He made his first pie at Coral Reef High. Now this chef runs a luxury Gables restaurant

When Chef Daniel “Danny” Ganem was a boy and living with his family in Santiago, Chile, his diplomat parents would bring him along to the sorts of glamorous events that don’t generally cater to children.

But Danny was different, and his parents knew it. He wasn’t a fussy, chicken-tenders kind of kid. Born in Miami, he moved to Santiago with them at the age of 4, and even then, they must have sensed the glimmerings of a palate.

And so, when they arrived at the sumptuous galas that were part of their job, they’d sit him down with a platter of oysters and caviar to keep him busy. And Danny ate it all.

“There I was, this 7-year-old kid sitting down eating oysters and caviar, eating really good food,” he remembers, laughing. “I loved it.”

Ganem, 41, can’t say for sure whether this early exposure to the finer bites of life led him to his profession, which at the moment is leading the kitchen as executive chef of the elegant Italian restaurant Fiola in Coral Gables. But the memory is certainly a part of the fabric of events and experiences that guided him to a passion for dining, cooking and a career that not only has helped shape Fiola but also will include running a new luxury restaurant on Grove Isle sometime next year.

At the glamorous Fiola, a Michelin Guide-recommended restaurant, Ganem’s skills are on display particularly in the restaurant’s pasta omakase experience, a six-course journey he created through some of the best pasta dishes you’ll ever sample (don’t worry — the portions are nicely balanced to prevent overeating). The kid who loved oysters and caviar pays careful attention to seasonal ingredients and flavors that mesh, and this unique tasting menu is unlike any you’ll find in Miami.

Ganem credits his family with getting him started down this road. He soaked up cooking knowledge like hot bread soaks up olive oil from his Panamanian mother, his father, his paternal grandmother, who was of Chilean, Spanish and German heritage. His Palestinian paternal grandfather showed him a few secrets about making Middle Eastern cuisine (to this day, he loves making and eating hummus).

More inspiration awaited when the family returned to Miami when Ganem was in middle school, and it came from a familiar face: Emeril Lagasse.

“My dad and I were watching the Food Network and we saw Emeril, and I was like, ‘What he’s doing is such a cool thing,’ ” Ganem says. “I kept watching every night. I told my mom, ‘I really like this,’ and she said, ‘It’s a hard life — while everybody’s celebrating, you’ll be working.”

Thinking about every holiday he has spent sweating in a kitchen, he has to admit: “She was 100 percent right.”

A family friend taught him to debone a chicken when he was 15, though, and his interest in cooking only grew throughout his time at Coral Reef High School. Ganem still remembers the cherry pie he made in home economics — his dad, who had warned him pursuing a career as a chef could end with him selling hot dogs in Central Park, ate all of it.

Ganem went on to work in the industry, starting as a server and a busboy at a sushi restaurant, finally getting to make sushi when a prep cook didn’t show up one day. He attended the now-closed Le Cordon Bleu in Orlando. He worked in restaurants around the world, in places like Panama, Chile, Spain. He has worked with chefs like Michael Schwartz (of Michael’s Genuine) and Michael Mina (Bourbon Steak). He loved the camaraderie and adrenaline rush of the kitchen and unhappily learned that not all top chefs were charmers.

Once a chef in Panama, infuriated over the treatment of a tomato, screamed “I don’t pay you to think, I get paid to think!” at him. It left an impression.

“I thought, ‘I don’t want to be like that chef,’ ” Ganem says now. “They used to scream at you and say so many things that should not be said. . . . My goal is to mentor my young cooks to make them better, see them pushing to be better and do it in a positive way. If you don’t do it in a positive way, you’re not going to get the best out of them.”

In 2020, Ganem got a chance to run the kitchen at the luxury property Little Palm Island Resort & Spa on Little Torch Key. While it was a great experience — “it showed me I could do it without a celebrity chef above me,” he says — his tenure was short-lived, and not because of the pandemic. By 2020, he was married with three children of his own. He had met his wife Anita, another Miami native who graduated from Southwest High, while visiting South Florida from Spain years earlier. Needless to say, he never moved back to Spain.

Working and living in the Keys most of the week while his family remained in Miami was hard. So in early 2021, when Ganem heard Fiola in Coral Gables was seeking a new executive chef, he raised his hand.

The original Fiola, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Washington, D.C., was created and owned by Italian chef Fabio Trabocchi. Commercial real estate attorney Thomas Angelo opened a new location in Coral Gables in 2018. When the pandemic began in 2020, Angelo found himself taking a more hands-on management role.

When the restaurant’s executive chef Brian Garcia left, Angelo’s team met Ganem, Angelo says, and “that changed the course of the restaurant.”

“What’s been unique about Danny is his openness to collaborate with me as the owner,” Angelo says. “We sit, we talk, we have ideas, and he executes them. He’s got a great openness to collaborate and a strong desire to continue to learn and expand his portfolio of dishes.”

That’s why Angelo, who has created the Gioia Hospitality Group, plans to make Ganem the executive chef at the group’s new luxury restaurant La Cala (“The Cove”) on Grove Isle just off Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. Scheduled to open sometime late next year, the restaurant, which will serve upscale Italian cuisine, will be designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, which designed Annabel’s in London’s Berkeley Square as well as Sexy Fish Miami.

“Danny’s had a lot of mentors and worked his whole career under top tier chefs,” Angelo says. “I wanted to give him an opportunity to do something outside the realm of being under another chef.”

Ganem, who will remain at Fiola until La Cala opens, is ready for the challenge, he says (chef de cuisine Luis Salcedo will take over executive chef duties at Fiola when Ganem departs). But in the meantime, he’s working to keep Fiola guests happy, creating the summer version of the pasta omakase menu ($145 per person) and gearing up for the more affordable Miami Spice months, always a popular time at the restaurant for locals who can’t quite afford fine dining as easily as Fiola’s loyal clientele.

Maintaining the standards of a high-end restaurant like Fiola is time consuming, and so there’s little time for Ganem to indulge his other interests. He loves reading cookbooks (he has a library of around 1,000, he estimates) and doggedly follows the ups and downs (frequently downs) of his beloved Miami Dolphins. He’s also trying to learn Italian via Babbel so he can talk with Chef Fabio in his native tongue.

Time will be even more elusive once the new restaurant is ready.

“To open my own restaurant — that’s the goal at the end of the day,” he says. “But the hardest part for me is finding time. I want to do so much! But you only have 24 hours. I wake up with ideas and write them down. The hardest thing is to organize the day. I wish I had more time to read and spend with my family, but this is where I am right now.”

Even so, he’s picking up where his parents left off, taking his kids — ages 14, 12 and 7 — to Michelin-starred restaurants (one child per restaurant, he jokes) and teaching his eldest son and daughter to work in the kitchen.

“We’ve made pasta, lasagna, pita bread, hummus and paella,” he says. “My daughter is getting into it. I take them in on Saturday to work sometimes. I see it as a way to be around them. It’s funny to see them working. Sometimes, they even have fun.”

Fiola Miami

Where: 1500 San Ignacio Ave., Coral Gables.

Hours: 5:30-9 p.m. Monday; noon-9:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday; noon-10 p.m. Friday; 5-10 p.m. Saturday; 11:30 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Sunday

Reservations and information: www.fiolamiami.com or 305-912-2639