Seasoned to Taste

Harvest, abundance and sharing

2010-09-16T17:53:00.003-04:00

We're starting our Abbondanza menu soon. Abbondanza means "abundance" in Italian and it's a autumn harvest menu that runs October 13-23.

Appetizers:

Wild boar salame with Cacio al Tartufo, cherry conserva, crostini--The day I arrived in Norcia, Umbria last year, I was too late to get lunch anywhere. Instead, I stopped in a shop, bought some boar salame, a chunk of this incredible black truffle cheese and a bottle of Rosso di Montefalco. After consuming most of it and blown away by my impromptu pairing, I took a nap.

Ribolita--I've eaten and made this classic Tuscan soup several times including in a house near San Gimignano that was built in 1010. I also like to feature something classic and with Jens Schmidt's vibrant and racy Primo Olio olive oil, this soup is Tuscany.

Rosemary crostini, melted lardo, Georgia apples, arugula--This is inspired by a lunch I had with my friend Jens at his house near Siena. It was simple yet memorable meal. He toasted bread then laid thinly sliced lardo (cured, pork fatback) on it. I picked some tomatoes from his property along with some basil and we sat outside.

Grilled house made venison sausage, Castellucio lentils, roastes squash--UPS delivered the sausage stuffer today. I got really excited and in hindsight, it was a little embarrassing.

Celery, walnut and Gala apple salad, Pecorino Toscano, Meyer lemon vinaigrette

Entrees:

Ricotta gnocchi, black truffle sauce, chive flowers, soft poached egg--This is also inspired by my trip to Norcia. The poached egg is my addition just to make it even richer, more decadent.

Smoked pork spare ribs, polenta, vin cotto glaze, braised turnips, poppy seeds--I had wood roasted spare ribs at Ristorante l'Astronave near Scorgiano, Tuscany and I've been craving them ever since.

Pappardelle alla Boscaiola--This means the Woodsman's sauce and after eating it, you should have enough strength to chop wood...or something like that. Again, this is a sauce I've cooked and eaten many times and falls under the "classic" category. When the air starts to get chilly, I want this pasta.

Trout, brussel sprouts, roasted squash, pancetta, pomegranate vinaigrette--Trout because we don't live near the sea and brussel sprouts because we have some regulars (Robert and Douglas) who would probably ignore me if I didn't fit them in somewhere.

Veal breast braised in sauerkraut, borlotti beans, baby carrots, fresh horseradish--This dish is a nod to my friends in Friuli.

Dessert:

Coffee panna cotta, warm chocolate sauce, toasted hazelnuts

How to Cook Vietnamese Pho in an Italian Restaurant

2010-09-03T15:20:00.002-04:00

I eat pasta every day. When I'm working, it's the quickest thing to throw together for the crew that is filling and somewhat healthy. Our prep guy, Feliciano, can suck down a bowl of pasta big enough for a lineman in about two minutes flat. He always takes his food outside and no one sees him eat, but before I can even get my silverware, he comes strolling through the door with an empty bowl. It's simply amazing.

That being said, I get sick of pasta. There are days when I would rather eat my shoe than anything resembling Italian food for lunch. Today I was craving Vietnamese food and this is what I came up with using ingredients from our kitchen. My apologies to Vietnamese food purists...

1 yellow onion, fine diced
1 red onion, julienned (or diced...I was in a hurry)
2 tbsp. sliced garlic
1/2 bulb fennel, fine diced
2 Calabrian chilies (jalapenos are ok)
1 tbsp. chili flake
1 star anise
1 stick of cinnamon
3 qts. of chicken stock (or low sodium chicken broth)
1/2 roasted chicken, pulled
2 cups of blanched spaghettini
Sprigs of basil and balsamic reduction or saba for garnish

Sweat down the onions, garlic, fennel and chilies in two tbsp of olive oil. Add star anise and cinnamon and cook for another three minutes. Add chicken stock, bring to a simmer and season with salt and pepper to taste. Simmer for fifteen minutes. Add chicken and simmer for ten minutes. Add spaghettini and cook for another two minutes. Serve with a ladle and warm bowls. Serve garnishes along side.

This serves 4-6 people as long as you're not eating with Feliciano.

El Patron

2010-08-22T11:28:00.003-04:00

After a long hiatus from writing, it only seems fitting to write about the people I've been spending a lot of time with over the last six months: Our Team. Contrary to previous accounts of kitchen crews as a hedonistic band of micreants, our team is a varied blend of personalities, temperaments and skill levels. We spend more time together than we probably should and inevitably learn more about each other than we probably should know. We've rebuilt some our team lately and as I said told our sous chef the other day, I feel like we're a college team with a lot of sophomores and one tenth year senior. That tenth year senior and the cog that makes the whole wheel turn most nights is Oscar.

Oscar and Feliciano, our daytime prep cook, are the only cooks left over from the old guard. I arrived at La Tavola in the spring of 2005 and after my first night, Oscar told Mark, our General Manager at the time, "This guy is going to change a lot of stuff." Even through those changes Oscar has stayed on and been one of those people I can really lean on when I need something done or a position filled. He's also the guy that take my food and at times, make it look better than I can. And what makes him so good at his job is a series of skills and instincts that are so difficult to find in cooks. They may, in fact, be skills of the past. As a chef and manager, I sincerely hope not.

As Brian, our newest line cook, observed last week, Oscar has an efficiency about his cooking that may not seem fast but he always has everything done, a dish complete and looking perfect almost every time. This is a skill honed after years of line cooking experience and one that shows he has examined every aspect of his job, the dishes he's responsible and the speed necessary to execute them. He knows exactly where all of his mis en place (cook speech for prepped items on a station) should be and understands that motions wasted over the course of a shift can mean longer ticket times and more work. His food is polished and finessed. He seasons and tastes consistently. His focus is unwavering and his ability to remember and process orders is almost unnatural. And he does all of this with a quiet, unassuming disposition.

I've often prodded Oscar to be more of a leader in our kitchen. I've asked him to be more of a teacher, my third set of eyes in the kitchen to ensure quality. He hasn't accomplished all of these things the way I would have, kicking the door down probably saying too much. Instead, he's been the leader by example and the absolute voice and power of our Hispanic contingency in the kitchen. If there's a problem with a dishwasher or a translation needed, Oscar's the guy. If there's a phone number needed or a position to quickly be filled, talk to Oscar. He is el patron. And he does all of this with a smirk, a smile, a joke. He will make a crack about someone's mom but only within earshot of them. And the ladies love him for his understated compliments and bashful flirting.

There have been a lot of nights that went very smoothly because of Oscar. And as I said last night, sometimes he's the beam under the tent that holds this whole circus together.

Valentine's Day weekend dishes

2010-02-13T13:15:00.006-05:00

Crespelle with Sweet Ricotta, Roasted Strawberry-Rose Water Sauce, Grated Chocolate, Rose Petal Garnish

Wild Striped Bass, Castelluccio Lentils, Artichoke Crema, Speck

Garganelli with Wild Boar Bolognese, Cipollini Onions, Pecorino Toscano Fonduta

Gala Apple and Celery Salad with Fontina Val d'Aosta cheese, Toasted Walnuts, Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette

Venting and Preparing

2010-02-11T15:48:00.004-05:00

I have to get something off my chest. I was off yesterday, and as I sat down to read the Dining section of the New York Times, my interest was peaked by the two star review of an Italian restaurant I hadn't heard of. The Times has a new reviewer, Sam Sifton, and to be honest, I haven't read many of his reviews. The piece starts by praising Novita, the restaurant featured, as a place that in "any other metropolis in North America, would be well known among the city's best places to eat. In many cities, it would sit atop the heap." Ah, New Yorkers...they are fond of their own, aren't they? It goes on to romaticize the decor, location and clientele. I usually skim this section as it seems perfunctory and uninteresting. It also gives a brief history of the restaurant, opened in 1994, previous restaurants in the space, past owners, chefs, mentors, doormen, etc. Apparently, Ruth Reichl gave the restaurant one star in 1995. The chef, Mr. Fregonese has moved away from some of his more "fussy, ornate preparations" to a more "plain and hearty style well suited to longevity." To me this reads: "Boring, bland food that will forever by stuck in the past. But, hey, at the least the chef doesn't have to come up with anything new!"

The review finally moves on to the food. The first dish described is the carbonara as a "riot of simplicity, a four-member noise band. It is outstanding, firm and pliant, salty and sweet, slick and sticky and rich." Ok, I can live with this. I love carbonara and we make it at La Tavola at least once a week. And I could even wax poetic about it to just about anyone who would listen, but Sam seems to be tasting carbonara for the first time. And he writes about it as if we, the audience, has never had it. This isn't some obscure dish only known by a small group of chefs and anthropologists. This is carbonara, a classic Roman pasta, served in trattorias all over the western world. I hope Novita does get their carbonara right. Any self-respecting, Italian restaurant in NYC should! Moving on...

Mr. Sifton goes on to rave about the mushroom salad with Parmesan ("packed with flavor"), asparagus gratin ("not to encourage FedEx farming, but it's wonderful all the same"), prosciutto with "airlifted" melon slices, breaded baby eggplant baked with tomato, mozzarella and Parmesan (something out of a Bensonhurst fever dream) and he hasn't even made it out of the antipasti section of the menu. Just wait until he gets to the black pepper encrusted tuna and the spinach and prosciutto stuffed chicken breasts.

Now I am sure that there are a lot of chefs and restaurants across the country serving this kind of Italian food and if you're reading this, and I've offended you, I apologize. I also know that this criticism of a critic might sound a wee bit snooty and I'm willing to take that risk. I guess the point of this is that this is the New York Times food review, the one of a few places where you can read thoughtful, insightful criticism about engaging food. And New York is one of those cities where chefs are constantly pushing the boundaries and exploring new ways of sourcing, preparing and serving food. Sam fails us on every level here. He is writing about food I didn't even know was still served in New York these days. These dishes are dinosaurs from Italian menus of ten plus years ago. And his naivete about this cuisine and Italian food in general is both confusing and embarrassing. I can name at least twelve Italian restaurants in NYC that are making great, sincere, seasonal food. And these restuarants aren't topping fish with foam or spraying "essence" on the plate. There are a lot of restaurants out there making great, regional Italian food every night that speaks of a place and gives the food the integrity it deserves.

Finally, my relationship with food writers/crtics has always been a love-hate one. I love them when they give the restaurants I'm cooking in great press and many, many stars. But I hate them when, with the power they do have, perpetuate a cuisine or restaurant that a lot of us are trying to avoid. We're moving forward so please, Sam, don't kick us back to the past.

In better news, we're getting ready for a crazy weekend. The stars have aligned to put Valentine's Day, the second installation of every restaurant's Holy Trinity (Mother's Day being the final blow) on Sunday this year. This means not only a crazy day on the 14th but also a solid Friday and Saturday. We're doing a menu in additional to our regular menu and here it is:

Celery, walnut and Gala apple salad
Fontina Val d’Aosta cheese, Meyer lemon vinaigrette

Garganelli with wild boar Bolognese
Cippollini onions, Pecorino Toscana fonduta

Wild striped bass with Castelluccio lentils
Artichoke crema, speck

Warm crepes with sweet ricotta and chocolate shaving
Roasted strawberry-rose petal sauce

I've always had a wierd feeling about Valentine's Day. I'm sure that the Hallmark conspirators have added to the pressure of taking your better half out for a nice dinner and flowers or chocolate. But I wish all of you could hear the guys that call late, grovel, swear, plead to try and get a reservation on this one day. This can't be healthy for any relationship. Trust me, I won't turn down the business but fellas: next year think ahead, be prepared.

New beginnings in comfort

2010-01-09T10:36:00.003-05:00

As it is almost all over this country and some of Europe, the weather is brutal, cold and unforgiving these days. It makes you think twice about going outside to do just about anything. Fortunately when it comes to cooking, this is one of my favorite and challenging times of the year. At the restaurant, we can and do serve some of the heavier foods that I really enjoy when the weather is like this. Now getting people to come in and try them is another story (free apple cider anyone?). And cooking at home takes on some new challenges when you don't feel like running to the store to pick up exactly the right ingredients. This is when you start digging out the nine cans of different beans in the back of the cupboard. This is exactly what I did last night. Canned black-eyed peas, butter beans, cannellini beans and pinto beans. I had a couple of pieces of celery, a few carrots, a head of garlic, a few herbs and some chorizo bought for a big breakfast never cooked. I enjoy cooking like this sometimes. I always have an Iron Chef-like fantasy going through my head: "Did he just put a bay leaf in that pot? Brilliant!" I never know exactly what the end result is going to taste like but it's usually something that a little salt, sugar or olive oil can't fix if it turns out broken. I know what some of you are thinking. "Yeah, well you're a chef and do this everyday. I just can't pull these dishes out of thin air." Well, I can give you a few tips to these impromptu culinary adventures, especially when it comes to soups and stews, my favorite things to cook in the dead of winter.

I always keep an onion or garlic around because they can help you build a base to whatever you're making. If you have carrots and celery or even leeks or shallots around, even better. Next up is protein. Do you have any ham left over from the holidays, a roasted chicken bought but not yet finished? Or even bacon as it seems to be the celebrity ingredient these days. I also try to find something that is going to thicken the soup or stew. Potatoes are good for this as are beans because they will both give off starch that will thicken and give some cohesiveness to the dish. Finally, spices and herbs can play a big role. When it's cold and I'm going to cook something for a while, I like using stronger herbs even dried, like rosemary and oregano. If you use an herb like thyme or basil and cook it for a while, I feel like the real, brighter flavors of these herbs are lost. Last but not least, the question of stock or water. I almost always keep a low sodium chicken stock around but if I don't and have to use water, then that also will change how I cook. When using just water as part of your base to a stew, cooking the vegetables (onions, garlic, carrots, etc.) at the beginning and how long you cook them can make a difference. Caramelize these vegetables over a medium high heat in the pot, and just when you think they're done, cook them for a minute more. Burning is a possibility here, but just stay close. If you have these items on hand and a little sense of adventure, you will be surprised what you can make and you too can win that Iron Chef episode in your head: The Stew Battle.

Four bean and chorizo stew

1 tablespoon of olive oil

4 cloves of garlic, smashed or sliced thin

2 carrots, chopped

2 celery stalks, with leaves, chopped

6 ounces Mexican chorizo, sliced

1 can each of black-eyed peas, cannellini beans, butter beans, pinto beans,

drained and rinsed well

1 teaspoon each, chopped rosemary and chopped oregano (dried is fine here also)

Pinch of cayenne pepper

2 bay leaves

2 quarts of water

Salt and olive oil to taste

Heat olive oil in a pot over medium high heat. Add garlic and cook for thirty seconds or until it begins to turn golden brown. Add carrots and celery and cook until tender, 4-5 minutes. Add chorizo and cook until slightly crispy, 3-4 minutes. Add drained beans, herbs, cayenne and bay leaves and cook for another 3 minutes. At this point, if things are cooking too fast for you or sticking to the bottom of the pot, lower the heat and extend the cooking time for each set of ingredients. Add the water, bring to a boil, turn down and simmer for 30-40 minutes. You want everything to really cook together and become a cohesive dish. When you run a spoon through the stew, you will be able to tell if this is happening. All the ingredients won't sink to the bottom of the pot with all of the water on top.

This stew will make your house or apartment smell fantastic and who doesn't like walking into a great, food smelling house? It's welcoming to everyone.

We're building something

2009-11-21T12:24:00.003-05:00

I've had a lot of people asking about my next blog post which is flattering. I'm still trying to figure out why what I have to say is any more important than, well, anyone else. But thank you to those who read this blog. So here it goes...

We recently hired a new line cook at La Tavola. Two weeks ago today, I fired one of our long time cooks in the middle of service in what turned out to be one of the more challenging nights of my career. I really didn't want to do what I had to do and that was let someone go who had been in our kitchen for over three years but couldn't keep control of some personal issues that detrimentally affected his job performance. He was part of our "family" as I call it and it was a sad day for everyone to see him asked to leave our tight knit group. But, it's not like we can all stop and hug each other, is it? So, on to better things.

Fortunately, I haven't had to hire a new cook in over two years. This is unheard of in most restaurant circles and I'm lucky to have the solid crew that I do. They are fast, smart, understand our food inside and out and for the most part, are cross trained on every station. I spend a good part of my day instructing them, pushing them (sometimes too far) and working to make them better cooks, and hopefully, great chefs. So hiring a new person is a serious task that everyone is concerned about. Is he or she going to fit in? How long will they last? Will they help me if I get in the weeds? Do they work clean? I could see all these questions going through my cooks minds before I started interviewing people. I finally settled on a young cook named Edson. He came in and trailed with us for two nights, giving him an opportunity to see how we put food out of the tiny closet we call our kitchen and it gave us an opportunity to see how he would react to weekend business. Would he jump right in and help? Would he stand back and just observe? What would his facial expressions be like? Confident, cocky, perplexed, frightened? We all watch these things when we have a cook doing their working interview. I can ask people a multitude of questions from across a table, but until they get a knife in their hand or a hot pan in front of them, you really never know what they're going to be like in a kitchen. Edson, as it turns, out is a pretty good cook. He has a pleasant disposition, cracks jokes easily and when he smiles (which is often) his whole face displays his optimistic view of the world. He's been training with us about a week now and I'm contemplating letting him go on his own tonight as he's been improving every day. The staff likes him. He's humble, quiet when he cooks, attentive, listens, adjusts to criticism, helps other cooks when his station is slow and all of these things spell a good future for him at La Tavola. I'm hopeful he will be with us for a while.

I once worked for a chef who once told me that with the kitchen staff, he was "building something." I think I remember rolling me eyes a bit and chalking it up to some hippie sensibility. But now, I understand what he was talking about. The "something" is always evolving, moving, living and I'm looking forward to the challenge of the next chapter.

It's called Gratitude

2009-11-06T22:27:00.008-05:00

Plating the boar

All systems go

Wild boar tenderloin, guanciale (smuggled back), porcini mushrooms,
Crispin apple puree, red wine reduction

Torta Stracciatella

Ricotta gnocchi with black truffles and chive flowers

Polenta with Montasio fonduta, poppy seeds, smoked ricotta, herb salad

I don't know if I would call the dinners we did this last week the pinnacle of my career, but they sure felt like it. We executed a menu for two nights based on my two week trip to Italy and the staff performed beautifully. I probably got twelve hours of sleep in the three days leading up to these dinners. Not only did we have almost every regular and key company employee attending one of the two nights, the hype surrounding the dinner and my trip made for some very high expectations and the stress that comes with them. I didn't want to let anybody down. I especially didn't want to let my kitchen staff down. They had seen me come back and make some tweaks and changes here and there, but this menu was my put-up-or-shut-up moment. I spent a good deal of time going over menu descriptions with the servers. I put together a kitchen plan on how everything was to be prepped, who would do what on each course and how everything would be executed. My sous chef, Brent Banda, and saucier Andrea Price worked hard and mostly blind for three days, relying only on my instruction and the pictures on my Ipod of the dishes we would be preparing. I'm also fortunate enough to have a group of line cooks who have been with me a while. I can make one hand movement or facial expression and they can read what that means. They are rock stars and everyone from front to back stepped it up to make for a seamless two nights. I can't thank them enough for making me look so good. Thank you to all of you for trusting me, following me, listening to me and believing in what we do. We are the family that sweats together night in and night out and for these two nights, we got to show a small slice of Atlanta what we can do. Cheers.

The Road Ahead or Good Bye Pappardelle

2009-10-25T11:17:00.007-04:00

At some point in every chef's career, there comes a time when you release yourself from past mentors, ingrained recipes, concrete experiences and begin cooking "your" food. I'm not sure if it comes at a certain age and the exact timing of this experience is tricky. And I'm sure it doesn't happen to everyone because not everyone can release them with ease and comfort. My first six months at La Tavola, I kept having the feeling that my teacher and previous mentor of five years, Lidia Bastianich, would walk through the front door, head straight to the kitchen, peer into a pot or pan and begin criticizing my cooking. It took me a while to convince myself that this would not happen and that I needed to relax and cook what I knew, honestly and from the heart...from me. I began to explore my own cooking at that point, trying out recipes, riffing off other chef's recipes and developing my own food. Another indirect mentor of mine has been Mario Batali. When I worked for Lidia, part of my training was going to New York to stage, or work for free at her flagship restaurant, Felidia, and Mario's intimidating restaurant Babbo. I had eaten at Babbo once before and the whole dining experience had opened my eyes to an Italian food I had never seen. Tradition was there on the plate of almost every dish, but you had to look for it, past the other ingredients, some of which I had never seen before in Italian cooking (smoked paprika?). I spent two days in the Babbo kitchen, a tiny shoebox of a place where any bystander, or observer like myself, had to shuffle and dance to not be in the way of the food runners and executive chef Andy Nusser (Andy has since moved on to other Mario endeavors). The kitchen staff was extremely welcoming, sneaking me a taste of a pasta here or a side dish there. I witnessed first hand the crazed cooking that takes place in a tiny kitchen with a packed restaurant and a "you've-got-to-be-kidding" sized menu. I came away from the experience with a new kind of Italian food to inform my cooking. When Lidia asked about my experience at Babbo, I mumbled something about her food being "juicier" (a word she loves) and not as "tight" as Mario's food. She huffed in agreement as if to say, "Good answer. You are now a confirmed apprentice of mine." I've followed Mario's food since my time at Babbo and for a long time held it in the highest regard. But then, a few years ago, I had a very lackluster meal there, where plates were left unfinished by myself and the friends I was dining with. Some of the food wasn't hot. Some of the food wasn't seasoned properly. I didn't get it. Andy had left the kitchen by that point and I chalked the bad meal up to his absence. It also made me realize that even a venerable kitchen like Babbo's can make mistakes. They were, in the end, mortal. And as I've developed menus at La Tavola and explored my own cooking, I've changed my perspective on past mentors like Lidia and Mario. I've found that I don't have to agree with everything I was taught by them.

I was reminded of these experiences this week as I wrote and developed La Tavola's new fall menu. Since before my time at LT, the pappardelle pasta has always been with our bolognese sauce. This is a Mario dish straight from the Babbo cookbook. You would never find pappardelle with bolognese sauce in Bologna (as Mario acknowledges before the recipe), it would be tagliatelle. And it finally hit me: Why aren't we cooking it like they do in Bologna and why is Mario's food on my menu...still? After consulting with the service staff, I'm not as afraid of the riot-in-the-street reaction I might get from our guests when we switch to tagliatelle because this immensely popular dish is not about the pasta for our diners, it's about the sauce. And on Tuesday, when we roll out the new menu, I will experience another feeling of release and another step in the development of my Italian food.

Abbondanza Menu

2009-10-19T14:19:00.006-04:00

Between the Lines

2009-10-19T13:37:00.007-04:00

Last Wednesday, we began Abbondanza, a special ten day menu highlighting the cuisine of central Italy, specifically Umbria and Tuscany. Getting these menus off the ground is a lot of work for our kitchen to say the least. Ten to twelve new menu items are built from the ground up, often instructing the kitchen staff how to cook them all for the first time and having them ready at 5 p.m. for the servers to taste and (hopefully) takes notes on. It's all very stressful for myself and our sous chef, Brent. So after getting all the food up for the servers to taste, getting through the menu descriptions that I had given them weeks before, making a few changes, tweaks here and there, I was more than happy to take a minute and sit down to reflect. After my moment of zen, I was approached by one of servers, Jeff. Jeff is a towering man who speaks softly and thoughtfully. His disposition is calm and his humor is dry. We all like Jeff. He said, "You know chef, when I read the menu descriptions you gave us, nothing seemed to pop off the page and at me and it all sounded kind of boring. But then when I tasted everything, it was fantastic." Uh, thanks...I think. I repeated this story to Stuart, our director of operations the next day, and he said, "Oh yeah, I've heard that before." Uh, ok...I guess there's a trend with my menu writing versus menu execution. I don't really think of it as a problem because the flavors and textures of the food and how they make people feel is what is most important to me. But as someone who is comfortable with writing and language, I'm a little concerned that my menu words don't "pop" on the page. So this got me thinking about menu writing and it's evolution, or rather de-evolution, since I became and executive chef and began writing menus. The current trend seems to be naked, listing only the ingredients, maybe a cooking technique to how the entree is prepared, leaving the diner to envision and often times guess at what might arrive in front of them. Take for instance some of these entree menu descriptions from Gramercy Tavern in New York:

Codfish

Marinated Squash and Zucchini Purée

Wild Striped Bass

Artichokes, Sungold Tomatoes and Swiss Chard

Halibut

Pole Beans, Wild Rice and American Caviar Sauce

Sea Bass

Spaghetti Squash, Walnuts and Sherry Sauce

Duck Breast

Green Beans, Duck Confit and Olives

Rack of Pork & Braised Belly

Heirloom Cauliflower and Kohlrabi

There is no mention of how the dishes are prepared or any herbs that might be used. Nothing. Is the halibut poached, grilled, roasted, braised, raw? As frustrating as this can seem to guests, I'm not against it and I'll tell you why. It forces us as chefs, managers, owners, to spend time with our staff and educate them. I often pass out recipes when I meet with our servers because I want them to understand food and why things work, why certain flavors "pop" and who knows, maybe they'll actually go home and cook something. The first time I heard about the importance of teaching the service staff was from Dave Pasternack, the animated chef/owner of Esca, also in New York. We were doing a dinner together and he said he spent a lot of time with the service staff and how much it contributed to the bottom line. I thought he was a little crazy at the time. As a younger chef, I only gave information to servers on a need-to-know basis and didn't want to spend any more time with them than I already did because I thought they were idiots. But now, I get what Dave was saying. It does contribute to the bottom line and the experience guests have in our restaurant. Now, I'm very proud when I hear a server waxing poetic about the texture of a bean and how it perfectly balances the crunchiness of grilled squid. So bear with us, dining public. Our menus will probably continue to just be a hint of what is about to arrive, but put the server to the test and let's see if we've all done our job.

Menu for Italy Dinner, November 3rd and 4th

2009-10-18T20:49:00.002-04:00

We're doing a menu based on my trip the 3rd and 4th of November. The 3rd is already sold out but we still have plenty of room on the 4th. Please call La Tavola to make reservations, 404.873.5430

Passed Appetizers

Assorted Salumi

Assorted cheeses with marmalades and mostardi

Mixed Crostini

Crispy phyllo pastry filled with speck and zucchini

Antipasto

Polenta with Montasio cheese fonduta, smoked ricotta, poppy seeds and herb salad

Primo

Ricotta gnocchi with black truffles and chive flowers

Secondo

Wild boar tenderloin roasted with Umbrian guanciale and onions, sauteed porcini mushrooms, apple puree, red wine reduction

Dolce

Torta Stracciatella

Roman ricotta-almond cake with grated chocolate

$65 plus tax and gratuity

Wine recommendations will be available from the staff

Back to Life, Back to Reality

2009-10-08T22:29:00.005-04:00

I've spent the last four days getting my sleep back on schedule and getting back into the routine at La Tavola. I've returned from Italy with a slightly new perspective on the kitchen and how we prepare food, how big the menu should be, etc. The pace of the kitchens in Italy is so very different than ours. American kitchens operate at a breakneck, athletic pace that will quickly swallow up the weak. Italian kitchens are not centered around this idea and are more geared toward spending more time on dishes, often having nothing prepped ahead of time, hence a more contemplative approach to restaurant cooking. What I found there were chefs cutting steaks to order on a band saw, nothing blanched off ahead of time and quickly sauteed to order. Nothing that resembles what I refer to as "wok cooking" at times where cooks are more concerned with flipping something in a pan than letting it sit on a flame and cook. So one of the big questions I face is how to bring this approach to the La Tavola kitchen, a tiny kitchen, without guests sitting there looking at their watches, getting aggravatingly hungry? How do I train our cooks to truly understand the ingredients they are cooking, tasting them and making decisions about how they react when cooked? Italians are surrounded by food in their culture since birth. They have an inherent ability to discern between good products and bad ones. They are what some people would consider "snobby" about food and wine and coffee. But I don't think of it as snobby, just a resistance to lowered expectations. I think this is definitely something we can learn from. So these are the challenges and questions I face as I return from my trip. Everyone has been asking me what I learned, but a lot of it is hard to put into words. But I hope they can taste it in our food.

On a lighter note, here are some excerpts from my notes and travels that didn't make it into the blog while I was in Italy:

"Alberto (sous chef at Vespasia) has on a shirt that says "Miracle Man" but I don't think his English is that good."

"I hope I just bought toothpaste and not denture adhesive."

Try getting a pre-paid cell phone up and working---in Italian. I spent two hours staring at the tiny instruction sheet.

(At the gas station) "Why are all of those old men in lawn chairs staring at me? Haven't they seen an American perplexed by their gas pumps before?"

"Why can't we do this? We should do this."

(In Norcia, Umbria) "Even my hand towels in my hotel smell like boar guanciale!"

"I woke up to the smell of burning wood." (Two days in a row)

(At a restaurant in Tuscany ) "What's up with all the cactuses? Cacti?"

It was a great trip. I saw a lot and learned a lot, traveling by myself. Like I said, hopefully you will be able to taste it in our food.

The Market, Trieste and Final Farewell

2009-10-02T17:13:00.004-04:00

I've spent the last two days working with my good friend Luca in his kitchen at Ristorante Al Ponte in Gradisca d'Insonzo. Yesterday, we woke up early and drove the 10 km to Gorizia to check out the market. Their market is full of stalls with beautiful vegetables, fruit, herbs and friendly people more than willing to share their love of their products with you. Luca let me do the shopping and we picked up some celery root, broccoli rabe, a local mushroom that resembles a shiitake and then we went next door to the fish market. Oh, the fish market. I've never seen seafood like this anywhere! All of the fish were caught less than five hours before we saw them in the neighboring Adriatic sea. All of them were glistening, eyes sparkling clear (the sign of fresh fish) and without the slightest hint of a "fishy" scent, just the sea. Luca picked out some fresh shrimp and turbot and we headed back to Gradisca. Luca is a fantastic photographer and he took some "American chef at the market" pictures that will be available soon. Believe me, they too are amazing.

When we got back to Al Ponte, I went straight to work on the special for the day with products we picked up. Luca had some American beef in his cooler (unusual for Italy) so I went ahead and broke it down to make beef scallopine. Separately, I made a sauce with onion, roasted carrots, paprika, coffee, red wine and a little veal stock. I kept the mushrooms separate to pan roast to order and cleaned the broccoli rabe to saute separately. Everything turned out pretty well, Luca was impressed, we finished our prep for the morning and took the usual afternoon break. We drove down to the shore, near Trieste, to watching the sail boats and fisherman pull in bluefish, a long fish that resembles eel. After a relaxing afternoon, we went back to the restaurant to get ready for the party of 50 people having several appetizers that evening on the patio. Luca put out a great looking spread of cheese, prosciutto (local of course), fried sage, Montasio cheese crisps called fricos, fried eggplant and zucchini and fried shrimp. He also managed to put out some great looking desserts, including a coffee panna cotta with a warm chocolate sauce.

I woke up this morning and instead of heading straight into the kitchen, I decided to be a tourist for my last day in Italy. I've always wanted to see Trieste, the city James Joyce, the Irish writer, made famous. Trieste sits nestled in a bay on the Adriatic and it is just as beautiful as I imagined it would be. After walking around for about an hour, I drove back to Gradisca and made lunch for everyone. I made a celery root risotto with some of the local shrimp we bought the day before and served it to Luca, Olga (his aunt and pasta cook) his mother, daughter and father. I was nervous as everyone stood looking over my shoulder wondering how the Americano's risotto would turn out. More than once a couple of the servers wandered into the kitchen, looked over my shoulder and mumble something in Italian with a smile on their face. We sat down to lunch and the risotto was a hit. Admittedly, I put in a little too much wine, a point definitely not overlooked and commented on but I was relieved to see clean plates go back to the dish room. We sat around and talked, had some espresso and enjoyed some conversation mostly revolving around Christina's, Luca's daughter, birthday party that was being planned for the next day. It felt great to sit there and take all of this in, feeling like part of the family and getting a clear insight into daily life in a small Italian town. This evening, I packed up my things for the last time, said my good-byes, gave out the customary two-kisses-on-the-cheeks and drove to the Venice airport to turn my car in. I leave early in the morning for a long day of travelling and I'm definitely ready to get home. This trip to Italy was different than the last one in many respects, but I enjoyed the food experiences I had, the new friends I made and seeing my Italian "family" again. I can't wait to come back...

Images from the Al Ponte kitchen

2009-09-30T17:51:00.006-04:00

Al Ponte

2009-09-30T12:00:00.011-04:00

After a long drive from Tuscany up the eastern coast of Italy, I finally arrived in Gradisca d'Insonzo in Friuli, home to Ristorante Al Ponte and my good friend Luca. He greeted me as soon as I pulled up to the hotel that is also part of his family's property and got me settled in right away. I dropped off my bags then we sat on his restaurant's patio, cracked open a couple of beers and began to catch up. Luca has become a good friend of mine and it wasn't long before we were telling stories, laughing and reminiscing about our past kitchen adventures. When I lived in Pittsburgh, Luca came and spent three months in our kitchen. And five years ago, I visited him here in Gradisca for the first time. After a couple of beers and catching up, we went straight into the kitchen to get ready for service. Al Ponte has 1 Michelin star and Luca's food is just as amazing as I remember it. He had me make Creme Catalan right away, the dessert of Spanish origin but one he said he can't take off the menu. As some of you know, pastry is not exactly my forte, but I managed with the simple recipe and got them in the oven. Luca then moved me onto cleaning some porcini mushrooms that had just arrived from over the border in Slovenia as well as cleaning fish and butchering some meat.

It's just Luca and his aunt Olga that work in the kitchen and they manage to make everything from scratch including their pastas, breads and pastries. The restaurant also provides the food for the hotel's breakfast and any banquet that might come through the hotel. I have no idea how they do it all. Service began to pick up around seven and Luca quickly made me a dish to try. It was a soft poached egg (local, of course) over a potato-saffron puree with grated bottarga which is dried and pressed fish eggs, in this case from a sea bass caught in the Adriatic. Luca makes his own bottarga and it was amazing, tasting like the sea with just the right amount of saltiness.

He then made me a dish I remember from my last trip that I've come to love. Polenta, a course variety from Piemonte, topped with Montasio fonduta (a local cheese fondue) with grated, smoked ricotta cheese, and a little raw polenta fried in butter with poppy seeds. This is Friulian comfort food at it's best and it didn't take me long to devour it. Luca is the one who taught me how to make polenta, very simply, with the corn meal, water, salt and a bay leaf.

After staying up way too late, talking and laughing, I met him in the kitchen around 10:30 and went to work right away. Luca makes an appetizer that is zucchini cooked with speck, a local smoked ham, wrapped in phyllo dough and baked in the oven until crispy. For service, he serves it over the Montasio fonduta, topped with crispy speck and a little salad of local herbs brought to the restaurant "by the old people from the hills." I've never seen these herbs but it looks like some kind of mix of fennel flower, mint and nettles but smells like marjoram, sorrel and anise. This area is known for their seemingly endless supply of wild herbs that grow in the foothills of the Alps. So he set me to work, cooking the zucchini and wrapping it up in small, phyllo rolls.

After some more pastry work, we took a break in the afternoon, as all Italian kitchens do and drove over to the coast of the Adriatic near Trieste. Tonight, as soon as I finish this, it's back to work in the kitchen then tomorrow morning, we're getting up early to go to the market in nearby Gorizia. It's good to be back in Gradisca as it's starting to feel like my Italian home-away-from-home.

Just my luck

2009-09-28T18:47:00.006-04:00

I went downstairs to Ristorante Casalta, the restaurant in my small hotel, ready to work. Chef pants on, white jacket in tow, mentally prepared for a night of service in a strange kitchen. When I arrived, I met the young Canadian intern, Frank, whom I had met the night before and he said things didn't look good. There were no reservations and he wasn't sure what they were going to do. This was 8:00. He called Lazzarro, the chef, and soon after he showed up in the kitchen. After a brief conversation, Frank told me we were going to Lazzarro's other property to make something to eat. So we drive about fifteen minutes, up another steep drive and to another castle-like house on a hill and begin to set up. They brought all of the food from Ristorante Casalta as there aren't any cooking facilities at this hotel. We had a typical, local Tuscan lasagna with ground beef cooked in red wine with bechamel and Parmigiana cheese. We followed with a ricotta ravioli, formed simlar to a tortelloni, in a basil puree. Next up was grilled pork livers that had been rolled up in caul fat with braised zucchini. And finally, a simple chocolate cake for dessert. There were about ten of us (I'm not sure who the other people were, but they were friendly) and Lazzarro kept us all entertained with his kitchen stories from the glory days. All I know was that there was one story about them wrapping a young cook in cellophane and foil, stuffing a lemon in his mouth and setting him on fire just before dousing him with a huge bucket of water. And this was hilarious to everyone. What I didn't understand, Frank translated but I kept up and it turned out to be an entertaining evening. But honestly, I was looking forward to cooking and getting behind the stove again.

Montecastelli

2009-09-28T12:38:00.012-04:00

I met up with Jens Schmidt today at his castle/farm/olive grove, Montecastelli. After a long drive up a treacherous gravel road, I came upon Montecastelli and Jens immediately greeted me with a smile and a handshake. Jens is German but has been living in Italy for the past twenty years and makes a fantastic olive oil, Primo Olio as well as operating his own wine selection company. He immediately showed me around his property which consists of eight rooms, a full kitchen, a dining area and a swimming pool. Montecastelli also has it own large garden which provides all of the vegetables that are eaten on the property and several pigs which are used in the salumi and other pork dishes they serve to guests. We also walked around his olive grove which as 1300 olive trees and the small room where the olives are pressed, the oil is spun and finally strained for consumption. Jens sells his olive oil to a lot of top restaurants in the States, including Hearth in NYC and A16 in San Francisco.

After the tour, he asked me to go pick some tomatoes and basil for as he prepared the rest of our lunch. We sat down to a plate of the salumi he makes on the property as well as warm, toasted bread with thin slices of lardo laid over them. He opened a bottle of Sicilian Grillo and we sat down to talk and relax.

Jens began to explain his philosophy behind Montecastelli in that he wants it to be a place where guests can interact with their stay rather than be pampered and waited on. He has several regular guests who arrive every year for the olive oil harvest and help pick the olives that go into his olive oil. We drizzled the oil on the tomatoes and basil I picked and talked about it. It is a deep, complex olive oil with hints of fresh grass, artichoke and chestnuts. The finish is a little peppery and the color is bright green. Jens explained that the oil we were tasting was eleven months old and he gets frustrated when restaurants want the olio nuovo right after it is pressed in the fall. Through the process he showed me, his olive oil preserves it's flavor integrity (and antioxidants) throughout the year.

The whole experience was very relaxing and enlightening. Jens truly has a farm-table philosophy behind everything he is doing at Montecastelli....gotta run, working at Ristorante Casalta tonight and I'll post my adventures tomorrow.

Farewell to good friends and Strove, Scorgiano

2009-09-27T11:24:00.012-04:00

I ended my stay in Norcia with the meal of a lifetime. I dined on Friday night at Vespasia as a farewell dinner to my new friends in the kitchen. I began the meal with an amuse sent out by Flavio of foie gras, chicken liver mousse and the now infamous gallantino with a Sagrantino wine reduction. The foie gras terrine was well, foie gras terrine with a coarse sea salt for seasoning. The chicken liver mousse was what you would expect in this part of Italy: a nice balance of bitter that is the liver flavor with a crotini in the top to help it along. The gallantino was wonderful. I tasted all of the meats and the hard work that had gone into the preparation and the sweet and sour flavor of the Sagrantino reduction was a perfect foil for the rich meat.

What followed the amuse was nothing short of extraordinary. Next, for my antipasto was seven different types of prosciutto. It began with ham from Norcia then Friuli, Alto Adige, boar prosciutto from Norcia, duck prosciutto, goose prosciutto and Spanish ham. All of them a little different in flavor profile but all of them top quality prociutti. My next course was the classic Bucatini all'Amatriccianna. Flavio and I had spoke about this pasta and he had said that in Amatrice in neighboring Lazio, he thought that they fried the guanciale, cured pork jowl, a little too much. I had also seen the house made bucatini, usually a dried pasta in America, that the Vespasia kitchen makes so I was very excited to taste his take on the classic dish. It was perfect. The house made pasta was a little less al dente than I had had it in the past and he explained later that was because they made it themselves. The guanciale was in larger chunks and rendered perfectly without being crispy. It gave the sauce a sweetness that was the perfect balance for the acidity of the fresh tomato sauce. It was finished with grated Pecorino (I'm assuming a local variety) and was one of, if not THE, best pasta I've ever had. After I told him this, he said that we were now friends and that I had to say that, but I really didn't. It really was that good.

Next was the famous cinghiale, wild boar, which is what Norcia is known for. I was presented with a boar loin with guanciale and roasted onion tied to it with leek leaves. It had been cooked in their very impressive rotisserie and served over an apple puree with a Sagrantino passito (sweet wine) sauce and small, fried porcini mushrooms. This dish completely blew me away and will probably make it onto the menu for the dinner we are doing at La Tavola on November 3rd.

I finished the meal with creme brulee made with muscovado sugar, a high quality brown sugar, served with a perfect cylinder of frozen vanilla parfait and a small glass of warm, rose and herbal tea with a small spoon of the muscovado sugar next to it. With the meal, I had a bottle of La Carraia 2003 "Fobiano," a cabernet-merlot blend from Umbria, aged 12 months in French oak. It was also delicious and balanced with the fruitiness of the merlot calming the cabernet tannins. One of the owners remarked in passing that it was his favorite wine from their cellar.

The following morning I said my good byes to the staff at Vespasia and made my way to Cortona for the night. I'm afraid there is not much to report about this part of my trip. Cortona, sadly, is overrun with tourists and drunken college students (sorry Daniel) and I'm not sure if I will return. Every town has it's place for everyone, but Cortona is just not for me.

Strove, Scorgiano

I drove to Strove this morning and was curious before I got here because no one I talked to had every heard of it. Now I know why. Strove is not a city or a town but a village of less than a hundred people. I'm guessing about 60...tops. I'm staying in the only hotel, with the only restaurant, in town and to say that it's quiet and tranquil would be an understatement. When you walk around, you can't hear anything. So for lunch, I got in my Opel station wagon and went exploring. I came up on a town, about 5 km away, called Scorgiano. There is also one restaurant there and translated, it means the Astronaut's Restaurant. This is a curious name for a restaurant in the heart of Chianti country. I walked inside and the place was packed and buzzing. I looked to my left into the kitchen and saw four old ladies in white smocks and one older gentleman preparing pasta on a huge stove with a gigantic, blazing fireplace behind them. The fireplace had steaks (Bistecca Fiorentina) and pork roasting in front of a single, large burning log. "This is going to be good," I thought. After flagging down a passing, sweating waiter, I was sat at a table and began to take in the surroundings. It's Sunday, so there were lots of large families gathered around with people of all ages, sipping wine, talking, laughing, arguing in this large restaurant that resembled a Tuscan mess hall. And I was starving. I completely overordered especially when I saw the food going out family-style to the rest of the tables. My antipasto was squid (large pieces from a seemingly giant sea creature) prepared in the style of Livorno, in a rich tomato sauce, cooked down with fresh herbs, mostly oregano. My pasta course (which was enough for two large bowls) was Penne al Profumo di Bosco, or penne with the smell of a hunter. The sauce was loose sausage, cooked down with mushrooms and cream and it reminded me, by its texture, that we need to cook our pastas less at La Tavola. By this point, the waiter smirked and could see that I was getting full. The table next to me had been vacant for quite sometime but had not been cleared. There was most of a bottle of local table wine left behind and when I ordered a glass of red wine, he pulled it off the neighboring table and poured me a glass. He then put his finger to his lips as if to say, "I won't tell if you don't." He did this three times, every time I asked for more wine. For an entree, I had roasted pork spare ribs (from the Dante-like fireplace) with patate fritte, french fries. The pork was perfectly seasoned, simple and delicious. Even the fries were spot on. Now, when one dines by themselves like I have been for the past week, one sees and hears a lot more than if one were involved in a conversation. The whole time I was eating there was a donkey in a pen across the street howling and screeching. No one seemed to have cared or noticed but me. I am truly in the country. No one here speaks any English and I love it.

The Asronaut's Restaurant and the Donkey

Images of Vespasia, Norcia

2009-09-26T12:11:00.009-04:00

The herb garden at Vespasia

Castelluccio

San Benedecto, Norcia

Norcia

The island in the kitchen at Vespasia. They built the rest of the kitchen around it.

Alberto and Flavio prepping the gallantino

The pasta that I made with Flavio. Tagliolini, tagliatelle and pappardelle.

Tranquillo

2009-09-25T13:03:00.003-04:00

After a good night of much needed sleep and some breakfast, I went to the Vespasia kitchen around 10:30. I found Flavio organizing the gallatino that Alberto had prepared the day before and could see the stress on his face. I asked him if he needed any help in the kitchen for the day and he said no, that he thought they would be ok. I asked him if they were busy the night before and he said yes, that they had done 15 people and had two important Italian food journalists in for dinner. There was alot of tension in the air as I looked around at the rest of the kitchen staff. They have 250 psychiatrists from around the world on arriving for dinner on Sunday and it's clear that this is the biggest event they have prepared for in the restaurant's short one year history. I certainly didn't want to get in the way, so I said I needed to do a little shopping and asked him where I should go to buy prodotto tipici of Norcia. He directed me to a butcher a little outside of town called Asuini.

Asuini is a little shop with a larger salumi plant attached behind it. In fact, you can see the butchers breaking down huge piles of whole pigs and making salumi as you stand at the counter and order. I ended up buying two, huge pieces of guanciale, a piece of ricotta salata cheese that is typical of this area and covered in ground leaves "of the outside of the wheat" (Flavio's words, but it looks like saw dust), a bottle of olive oil, a bottle of Amaro di Tatufo (for you Cammer), a bag of Castellucio lentils and a jar of local honey. Now I just have to figure out how to smuggle this back into the States, but I'm working on that. After leaving Asuini, I drove up into the mountains with the windows down and took some pictures.

After driving back into Norcia, I started looking for lunch. I'm travelling with Fred Plotkin's Italy for Gourmet Travelers and have used it quite a bit, especially in planning where to stay. In the section on Norcia, one of the places he recommends is Taverna di Massari. I found the little place and wandered in around 1 p.m. I sat down and ordered boar coppa with arugula, Parmigiana shavings and grated black truffles for my first course and tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms for my entree. The coppa arrived and tasted pretty good. The arugula had been dressed with a good olive oil and a little lemon juice, there were shavings of a raw mushroom (I couldn't discern what kind) and grated black truffles to finish the dish. It all came together nicely and really tasted of Norcia, the flavors I have become accustomed to over the last few days. After it was cleared, the pasta arrived and was a very generous portion. It was tagliatelle, although it looked more like the thinner tagliolini, with porcini mushrooms that had clearly been frozen. Furthermore, the pasta was so overcooked and the sauce so salty and that the first thing that came to mind was ramen noodles. After speaking with Flavio about it later, we decided they had probably used bouillon cubes to make a stock instead of fresh products. Sigh. As I walked out the door, I realized why I was the only one in the restaurant the whole time. Maybe they should pay more attention to the food and less attention to the fashion news playing on the television in the dining room.

That afternoon, after a failed attempt at taking a swim in the fitness center in my hotel, I took another drive in the mountains. Norcia backs up to a large, national park that is dotted with little towns and villages. I did some exploring, had some espresso in a local bar, tried to tour a prosciutto factory without any success and ended up back in Norcia early in the evening.

I told Flavio earlier in the day that I had yet to have the famous cinghiale, wild boar, that Norcia is famous for. He said that they don't have it on their menu but he would get some and prepare it for me for dinner. I'm looking forward to it and the very posh, relaxing dining room of Vespasia.

Vespasia

2009-09-24T13:36:00.005-04:00

I met Flavio this morning in his kitchen and we immediately got to work. He asked me, "So, what do you want to learn?" Let's start with fresh pasta I suggested so we immediately went into the pastry kitchen and on a table designed for making pasta, with a textured cutting board fit into the table to give the pasta the right "mouth feel", we got to work on fresh tagliolini, tagliatelle and pappardelle. The sunshine was streaming in from the stone alley way and provided a great source of light for the egg rich pastas. He made some, then I made some. All the pastas were hand cut with a knife specially designed for pasta and laid out in little piles on the table. After producing some pretty good quality pasta, I wandered over to Alberto, Vespasia's sous chef and watched him prepare duck gallatine for a large banquet of doctors coming into Norcia this weekend. He had whole, boned out ducks, that he pounded out and seasoned with salt, olive oil and orange zest. I came to find out later that Alberto is the Norceria of the kitchen, the one who butchers all the meats and makes all of the various salumi served at Vespasia. In fact, Norcia is so known throughout Italy for its salumi and meat that a lot of butchers are referred to as Norcerias, a compliment to this little valley town. He filled the boned out duck with a comination of ground pork, boar, turkey and pigeon. The duck was then rolled up, wrapped in caul fat (pig stomach lining) and refrigerated to be steamed later. This was quite a project to watch. Alberto made this all morning and, in his broken English, told me that he was going to dream about gallantino tonight. After that, we broke for staff lunch in the dining room. We were served penne with marinara and basil, pork shoulder braised in milk and the pasta that I made that morning in a sauce with lentils. So much for really contributing to kitchen, I thought. Then again, these guys didn't know what kind of cooking capability I would bring, so I don't blame them for letting me make family meal.

After lunch, Flavio gave me a risotto lesson. This was interesting because if any of you have read any of my past entries, then you know how I feel about risotto. First we started by talking about the quality of the carnaroli rice that he uses. He gets it from Verona and when you first open the package it smells like a kind of wild rice and you can almost catch the scent of some herbs in the bag. I have never seen rice like this. He began heating up a pan talking about his way versus the traditional way. He doesn't like the traditional way of cooking with onions and wine and prefers to toast the rice in olive oil then cook it in stock and finish with only a small knob of butter and Parmigiana cheese. It was interesting to watch and in fact I took over and finished the risotto but I'm not sure I'll adapt this method for making it. Who knows...

After the risotto lesson, we walked out to the patio and herb garden. Flavio has approximately fifteen different herbs growing in his garden including five kinds of sage and three kinds of oregano and at least five herbs I had never seen or heard of. He told me that he doesn't use as much salt and pepper and prefers to season his food with herbs instead. Next, he handed me a pair of scissors and a plastic container and asked me to cut 200 bay leaves from the bushes that surrounded the garden. "Wait," I thought, "you want me to stand out here on this beautiful day in a town that always smells like burning wood and wild fennel and cut leaves in this amazing garden?" It didn't prove to be much of a problem.

After a quick break and a shower, myself, Flavio, Alberto, Sarah the pastry chef and Michela, a server piled into two cars and drove up the mountain to Castellucio. Racing up the windy roads in Flavio's new Mini Cooper, he explained to me that in June, the flowers blume in the valley just below Castellucio and produce the lentils that the tiny town is known for. I told him that I had been cooking Castellucio lentils for five years and was very excited to see their place of origin. After getting out of the car, I noticed the temperature had dropped about ten degrees as we had climbed about 2000 feet. Castellucio is a very small town perched on top of a hill at the base of the mountains and it took all of about ten minutes to walk the perimeter. We then found a little place to have a bite to eat and settled down to a huge plate of salumi: coppa, boar salami, prosciutto, dried boar liver sausage, a young ricotta salata, a local pecorino, lentil soup and Minestra di Farro, a local spelt soup we will be featuring on our upcoming Abbondanza menu (earlier in the day, I cornered Flavio and got his recipe). It was all amazing and I tried to follow the conversations about music, food, life as we all relaxed and sipped on Rosso Piceno wine.

We raced back down the mountain and Flavio dropped me off at my hotel saying, "I see you later, maybe tomorrow. Now, you relax." That sounded like a pretty good idea. I had a lot of things to take in from the day.

Small Victories or Night and Day

2009-09-23T18:03:00.002-04:00

I woke up this morning after not much sleep and a screwed up body clock and made my way to Fiumicino Aeroporto to pick up my car. After a horrific train ride and an hour wait to get the car, I jumped into my Opel station wagon and headed northeast on a drive that can only be described as Formula 1. With the aid of my GPS with a very friendly, female English accent, I still managed to get lost. I finally made it to Norcia, a little town in Umbria, central Italy and settled in. Norcia is known for two things: wild boar and black truffles. And there is no hiding the fact that they are proud of these products. On a side note, I apologize, my pictures from this part of the trip are taking too long to load and as I'm writing this at 12:14 a.m. I will have to post them later.
I met Flavio Faedi, the chef I will be working with for the next couple of days who was very friendly and we immediately started talking about food, the five types of black truffles, the problem with getting good, Italian products in America, etc. I wandered around town a little bit, took some pictures, bought myself a little salame di cinghiale (boar sausage), some black truffle pecorino cheese, a small bottle of Rosso di Montefalco wine and finally got some sleep. After a two hour nap, it was time for dinner at Vespasia, Flavio's restaurant.
I settled in to a loungy, high back leather chair that is in a very modern, yet rustic and very Umbrian dining room and waited for the first course. He sent out pappa al pomodoro, a fresh tomato soup that is thickened with day old bread, some local crawfish (just slightly blanched with some roe to garnish) and local, fresh ricotta foam. It was good. I thought the tomatoes were probably on their last leg. After all the work I've done with tomatoes, I can smell or taste one going bad from a mile away. Next was risotto. I didn't order it but I gathered that he sent it out based on our conversation about black truffle risotto and how I have it coming up on our Abbondanza menu. He told me in our conversation that he doesn't like to cook it over 50 degrees Celsius. This guy knows his black truffles. The risotto was also cooked with a local herb, somwhere between ramp leaves and sage, but I failed to understand the Italian name. Anyway, it grows wild around here and he picks it. The carnaroli rice was al dente, the black truffles not what I would have expected but the real gems come along in December. These were closer in flavor to a mushroom, lots of earthy flavor components and you could feel them on your tongue: they definitely had texture. Up next, another pasta course: Alberto's tagliolini pasta with black truffles. Alberto is Flavio's sous chef and a very friendly, jovial guy. The pasta was perfect. Thin, egg-rich, perfectly cooked and the black truffle sauce held onto it perfectly. For my entree, I had lamb at the recommendation of the server. It is raised in the nearby mountains and cooked with ceccerchie, a wild local chickpea. It was also served with a cecchercie puree and local olive oil. The lamb was braised shoulder (I think, alot gets lost in translation) and with the wild peas was a great compostion. The lamb was a little gamey but not in a bad way. It tasted like what I think lamb should, strong but not offensive. I had two desserts, both with local chocolate and both great. Although the chocolate molten cake I had with "zuppa inglese" foam wasn't melted all the way through. Honestly, as good as this meal was, I would disagree with some of the execution. It seems like the food was coming too much from the mind and not enough from the heart. Just an opinion, but I guess it is my blog isn't it?
I'm working in Flavio's very modern, very spotless kitchen tomorrow. Business is a little down as there were only 8 of us in the dining room all night so I'm not sure what I'll be working on but I will definitely be writing about it tomorrow. Good night.

Rome

2009-09-22T17:54:00.019-04:00

After a two hour delay due to the biblical rain in Atlanta, I finally departed for Italy and landed safely in Rome. I made it to my hotel just in time to check in and get to my first reservation: Ristorante Checchino, a little place very out of the way of tourists. I was worried about being late for my 1 p.m. reservation but when I arrived 15 minutes late, I was the first guest there. Apparently the economic downturn is not just affecting us in the States. I sat down and perused the menu. This restaurant has a section at the beginning of their menu that is devoted to truly, traditional Roman dishes. Some of them are veal trotter salad (Insalata di Zampi) and a rigatoni with lamb's intestines as well as other seemingly ancient, offal-driven dishes. I opted for the veal trotter salad, a plate of mixed crostini (Crostini Misti serve with a glass of prosecco) and the Spaghetti Carbonara with a half bottle of Cesanese, a grape native to Lazio, the region home to Rome. I sat outside and looked across at the ancient slaughterhouse and watched butchers come and go in their white, mesh overcoats.

The warm, veal trotter salad arrived. It was braised veal's foot that had been cut off the bone and served warm with borlotti (red) beans, thinly shave carrots, sliced celery in a parsley vinaigrette that was a little light on the vinegar. It was outstanding. The veal trotter was impossibly tender (although I found one piece that still had a little hair on it), the carrots and celery providing just the right vegetal element with the parsley pesto-like dressing adding the right amount of herbaceousness to bring it all together. This is a dish that I wonder if we could get away with at La Tavola but it speaks of old world, only-in-Italy food. This is a dish that I'm sure has been served this way for at least fifty years, maybe more, and it's timeliness speaks to its appealing simplicity. This is simple food, executed right and that, folks, is a lot more difficult than it sounds.

My second appetizer was the Crostini Misti, a plate of three pieces of toasted bread with a young, melted Pecorino Romano cheese, an artichoke puree and an olive puree. This, to me, is a classic Italian antipasto. The cheese was rich, the olive pate was bright and acidic like olive can be and the artichoke puree fell somehwhere in the middle. The dish was a perfect compliment to the cherry fruit and tannins in the Cesanese.

My entree was the classic Spaghetti Carbonara. This is a dish we serve every Monday so I was interested to see how they really did it in Rome. It is a pasta with guanciale, cured hog jowls, Pecorino Romano cheese, Parmigiana Reggiano cheese, black pepper and an egg yolk tossed in at the end to hold it all together. As soon as it was put in front of me, I knew ours was different. We put caramelized onion in with our guanciale (absent in this one) and we add quite a bit more black pepper. The pasta at Checchino was decidedly more balanced, more delicate yet richer with the addition of more cheese, especially Pecorino. It was delicious. I almost couldn't finish it all and I don't know how Romans eat this and go back to work. I would be drooling on my mouse in all of ten minutes.

Dessert was Torte Stracchiatella and the translation escapes me but the cake was a wet concoction of almond, ricotta cake with shaved chocolate on top. Rich, cool and the perfect ending to a Roman lunch.

After some afternoon cantaloupe gelato and a brief nap, I was off to one of my favorite spots in Rome, Obika mozzarella bar in Piazza di Firenze. I sat in almost the same spot I sat five years ago and had two types of mozzarella di bufala: Pontina with Mortadella di Prato, a hearty salumi and Stracciatella di Burrata, the same cheese we serve at La Tavola only this was just the creamy middle with anchovies, cherry tomatoes and delicate lettuces. I went on to have dinner at a place recommended by the front desk of my hotel, Ristorante Grano. I began with a warm salad of shrimp with cantaloupe, whole almonds and unbelievable arugula. The dish could have used a squeeze of lemon, but aside from that was out of this world. The shrimp were delicate and sweet, the cantaloupe just ripe and the almonds adding just the right amount of crunch.

For my entree, I went with the traditionaly Saltimbocca alla Romana. This is another dish we do at La Tavola, only with pork and I was suprised at how little the veal (we do it with pork but veal is the traditional way) was sauteed and how "blond" it was. The pan had been deglazed with white wine and a little butter and it was served with perfectly roasted, perfectly sweet, little potatoes. This was a dish where every ingredient had been thought about before being selected, with the sage on the Saltimbocca perfuming the entire plate.

With little room for dessert, an overwhelmed and therefore slow server, I opted for an espresso, wandered back to my hotel and wrote this. Not a bad first day.

Risotto...part Due

2009-09-18T11:53:00.005-04:00

In a previous post, I touched on my first experiences with the blissful rice concoction known as risotto. I was reminded of it the other night when I had a late dinner with a friend at a new, hip restaurant. I ordered an entree that had roasted corn risotto on the plate and after a few bites, I was reminded of how many versions of risotto or "rice cooked in the style of risotto" there are. This was remarkably different from mine. I put quite a bit of wine in my risotto (1L:1 kilo of rice) because I think it needs the acidity that white wine provides to cut the rich, creaminess of the starchy rice. It also balances out the fat of the butter and cheese. And from what I know, balance is where it's at as far as Italian cooking is concerned. Anyway, the corn risotto was ok but I'm a traditionalist and i think if you're going to do it, don't hold back, find the roots and nail it.

I have a chef friend that I will be visiting when I go to Italy. His name is Luca Plett and he is the chef at Ristorante Al Ponte in Gradisca d'Insonzo. Al Ponte has one Michelin star and serves food that lands somewhere between mountain-Friulian and modern-Central European. Luca's family is known for their risotto in their corner in Italy. So much so, that when I was sitting in his restaurant having dinner a few years ago, a local woman who was joining us, leaned over and whispered, "You know his risotto is famous, right?" So when it arrived, I took it all in. It was loose without being disjointed, the kernels of rice still slightly al dente and having released their starch at just the right moment to hold the whole thing together. In short, perfect. And I haven't even mentioned the tiny scallops that adorned the center of the risotto, so sweet that the only thing I could compare them to would be candy. I didn't get a risotto lesson on my last trip to Italy. He put me to work making streudel, butchering lamb, cleaning fish and other plebian duties. But I will get my lesson this time and hopefully be known for my risotto in my neck of the woods someday.

2009-09-17T14:34:00.007-04:00

Agnolotti

Line cook Brad trying to eat the Braciolone

Braciolone--Henry Fudge's pork shoulder stuffed with currants, Montasio cheese, spinach, prosciutto and hard boiled eggs, right out of the oven

Rhythms

2009-09-15T00:05:00.004-04:00

When I'm not sweating over the stove, I like to swim. I've come to swimming later in life at the ripe age of 36 and it's what I do to release. After the long hours of a restaurant kitchen and the mayhem of a busy weekend, there's nothing I enjoy more than swimming a few laps to clear my head. This summer, through my boss, I discovered open water swimming. So far, I've participated in two swims, both 3ks, and I have to say that I've found a new passion.

This last weekend, we drove to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina for the annual Pier-2-Pier swim. It was my first attempt at doing an open water swim in the ocean and I was a little nervous to say the least. The shark jokes around the restaurant didn't help much either. So at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, there I was: swim cap on, goggles ready, stretched out and looking out over the ever-unforgiving ocean. As the horn sounded and 400+ swimmers ran out into the ocean, my heart pounded. The first 400 meters were the worst. I dove into the first big wave coming at me, put my head down and started my stroke. The second wave hit me and I was lost. I do most of my swimming at the local gym where the biggest waves that come at me are from the elderly gentleman in the next lane over doing some form of a back stroke. I stopped, looked up and starting breathing hard. I was bordering on a small anxiety attack. I collected myself and began an inner, coaching dialogue.

"I didn't pay $75 for this race to quit."

"I am going to be completely humiliated when I get back to Atlanta and tell everyone at the restaurant that I didn't finish...chickened out."

"I'm in shape...right? I can do this!"

And finally...

"My daughter (she's 3) is going to be confused and bummed at me for coming back so soon."

I put my head down again and started to stroke. It seemed like there were still hundreds of swimmers around me and I new that if I just made to the first buoy, made the turn for the long swim to opposite pier, I would be fine.

So about 45 minutes later, I finished. Somewhere, I found my stroke, my rhythm and I made it. And I couldn't have felt better.

Now fast forward to today. I get back to the restaurant after a three day absence and it's big time catch-up mode. What happened over the weekend? Where did all the buffalo mozzarella go that we had on Thursday? How did the special turn out over the weekend? What were our final sales last week? Luckily, I have a very skilled and intelligent sous chef who sees to it that everything runs smoothly when I'm away. My next panic moment was my planning for my trip to Italy next week. I'm really trying to squeeze in as much as possible: where to stay, renting a car, emailing chefs who may or may not let me work with them in their kitchens, do I go to Bologna for the pasta or Florence for serious Tuscan fare? I've been planning the itinerary for this trip myself, and as inspiring as it's going to be, it's also provided another level of stress I'm not used to.

In doing this planning a few weeks ago, I was sitting in our office at the restaurant, sometime after service trying to figure out how long to stay in Rome, where to stay, where to eat and possibly work. Do I stay three days and blow it out? Do I stay one night and then drive out into the country where most of the "real" Italian food is being cooked? Do I skip expensive Rome all together? As I'm sitting there, fretting out loud about my troubles, one of our dear servers, Sarah Williams (we call her Swilly), was sitting behind me, doing her check out for the night and listening intently. Finally, she said, "There are probably a lot more important things to worry about than where you're going to stay in Rome." I stopped and laughed. "Well said, Swilly," I thought. I want to enjoy my trip and I can't do that if I hit the ground stressing.

So I think once I land in Italy, get to my hotel, find my first lunch reservation and sit down to a plate of Spaghetti Carbonara or Bucatini all'Amatriccianna, I'll have my "Swilly moment." I'll find my rhythm and ease into the pace that only Italians really know. I'll have done the leg work already and be relaxed and ready for the trip to come to me.

I didn't even know it was Italian

2009-09-05T10:51:00.006-04:00

Risotto has always been one of the most sacred Italian dishes for me. It's one of those things I take very seriously in our kitchen and I try to instill that in our cooks. The importance and execution of it is one of the things I want them to take with them when they leave La Tavola. There are many ways to make risotto and anyone serious about cooking it will tell you that their version is the best. A very good cooking friend of mine and I used to argue about whose was best, mine being looser and closer to the Milanese or Venetian variety and his being a little tighter, closer to the Roman variety. I have a lot of cooking memories that revolve around this very special dish of rice, some good, some embarrassing and I might as well start with the worst first.

One of the first serious kitchens I worked in was run by a Nepalese chef and a Mexican sous chef. We changed the menu every month (insanity) and the food was "world fusion." Go ahead and laugh a little, it was the late 90's. This is where I had my first experience with risotto. We served a lemongrass risotto with grilled Mako shark. We made it before service started and stored it in a steam table during service. Well, as some of you know, when risotto sits like that and the starch really releases from the rice it goes from something silky and sublime to wallpaper paste very quickly. I just remember the general manager bringing back plate after plate of uneaten rice and I, as a young dumb cook, was thoroughly confused. I'm not even sure I knew it was Italian at that point.

So a few years go by and I start working in an Italian restaurant and begin to learn more about the food. But we didn't serve risotto. In hindsight, I don't think the chef was confident about his ability to cook it and since we all worked for the Grand Matriarch of Italian Cookery (Lidia), we didn't want to bastardize one of her national culinary treasures. It wasn't until a crazy, hyper chef from NYC came to visit that I really started to learn how to make risotto.

Chef Chris stormed into our kitchen with a larger than life personality, energy level and locker room vocabulary. It kind of scared us vanilla kids from the Midwest. But soon we saw that this was a guy we could learn from, if we could just keep him in one place. I learned that Chris had cooked in Italy, near Milan, and learned how to make risotto there. He had also convinced the two little Italian cleaning ladies that he was Satan by grabbing a sheet tray of roasting veal bones out of the oven with his bare hands, but that's another post altogether. I thought that if I was going to make this thing it might as well be from a guy who learned how to make it over there, and not all that far from where they harvest the rice!

So we worked on it. He gave me a fool proof recipe which I committed to memory. He showed me what to look for, what to taste for and how to recognize problems. And he also told me to throw my risotto away and start over a few times.

I decided the best way to test my risotto was on the people who, we as cooks, didn't really care what they ate or how it tasted: the waitstaff. We had some lamb ragu in the cooler that was a few days old so lamb risotto it would be. I got out the giant rondeaux we used as a trough for staff meal and started with my ingredients. Twenty stirring, sweaty minutes later I was finished and I heaved it onto the prep table that served as our makeshift buffet. Chris walked by, took one spoonful and said, "That's good." I knew I was on to something.

More later...

Saturday

2009-09-01T19:55:00.008-04:00

Expo

Tools. I have a thing for cooking with wooden spoons. I think we have five or six different kinds.

Roasted chanterelles and Pecorino Sarda

Beet, pear and fennel salad. Pistachios and Ricotta Salata.

In defense of modern rustic

2009-08-30T20:38:00.005-04:00

I spoke to my mom yesterday morning and had an interesting conversation about an I-talian (her pronunciation) restaurant outside of Scottsdale, Arizona. Her and her boyfriend, Mark, are buying a house there and she was there with a friend furniture shopping. She began the conversation with, "I HAVE to tell you about the restaurant we ate at last night." I'm interested because my mom isn't much of a foodie and her holiday desserts alone usually peak my curiosity or prompt a snicker. She went on to tell me about an Italian restaurant, which doesn't need to be named, that I looked up while we were talking. Her description was that it was the most beautiful restaurant she's ever been, she met the chef, she met the GM and it was more "fine dining" than what I do at my restaurant.

Ahem.

"Is that so?" I thought. I didn't say anything about it and listened to her gush for the next ten minutes about how great the food was, all the while looking at their menu online. To be honest, I didn't see anything on the menu I hadn't seen before. Most of it was the obligatory dishes: caprese, some kind of scallopine, too much prosciutto and tomatoes, et al. It's what I call "food cooked with Italian ingredients," not Italian food. But whatever. People like this kind of food and there are a lot of restaurants that are busy because of it. I think of it as the new Italian-American cuisine.

But it's not what we do in our kitchen. The trend over the last five years in Italian cooking, from what I've seen, is going back to rustic, country cooking, the cooking of the peasants. The approach is using micro-regional Italian products combined with ultra-fresh local ingredients to create a cuisine that is both very Italian and "of the place" where it is being cooked. The presentation is simple yet the execution is (should) be spot on and prepared as if an Italian were cooking it. I think of this food as modern rustic. It has changed the way I cook since leaving my last restaurant and I really appreciate the honesty, integrity and timelessness of it. There are a lot of great chefs around the country cooking this way and it excites me to see the dining public catch on and "get it." I think this is the new Italian cooking in America. It may not be perceived by some as fine dining but it is progressive in its own right and challenges our notions of Italian food.

Now I just have to convince my mom...

Can you hear what I'm sayin?

2009-08-28T13:02:00.002-04:00

Well, since this is my maiden post, I feel like I should explain myself. I was against blogs for a long time (even the word sounds like something you would do after one-too-many) but after some prodding from friends and research, I decided it was time. I thought it might be good to get some of those little voices out of my head and even pose a few interesting questions about life, food and life in food.

As some of you already know, I cook for a living and much of my life revolves around food, Italian food. I think a lot about how it's prepared, where it comes from, ingredients, etc. I'm preparing for my second trip to Italy next month, making connections with chefs, wine makers and Vatican tour guides to get the most out of it. By the way, I'm not Italian at all. At all. But I've spent the last ten years of my life learning about Italian food, culture, the language and a little about their soccer teams on the side. And in this professional area, I guess you could say I have good pedigree. Just google my name and my old boss' name will probably pop up before mine. So I guess my experience with her has given me some street cred.

So here we are. And I hope you find something interesting in my future posts that bring you back or make you ask questions or coax you into eating something new...

C