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07/15/2007 Archived Entry: "Cleaning Up My Desk"

I leave this Wednesday for Italy. I want to leave with a clean desk. But it is piled with chits of paper, business cards, menus, and whatnot, reminders of things I have been meaning to share with you.

Food from Sorrento and Beyond
Rita Pane Vessichelli is privelged to live in the Villa Tritone in Sorrento. It has a 150-year-old garden built by one of the several William Waldorf Astors. This one was ambassador to Italy. The garden is full of surprises – a window in a wall that looks out to a fishing village – and great beauty. A fountain here, an amazing sculpture there, a Roman ruin or five, classical music piped into speakers hidden in the trees. The inside of the house is no less amazing. You can see some pictures by going to the Villa Tritone web site. “

Most amazing of all, perhaps, is that its glamorous owner is a wonderful cook. Her cookbook, written with her husband, Mariano, has been in five Italian editions. Now, with the help of her daughter who lives in the U.S., it is in its first English edition. You can order a copy of Tastes of Southern Italy directly from Rita by clicking on the title. It costs $25 euro, at today’s exchange rate about $35. It is a soft cover book filled with color photos.

Dinner in Staten Island
Had a delicious and amusing dinner at Panini Grill538 Forest Ave, Staten Island. As is typical on the island, the portions where enormous and very well-priced. As is not so typical, the food tasted great. I particularly loved the outsized Grandma’s meatball. It’s the kind of softball sized meatball that Italian-Italians make fun, just to give their Italian-American cousins a hard time, but then devour anyway. It was soft, well-seasoned and absolutely irresistible. The grilled turkey sandwich was, too. There was something called Italain nachos made with fried pasta. Like genuine nachos, it’s a real mess of a dish if you let it sit around too long, but fantastic for a table-full of friends who are ready to pounce on it immediately.

Nuts and More
In regard to Oh! Nuts, which I visited a few times recently to take photographs for my new Jewish book (due in early March), I am tempted to use the old Levy’s rye bread advertising line, now a cliché, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love …” Oops! I just did.

Oh! Nuts is a nut and candy shop with strict kosher credentials at four locations: At 1503 Avenue J in Brooklyn, 4923 13th Avenue in Brooklyn, 69 Route 59 in Monsey, NY, and 468 Central Avenue in Cedarhurst, Long Island. But they also do mail order, and carry every nut you can think of. The nuts are highest quality, super-fresh, and priced as low as you’ll find. So are the dried fruits. The chocolates and amusing candies are as good as kosher chocolate gets. And they make beautiful gift baskets for ever occasion, including summer camp care packages.

Dinner in Tribeca
I dined at Dani recently – finally -- the restaurant owned by chef Don Pintabono at 333 Hudson St., at Charlton St.; 212-633-9333. I’ve been meaning to go since it opened, but it took nearly a year.

I enjoyed absolutely everything but the noise, which Don promises he is dealing with. I think he said he was taking care of it this summer by putting some sound-baffling material on the ceiling or something. Noise, not food or service, is my biggest problem with restaurants lately. A quiet restaurant has become the most luxurious thing in New York City – meaning you pay through the nose to eat in one.

Don, who was the chef at the Tribeca Grill for many years, is now cooking the food he loves most, Italian-inspired food. Most of it has a southern bent, as Don is of southern Italian (I think mostly Sicilian) descent, a former Brooklyn boy who only recently transplanted his family to Long Island. Some of the dishes are strictly traditional. Some have Don’s special touch inform them. His spaghetti all’Amatriciana, made with guanciale (pork cheek) that he cures himself, is by the books and among the best I’ve ever had. No exaggeration, and that’s something for me to say, as not only do I make a great Amatriciana myself (I don’t have to say so myself. My Italian friends say so.), but I have eaten some wickedly good ones in my days in Rome, the city that dotes on this dish. As this one is, all have been made with slightly funky, seriously porky flavored guanciale, not that I turn my nose up at pancetta. Listen, you can even make a good Amatriciana with Oscar Meyer bacon, but there’s nothing quite like the texture of .pork cheek.

We also tried some macaroni with spring vegetables and shrimp that I loved. And I also loved Don’s braised pork shank, although by the time we got to the secondo, the main course, our appetites were exhausted by the multiple antipasti and pastas, and I ended up splitting the shank three ways with my friends. It’s so big, that was enough.

Dieting and Sashimi
I am on a strict doctor-ordered diet. Don’t ask why. Talking about fat is always depressing. But talking about the good food I have been eating is not. I am basically eating only fish and vegetables. Even fruit is off limits for the moment. To that end, I have been haunting my local Japanese restaurants. I find sashimi, raw fish without rice, very satisfying, and I am allowed a cup of rice with my fish. By the way, the going out for Japanese, is just an occasional break from cooking at home, where I have been enjoying expanding my fish recipe repertoire.

However, I needed to ventur outside Park Slope for sushi recently, to meet up with some friends who live in Greenwich Village, right near Yama, a much touted place at 38 Carmine St.

I have to say, the sushi and sashimi at Yama were good, but not as good as the restaurant’s considerable reputation would have it. In fact, I found the sashimi to be cut way too thin. You might say the pieces were elegantly thin, but I viewed them as stingily thin. Call me a rube. Better than the raw fish was the cooked fish, namely excellent black bass with a miso sauce that is very bit as good as the one for a zillion dollars more at Nobu. But at Yama, of course, you are not rubbing elbows with the Hollywood on Hudson crowd of Tribeca.

Swiss Pork Store
I went to visit friends in Bergen County and they took me to the Swiss Pork Store, 24-10 Fair Lawn Ave. in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. It is an amazing place, a beautiful old-fashioned place. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know about it. It has been at the same location since 1950! They make their own bratwurst, weisswurst, knockwurst … you name the sausage, some not even German. They are also butchers who sell fresh meat. I wish I had a shop like this near me. Sausage stores are a great rarity these days, an endangered species that require your patronage to remain in our midst.

Goffle Road Poultry Farm
Speaking of endangered species, live poultry markets have practically gone the way of the Dodo, the extinct bird species that was always cited as a phenomenon in my youth, but a species that now has been extinct for so long no one even remembers anymore that it existed. Or that expression: gone the way of the Dodo. But Goffle Road Poultry Farm, in Wyckoff, New Jersey,is a genuine live poultry market. They also sell freshly laid eggs, and freshly slaughtered rabbits, and turkeys, and ducks. I loved my visit here, and loved that they still call young chickens “pullets” on their price sign. That’s an extinct word that has gone the way of Yiddish cooks.

Eat me in St. Louis
As some of you may remember, my niece, Rachel Alexander, lives in St. Louis, which I call San Luigi just to tease her. On a recent visit, we took a ride to “historic” Kimmswick, Missouri. I have to say, it is a place for girls. I have never been to a girlier place. The buildings are old, I’ll give it that. But it is simply a town of gift shops filled with frou-frou stuff that only women enjoy, except for one craft shop that had some beautiful handmade decorative items and ceramics. Oh yes, I wanted to buy a jar of apple butter at one place that makes it, but with the new airline security restrictions, I would have had to check my carry-on to take it back to New York. Not worth it for apple butter.

The big restaurant in Kimmswick, the only restaurant in Kimmswick, and known far and wide, is called The Blue Owl. This place is so popular that you have to make reservations weeks ahead, and even with a reservation you are likely to wait some time for your table. Actually, I didn’t mind my wait on a bench in the entryway. The hostesses wear cutesy, country pinafores, and they were a hoot to watch at work, bossy and friendly at the same time. The customers made for great people watching as well, as good as when I sit in an Italian piazza. For this New York City provincial, Missouri is just as foreign a culture.

Eating on The Blue Owl’s deep veranda was very pleasant. Some of the food was pleasant. Some, particularly the leaden quiche, was not so pleasant. But then, what the Blue Owl is famous for is not its savory food, but its pies. There are 41 kinds of pie listed on the menu. Not all of them are available every day, but enough are that it is still hard to make a choice. We adored the chocolate cream, and the coconut cream, but the strawberry shortcake pie was dry.

There Is Nothing Like a Dame
I was invited to a dinner of the Colonial Dames of New Jersey, which was held at the Essex County Hunt Club in Peapack, New Jersey, which is gorgeous horse country.

It was a great event. Being that all the members can trace their families back to Colonial days, everyone brought a family heirloom (or a store-bought antique), and these were on view for everyone to see, and for a well-known expert to appraise. I brought an iron spoon mold, which I always thought was to make silver spoons. It isn’t. It was used to make pewter spoons and dates only to the early 19th century. I imagined it was older.

The dinner was quite good, too, especially some roast filet of beef, which is hardly ever as good as this was, and the accompanying horseradish mashed potatoes. The food was by the Hunt Club’s regular caterer.

But, as I didn’t know what to expect for dinner and I always expect the worst at country clubs and the like, we stopped in Peapack before the party and had a bite to eat at CocoLuxe Fine Pastries, at 161 Main St.; 908-781-5554.

My jaw dropped when I saw the magnificent looking cakes and pastries in this beautifully fitted shop. My taste buds sang when I ate the grilled vegetable and mozzarella sandwich moistened with basil pesto. And that’s not the kind of sandwich that usually excites me. They get top dollar for their cakes and tarts -- $24 or $25 for eight-inch cakes, $19.50 for six-inch; $4.25 to $23 for 3 ½-inch to 10-inch fruit tarts. I bet they are worth every penny, if the few things I tasted are any indication.

Okay, I’m tired of cleaning my desk and writing. More in the next day or two, before I leave on Wednesday.