Chez Arsenio – The Customer is King

“The first ingredient is love. This is the most important thing,” explains Arsenio, sitting in his restaurant, Chez Arsenio, with the Atlantic Ocean waves crashing in the background.
Originally a private restaurant for a condominium near Cabarete on the north coast of Dominican Republic, Chef Arsenio transformed it into a destination gourmet restaurant serving fresh, local foods to the public. Open non-stop from morning until 10 pm every evening, chef Arsenio adamantly puts his customer as his reason for being.
“Make the customer feel like a king. That is what I tell the people who work with me,” declares Arsenio. The stage is set with the first view of the restaurant. With a large swimming pool in the foreground, and the ocean in the background, this open-air restaurant with its thatched roof is instantaneously welcoming and special.
Combining fresh local ingredients with classical techniques, he creates a cuisine that he describes as Dominican fusion. Pointing out that there is no large refrigerator so there is no possibility of anything frozen, Arsenio describes taking a banana leaf to wrap a piece of fresh local fish with local herbs such as two different kinds of cilantro and other local ingredients such as coconut to create a unique dish.
He keeps the “customer is king” in mind in everything that he does in the restaurant, from plating to suit current tastes to stopping to visit the customers during the dinner hour. A visit from Arsenio is truly a pleasure because his passion and joy are contagious, and add that extra special local ingredient, Arsenio himself, a true local product.