Guillermo Pernot, local James Beard Award-winning pioneer of ‘Nuevo Latino’ cooking, has retired

The movers had driven off with the container and their suitcases were waiting in the living room. Monday morning, Guillermo and Lucia Pernot opened boxes to pack up the few remainders of their 26 years in the house on a quiet street in Wynnewood.

Among them was a black canvas bag holding his knives.

Chef Guillermo Pernot, a two-time James Beard Award winner, has packed his knives — literally — as he and his wife head off to their retirement in Mexico.

Pernot, 67, hit the scene in 1996 with a culinary style called Nuevo Latino at Manayunk’s Vega Grill, opened the Center City restaurant ¡Pasión! in 1998, and at the same time consulted on Cuba Libre’s menu for its opening in 2001. Cuba Libre opened a second location in Atlantic City in 2004. Since 2006, Pernot has been its corporate chef as it expanded to Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and Washington, D.C. Lucia Pernot, 62, a longtime manager at the Four Seasons and Rittenhouse Hotels, last week left her job as Jefferson Hospital’s associate director of protocol and special events.

The Pernots, who bought a property several years ago in Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, said they came to the decision relatively recently. “We just need to move to the next stage of our lives,” he said.

The Pernots met in 1988 when both worked at the Four Seasons Hotel, then on Logan Circle. One day, a coworker suggested that the night manager, whose family had fled Cuba when she was a baby, speak Spanish with the restaurant waiter who at 19 had left the political turmoil of 1970s Argentina for New York City. They have two children — Viviana and Marcelo.

Guillermo Pernot enrolled at Columbia University after leaving Argentina in 1975, arriving in Philadelphia three years later. He bused tables at Fiddler, and then waited at Fish Market, La Panetiere, Downey’s, La Terrasse, Apropos, and the Monte Carlo Living Room. By the time he arrived at the Four Seasons, where he worked the dinner shift at the fancy Fountain Restaurant, he was growing tired of the front of the house.

In late 1991, the Pernots heard about Sweetwater Farm in Glen Mills, which was looking for an innkeeper. The job required making breakfast for the guests. The owner told him that he could have the job on one condition — that he cook New Year’s Eve dinner for a family that had booked the whole place. Guillermo Pernot made pan-seared salmon with red pepper vinaigrette, a salad, and veal shank in a broth with root vegetables.

The family was happy. So was Pernot. The cooking bug had bitten. In short order, he took kitchen jobs at a friend’s pizzeria, in Miami Beach’s South Beach at a restaurant owned by Gloria Estefan, and then back in Philadelphia as chef de cuisine at Treetops, then the Rittenhouse Hotel’s main room. He worked for free at Samuels & Son so he could learn to cut fish.

In 1995, Pernot met chef Douglas Rodriguez, the Miami-born son of Cuban immigrants and author of the new cookbook Nuevo Latino, which celebrated contemporary Latin-American cooking. By then, Pernot had landed the chef’s job at what was supposed to be an upscale diner in Manayunk. Pernot convinced his employers to switch gears and go with a Latino bent. “We were discovering ourselves,” Pernot said of the chefs of Latin descent who wanted to share familiar dishes. .

Vega Grill, a 50-seater with an 8-by-14-foot kitchen, opened in 1996 on Main Street.

Inquirer writer Rick Nichols called Pernot’s food “a playful Esperanto of South American-Caribbean cookery.” Esquire and Food and Wine both named Pernot a chef of the year in 1998, just before he headed downtown to open the destination restaurant ¡Pasión! with a partner on 15th Street south of Walnut. (A new building now stands there, housing the Cheesecake Factory upstairs and the &pizza shop on street level, where ¡Pasión! was.)

As accolades poured in for ¡Pasión! and ceviche and mojitos became more mainstream, the local restaurant scene took notice.

» READ MORE: From 2001: The restaurant rivalry between Guillermo Pernot and his mentor, Douglas Rodriguez

In late 2000, Rodriguez’s phone rang. The chef, based in New York, had recently opened Chicama and Pipa after leaving the landmark Patria. On the line was Stephen Starr, who offered to build him a restaurant in Philadelphia at 1623 Walnut St. — about two blocks from ¡Pasión! and triple the size.

Before opening Alma de Cuba, Rodriguez sent his sous chef, Jose Garces, to Philadelphia to work with Starr’s chefs and then to Cuba to get a feel for the island before Alma’s opening in 2001. (Garces later also juggled the executive chef’s role at Starr’s El Vez before leaving to open his first restaurant, Amada, in 2005.)

¡Pasión!, meanwhile, more than held its own. In 2002, Pernot won the James Beard Award for best chef, Mid-Atlantic, on his third nomination. He also won the Beard award that year for best single-subject cookbook for Ceviche! Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails With a Latino Twist.

But like almost every restaurant, the economy and changing tastes dipped into its fortunes. ¡Pasión! closed in 2007 after 8½ years. Alma de Cuba has been closed since the start of the pandemic in March 2020; Starr declined to discuss its future.

Gutin and Cohen at Cuba Libre had maintained a good relationship with Pernot, who had set up their restaurant’s kitchen and menu in 2000. But they wanted to grow the brand. In ¡Pasión!’s last year and a half, Pernot kept his ownership interest but worked as Cuba Libre’s corporate chef.

Pernot’s decision to step away is setting in motion changes at Cuba Libre.

“When I told the guys [at work], it was a big shock,” Pernot said. “I said, ‘I don’t know how long you want me to hang around.’”

”He’s a great culinary leader and leaves behind great people and a great culture,” said Barry Gutin, who owns Cuba Libre with Larry Cohen. Two longtime Cuba Libre chefs, Kevin Couch and Angel Roque, will step up, Gutin said.

Couch, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, has been with the company since 2006. Roque came to the company through Pernot directly. Pernot traveled frequently to Cuba for culinary trips. In 2010, he met Roque, who opened his own restaurant a year later. Roque also visited the United States in 2012 and 2013 and later sought asylum in the United States. Eventually, Roque’s family was allowed to join him.

Mérida has a slow pace, “except for the driving,” said Guillermo Pernot.

He and his wife had started to crunch some numbers over the summer, “and they really clicked. It is much cheaper to live there than here.” Their home in Mexico is about the same size as the Wynnewod house and has a pool. There’s a park on their street, and a farmer’s market a half-block away.

The pandemic was draining, he said. He spent a lot of time developing takeout menus for food that doesn’t travel too well.

After stepping away from the cooking line earlier this year, he realized that retirement was a possibility.

As he gazed at his knife bag in the cardboard box, he said he would miss the work. “How could I not?”