Leonor Antoni floats across her kitchen as Latin music blares through speakers. Customers come and go, always making sure to give her a hug and a kiss. In this kitchen, she’s everyone’s mom.
Antoni, 47, is the owner and chef of Corner, 1220 W. University Ave., a Latin fusion restaurant.
Antoni, born in Caracas, Venezuela, said corn is a staple in Latin American food, especially Venezuelan meals. The taste of home pops up often on Antoni’s menu.
Antoni’s speciality is an arepa, which is a cornmeal cake served sandwich-style.
To her, it’s just lunch that she learned from her mom to make.
Antoni said when she was thinking of names for her restaurant, she loved Corner because it had the word “corn” in it.
She looked up the definition of corner, and it was “a place where borders meet.”
She said she cried with joy. She had the name for her restaurant.
“Food is one of the few things where you can get through to people in such a deep place,” she said.
A mother of two, Antoni worries about Corner often.
“I feel like I have a third child now,” she said.
She said she loves to watch people eat their first arepa.
Antoni remembers when her stodgy father-in-law ate his first arepa and cracked a smile.
She said she has always been crafty, including in high school. Antoni said she used to get in trouble because of the radical stories she wrote for the school’s newspaper.
In the kitchen, she cooked with the women in her family. She said cooking is a way of life in Venezuela.
“No one teaches,” she said. “You just do.”
Besides food, Antoni is a photographer and published a book of poetry, “Entre Entes.”
After jumping between Caracas, Venezuela, and San Francisco, where she attended film school, she rekindled a friendship with her first boyfriend 30 years later. He was a horseman moving to Ocala, and she came along. They’re now married.
Once word got out that Antoni could cook, she started teaching cooking classes for seven of her husband’s co-workers.
She taught them how to make risotto on Italian night and paella on Spanish night, and she set the mood with music and pictures from the parts of the world showcased in the food.
She got a lot of hugs from the ranchers’ wives.
“I’ve always been happy to feed people,” she said, “and making people happy.”
But if she wanted to teach, she said, she needed to get formal training.
Antoni enrolled in the Johnson & Wales University’s culinary arts program on the North Miami Campus. At 45 years old, Antoni was older than some of her instructors.
That wasn’t the only problem. She found that professors kept “feeding students lies” and making them think they were all going to work as celebrity chefs.
She said there were no classes that taught how to run a restaurant or manage catering finances.
“It was a horrible experience,” she said.
She said she felt insulted that the students thought they could come into the world of food and just instantly succeed, as if her lifelong passion was a fad. But through the adversity, she flourished.
She graduated in the top 1 percent after two years with a 3.9 GPA.
After graduation, she taught a summer camp for children ages 7 to 15 years old at the Biltmore Hotel in Miami.
She loved to see students come out of their shells and connect with food. Crying mothers thanked her.
“These kids are going to be changed for life,” Antoni said.
She stills gets calls from the children and the men she taught in Ocala with questions about recipes or just to chat. It’s her policy to give every class she teaches her phone number and the chance to call her whenever they need help cooking.
Even with a degree in culinary arts from a program that graduated celebrity chefs like Tyler Florence and Chris Santos, Antoni stills takes calls from ranchers. Occasionally, when she’s having a panic attack about Corner, she eats her favorite snack, Jalapeno Cheetos.
“People think because I’m a chef, I don’t like Cheetos,” she said.
Contact Benjamin S. Brasch at bbrasch@alligator.org.
Venezuelan native Leonor Antoni, 47, is the owner and chef at Corner, a Latin fusion restaurant at 1220 W. University Ave.
