Oona Settembre

By Bonnie Brewer Cavanaugh

Title: corporate executive chef
Company: Dave & Buster's Inc., Dallas
Birth date: Sept. 5, 1958
Hometown: born in Folkestone-Kent in England and raised in the Blue Mountains of Australia
Education: attended an all-girl boarding school, took an apprenticeship at her father's restaurants in Folkestone; opened a restaurant with her husband when she was 19 and he was 25 in 1976
Personal: married, with two children
Hobbies: cooking, "junk shopping" and collecting cookbooks

Corporate executive chef Oona Settembre of Dave & Buster's Inc. in Dallas has a lot on her plate, figuratively, that is.

After her last October menu revamp, she just launched an entire new low-carb menu and is working on several regional menus to suit the diverse tastes of Dave & Buster's customers from coast to coast. Such endeavors have earned her Nation's Restaurant News' 2004 MenuMasters Chef/Innovator Award.

It's all pretty much in a day's work for the versatile Settembre, whose entertainment- and-casual-dining chain concept's menus change almost twice a year. For the April 20 menu, which is dedicated to low-carb dishes, she's removed starches in some cases and created a few new low-carb dishes.

"We've actually reformatted our whole menu to include a section called Low-Carb Classics," Settembre says.

Although Dave & Buster's always has been willing to modify dishes for its guests — removing starchy items like tortilla chips — the new low-carb menu will make things a bit easier. Then it's back to working on the main menu again.

"We try to make changes at least every year," Settembre says. "It works out to 1.5 menu changes per year. We do a lot of things with our other menus. We do a big banquet menu that we tweak a lot through the year."

Her menu revamp was launched in October with eight new items priced in the $7-to-$8 range, including a chipotle chicken salad with "a great chipotle honey dressing glaze that works really well on chicken and salmon," she says. The dish features chipotle-honey-glazed chicken breast tossed with romaine lettuce, tortilla strips, cheese, avocado pico de gallo and chipotle dressing.

Her new Southwest grilled-chicken sandwich is marinated in the same chipotle dressing and is topped with Chihuahua cheese, which Settembre jokingly insists comes from real Mexican Chihuahuas.

Another addition, grilled wrapper with shrimp, includes a grilled jalapeño-cheese tortilla, made locally and filled with sautéed shrimp, rice, Poblano peppers and cheese. Then there's a Mediterranean sandwich made with grilled lemon-herb-marinated chicken, roasted peppers, fresh basil and herb cheese, served on "really great Italian-style rustic rolls."

The menu features about 56 items. "When we do a new menu, generally we change about 12 to 14 of them," Settembre says. "We also change the presentation of items that stay."

The restaurant's former "beer-battered fish and chips" menu item, for example, was changed from beer batter to tempura batter and from halibut to tilapia. Then it was renamed "tilapia fish and chips."

Settembre's chicken enchilada dip — made with poblano peppers, grilled chicken breast, queso cheese, a soft corn tortilla, topped with fresh avocado pico de gallo with onion, cilantro and lime — is one of three dips added back to the menu because of popular demand.

"Dips are big," Settembre says. She's also returned her spinach artichoke dip to the menu, even though "it was a pain to do it from scratch and to do it consistently."

She revamped the dish, and now it still takes three hours to make. But she says it is worth it. "You have to spin-dry the spinach, get all the moisture out of it, then make a basic cream sauce," Settembre says. "We had to bring in one of the world's most expensive cheeses to put in it because we like it: 24-month-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy. You can try any other cheese, but this flavor is just outstanding."

Back at Dave & Buster's headquarters, buyers initially were not pleased with the cheese choice. She recounts: "Purchasing said, 'You cannot possibly want a cheese that costs this amount of money,' and we said, 'Taste it.' "That's one of the good things about this company; you can humor them by making up batches for them. We had a hands-down win with the Parmigiano-Reggiano."

Future plans for Settembre include "working on Miami Latin specialties, looking at a more regional type of menus and tweaking them to make them more interesting for our guests in those regions — giving them a few more local tastes," Settembre says.

"In Hawaii we do different items that fit with that market," such as local fresh fish. "We even do a 'loco moco': a big scoop of sticky rice with a big 8-ounce burger put on top of it, with a fried egg on top of that. We put a peppercorn gravy on top with grilled onions. It's so weird."

Settembre's culinary training was sort of "trial by fire." She cut her culinary teeth during a two-year apprenticeship in one of her father's fine-dining restaurants at the Royal Pavilion Hotel, in her hometown of Folkstone-Kent, England.

"We weren't allowed to write anything down," she notes. "You had to keep your repertoire in your pocket. We learned that way."

She and her husband later opened and ran an Italian restaurant in Folkestone for three years, and then they "escaped," as she puts it, to Key Biscayne, Fla. They eventually moved to Dallas and opened Two Going Gourmet, voted the "best casual new restaurant" in Dallas, in 1986.

That's where she met Dave & Buster's chief executive, Buster Corley, who with his wife, Lacy, became regular customers. She didn't know they were in foodservice until the day they began to chat about local restaurant gossip. Then it hit her.

"You're not anything to do with that Dave & Buster's, are you?" Settembre recalls asking. "He looked down at the table and said, 'Yeah, I'm Buster.' "

A short while later she and her husband sold the restaurant, and she focused on launching a freelance consulting career. She called on Corley for a personal reference and got a job instead.

"I met with Buster, and we spoke for about five hours," she says. "He's a good talker. He talked me out of consulting and into his kitchen. After having a restaurant for five years, the last thing I wanted to do was this."

She's been with Dave & Buster's for eight years now.

"When you work with people you like, it makes a big difference," she says. "He's a very nice person."

Buster is "the food guy" of the operation, while company president Dave Corriveau handles the gaming aspect of the business, she says.

"Oona's flexibility is amazing — she enjoys working on a new hamburger presentation as much as on things that might be considered more of a culinary challenge," says Mike Plunkett, senior vice president of food and beverage. "She brings an incredible balance of food quality, food costs and kitchen labor insight to everything we do."

One of the innovations the company provides with each new menu rollout is a video so that all their chefs will be in sync with new procedures. Settembre takes it one step further by also showing what can go wrong with the new dishes plus quick fixes to get the dish back on track. It's a long haul from her days of memorizing recipes in her father's kitchen.

"If I think something may be a problem, I show on the video how to do it wrong and what to do and why it happened," she explains. "Nobody likes to fail; when you're at a station and cooking an item and it fails, you can't ask me for help. Giving people the knowledge of what can go wrong gives them the power to fix it."