By Anna Bedell
Bristol native Nick Valenta has come full circle to find his calling as a chef with his latest endeavor, Smetana Food Truck, which is a regular at GastroPark on New Park Ave. in Hartford.
From growing up in a household that owned a local pizzeria, to law school and then spending time in Michelin-rated restaurants in New York City, Valenta is cooking the food he grew up and living back in Bristol where he graduated from Bristol Central High.
Valenta’s food truck, featuring its unique menu, debuted last month. It is just one more step in a journey that began long before he was even born.
The son of immigrants, Valenta’s mother Irena, was originally from a small potato and dairy farm in a small village called Wrocen, which is located in the Northeastern part of Poland near the city of Białystok.
In the 1970s, she emigrated to New Britain, an enclave for Polish immigrants.
Valenta’s father Pavel, who was from the Czech Republic, fled to Austria after escaping communism. He hid out in Vienna for a couple years while his asylum application to the United States was pending.
He too ended up in New Britain because he too spoke Polish, making it easier for him to assimilate in the Polish community.
“That’s where he met my mother, and it’s a really cool story,” said Valenta. “They were both with no formal education.”
His father was a car mechanic by trade, while his mother was a nurse in Poland.
“When she came here to the states, through English equivalency and different exams, she ended up as a nurse’s aide, and my dad was a painter,” said Valenta.
“He took every opportunity he could find so, at one point he was a car mechanic for individual named Nick Ioannides, who I was named after.”
Ioannides owned Main Street Pizza House, on Main St., in Bristol.
His father used to fix Ioannides’s vintage Mercedes cars, and it was because of his hard work that Ioannides offered to sell his father his pizza business.
“My dad ever the entrepreneur took that opportunity to learn how to make pizza,” said Valenta. “It was him and my mother for 20 years and me and my brother had a playpen in the back.”
Valenta went to Bristol Central High School, and then went to UConn in 2001.
“My dad sold the pizza place and he kept his night job at Pratt and Whitney,” said Valenta. “At this juncture they’re both retired.”
His parent’s philosophy was, they worked in food so that he and his brother didn’t have to while both would get an education, to live the American dream.
“I ended up going to law school,” said Valenta. “I was a litigator for five years with Hinkley Allen in Hartford, a big law firm, and my brother John became a neuroscientist.”
While an undergrad, Valenta worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Middletown called It’s Only Natural which was vegetarian and vegan.
“That was sort of how I fell into cooking, with my mother doing her traditional recipes at the time,” said Valenta. “She said, ‘you know, you’re gonna have to learn how to cook this stuff yourself frankly, I’m not going to modify all these traditional recipes.’”
Valenta started out as a dishwasher, for a couple years as a prep cook, and then he became a line cook, while continuing his studies.
“I always kept that cooking passion alive, so I had a little catering company back in the day in Connecticut, while I was in law school,” said Valenta. “I worked on the weekends, interned at farm to table restaurants.”
He had a job at the River Tavern in Chester, and also worked at Mill Rights.
“I worked at ON20 in Hartford as a ‘gar manche’ and these are all things I did on the side, while studying for the bar or doing things on the weekends or anything like that,” said Valenta.
Although he passed his bar exam, Valenta was never able to quell that passion; he wanted to be in the food and wine business.
After graduating from UConn Law School in 2010, after five years of being a lawyer, in 2015 he made the transition to food and wine full time.
“I started working at Yale’s Hotel in New Haven, it’s called the Study at Yale, and the restaurant was called Heirloom,” said Valenta. “They had a manager-in-training program.”
Valenta saw this as his opportunity to learn front of the house stuff because everything he did in the past was back in the house cooking.
He became an assistant manager and assistant wine director, while he worked his way up, doing all the stations as a server, as a barback, as a bartender, which placed him on the speed fast track towards success.
“I started studying with the court of Master Sommeliers, so my ability to study was easy for me to transition into the world of wine,” said Valenta.
“I didn’t grow up around fine wine or anything, but I felt I had a good palate and can study well and new geography and geology and I could sort of get ahead in that route.”
He eventually made it to New York City, working at a restaurant called Dovetail, which is one-Michelin star restaurant that was around for about 10 years.
“They did meat and vegetarian tasting menus, and I was a server and a sommelier there,” said Valenta. “Then I went to Aqua V, which is a two-Michelin star restaurant, working for Chef Bankston who was voted best female chef in the world a couple years ago.”
It’s Nordic cuisine was a big inspiration for Valenta because Poland and Sweden obviously share the Baltic Sea.
“A lot of the preservation methods, a lot of that sort of scarcity of ingredients and preservation that was all a really nice exposure because there wasn’t a sort of two-Michelin star Polish restaurant in New York City,” said Valenta.
He became a head sommelier there while studying for his advanced exam with the court of Master Sommeliers and the pandemic hit, he said.
“All the restaurants in New York City shut down, my exam was delayed, and I tried to ride things out in New York as long as I could,” said Valenta. “At that juncture, I was in New York for five years or so.”
After struggling to pay his rent, Valenta moved back to Connecticut and began brainstorming.
“What can I do with the sort of different skill sets I had acquired, whether it was managing wine pairing, or whether it was cooking? I really didn’t know what to do,” said Valenta.
Reconnecting with his childhood friend Matt Westfall, owner of Counterweight Brewing, a brand new 20,000 square-foot facility in Cheshire which slated to open around Christmas time, who put him in touch with his loan officer at Thomaston Savings Bank.
It was the catalyst Valenta needed to fulfil his dream of starting his own business.
“In light of Black Lives Matter and all the consciousness raising that was going on at the time, I didn’t want to be someone appropriating someone else’s food,” said Valenta.
“The idea of exploring the traditional recipes and my heritage, just sort of popped into my head and I said, ‘You know what, all the food in New Britain, all of the Polish food around here, Connecticut has the third largest density Polish population in the country.’ ”
Fermenting your own sauerkraut, making your own farmer’s cheese, culturing your own sour cream, doing things in with that sort of attention to detail, is something that used to be done, he said.
Valenta took some of those philosophies of farm to table and the Michelin fine dining approach and made them his own.
“When you had communism, almost directly in contrast from the westernization of food, is sort of the industrial food movement,” said Valenta. “I think some of those traditions went away and unfortunately, I think a lot of people relied on perogies or something in the freezer section or they just put together some potatoes and some prepackaged cheese and call it a day.”
Smetana Food Truck will be at the following locations:
Saturday, Jan 22nd – GastroPark, West Hartford – 12 – 8 p.m.
Wednesday, Jan 26th – GastroPark, West Hartford – 12 – 8p.m.
Aside from GastroPark, Smetana has also been featured at Tonn’s Marketplace, just over the city line in Burlington.