

Beth Bobbitt:

So I'm curious you touched on this a little bit with some of the other chefs that you've met in the area but what do you think of the culinary scene in Northwest Arkansas? Oh no, it's amazing.

Chef Soerke Peters :

You know we love to go to Oven and Tap. We basically live there because it's close to the restaurant that we're building out right now Conifer. You know Preacher's Son. We had a really good experience at Lady Slippers, with some great cocktails and bar food the other night, and what else is out there? Barclita and you know, a great, great restaurant. So you know we don't want to be a competition, we just want to be an addition.

Beth Bobbitt:

Right.

Chef Soerke Peters :

And complement the community and the variety of food that's available here and just make it even more interesting than it already is.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yes, absolutely. There's so much growth in this area, there's room for everyone. Well, we'll wrap up with a question. We ask all the foodies If you could eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would that be?

Chef Soerke Peters :

That's a good one. I get that question a lot and every time I think mostly they say what would be your last meal? Yeah, you know, which could also be that same meal that I could eat every?

Beth Bobbitt:

day.

Chef Soerke Peters :

And I will never forget. I went, probably about 25 years ago. I went to Hong Kong and I went to the Peninsula Hotel and I had a Peking Duck and I think that was the most interesting flavorful meal experience I've ever had in my life. It was just amazing and I can't get over it. I tried to replicate it. I can't. So I got to stick with pasta.

Beth Bobbitt:

Well, you can't go wrong with pasta, and I think that we're so looking forward to the opening. I know that you mentioned there's no set date yet, but it's coming this summer, very soon, yes, so we'll have to stay in touch and everything is made in-house.

Chef Soerke Peters :

That's why everybody knows that Pasteria means. You know it's like a pasta place. So the whole concept is built around fresh pasta that we make in-house. We make our own mozzarella, our own gelatos, and we also have gluten-free options which we make in-house as well gluten-free bread. It's a pasta place I can eat there, have a gluten-free intolerance or whatever, so we can accommodate everyone. So we're looking forward to that. And then we need employees, so anybody's looking for a job front of the house back of the house.

Chef Soerke Peters :

So we're ready to hire right now and interview.

Beth Bobbitt:

That's exciting. Yes, well, great Well, we'll look forward to more updates. We should all get some lunch now that we're hungry. Thanks for coming to the podcast, jeff.

Chef Soerke Peters :

Yeah, thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yes, can't wait to try it. Where can folks find out more? Is there a website?

Chef Soerke Peters :

Oh, yeah, you can follow us on Instagram, facebook mostly pictures of what we do in Pacific Grove in California, but you can check us out on our website, mezzalunapasteriacom, and you can go through the menus and everything else that we do, and there's also a link to careers so you can fill out your information if you're interested in working for us. So that's all Sounds great.

Beth Bobbitt:

Yes, Thank you so much, so we hope you have a chance to check out Mezzaluna Pastia next time you're in town. Don't forget, Visit Bentonville is here to help navigate things to do, where to stay and eat and what's going on in our new American town. Give us a follow on social media, sign up for our newsletter and check out the website at visitbentonvillecom. Thanks for listening.