At Zaytinya, Hilda Mazariegos is the person responsible for switching on the lights every morning. A middle-aged woman with a ready laugh, Mazariegos never attended a culinary school. She was on track to become a schoolteacher in Guatemala when she took a job at a restaurant in Virginia, thinking her work in kitchens would be temporary. Four months after Zaytinya opened, she was hired as a line cook on the fry station. She went on to master every other station in the kitchen: salad, sauté, grill, oven, flat top, bread and dessert. Now she is the restaurant’s executive sous chef. She can make each of its signature dishes from scratch and has trained most of its cooks. Many have worked at Zaytinya for more than five years. “I’ve been here for 13 months,” the head chef, Terry Natas, told me, “and I’m still the new guy.”
On the Thursday that I came to visit, I found Mazariegos in Zaytinya’s closet-size chefs’ office, working on the next week’s schedule. About 25 cooks and dishwashers are in the kitchen during each shift, and at 8 in the morning the space already hummed with the sound of staff members’ scrubbing down surfaces with soapy water. In the back prep kitchen, Antonio Machic, who was born in Guatemala and has been working at Zaytinya for about a decade, was trimming 80 pounds of chicken, saving the spare bits so that they could be added into stock.
“The beauty of this food is that everything is made like you make family food at home,” Mazariegos told me in Spanish, which is still her preferred language. Nearly every dish is made from scratch daily, which requires skill and attention. There are machines that make dolmades, for example, but at Zaytinya, they are filled and rolled by hand by a woman from El Salvador, Julia Hernandez, who produces them by the thousands every week. She also makes the restaurant’s juicy kibbeh, a football-shaped, cinnamon-spiced meatball that is encased in a crispy shell of bulgur wheat and ground beef.
That Thursday morning, Mazariegos made a batch of phyllo using the technique that she learned almost two decades ago directly from Abdelrazzaq Hashhoush. She flattened a dozen baseball-size rounds of dough into single sheets, each larger than a pillowcase. Then she layered these together with handfuls of cornstarch and ran a rolling pin over the stack until it turned into one thin, silky sheet, nearly the size of a throw blanket. “This is my workout,” she joked as she flipped the phyllo for the fourth time, using a long wooden dowel, and then rolled it even thinner. Phyllo made this way is more elastic than the kind sold in stores, so Zaytinya can stuff it with more spinach and shape it into a cylinder for spanakopita.