To Palladino, cooking was always an integral part of his life.
"I've been interested in food since I was 13," he said. "I have a love and a passion for it. I never wanted to do anything else.
"I grew up [in] a big family and we'd get together for the holidays, and I remember . . . we'd get together around 1 in the afternoon and leave at 8 or 9 at night. We'd take breaks, but I remember this procession of food. All the different segments of the family would bring their specialties, and that's what I loved."
The 1989 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, N.Y., began his career working for super-chef Emeril Lagasse in the latter's Commander's Palace restaurant in New Orleans, and then put in time in a kitchen on Cape Cod.
In the early 1990s, he began the first of three extended stays in Italy. Traveling throughout the country, he absorbed the regional styles, from the Piedmont in the north to Sicily in the south. It was during his third stay that he changed from employee to employer when he and a partner opened a restaurant in Venice.
By the early 2000s, the divorced father of three was back on American soil, running his own eatery in Aspen, Colo., and then at the Mirage casino on the Las Vegas Strip. About a year before the 2003 opening of Borgata Hotel, Casino & Spa, he arrived in Atlantic City to build what would ultimately become Specchio, a casino-level, high-end gourmet room, and Ombra, a more casual trattoria on the floor below.
He also ran Risi Bisi, an Italian version of a fast-food outlet. All three operations were, by any standard, successful. But Palladino found himself at odds with casino management when it came to operating philosophies. In 2008 he called it quits at Borgata.
