Restaurant Review: LOCANDA VERDE (New York, NY)

LOCANDA VERDE

Tribeca isn’t lacking in great eateries, but this Italian straddling the rustic/refined line is a welcome addition to the nabe. It’s many things to many people: a great lunch spot for the eclectic local work crowd, and a relaxed crowd-pleaser in the evening – the kind of place where expense accounters, local celebrities, and Manhattanites from further afield come for a reliably delicious Italian-esque meal. Renowned pastry chef Karen DeMasco (formerly of Gramercy Tavern) even turns out pastries and savory-sweet goodies for breakfast. The style is a mix of authentic, accomplished Italian food – traditional dishes tweaked ever-so-slightly for the local palate, or the chef’s amusement, or both – with Italian-American comfort food staples like Chef Andrew Carmellini’s  “ grandmother’s ravioli.”

 The dining room is a series of different spaces, cavernous yet warm, with ultra-high ceilings more reminiscent of farmhouses in Umbria or the Maremma than a converted industrial space in downtown Manhattan. I headed to the ladies room at one point, and as I descended the stairs I was immediately swept away to an upscale dining experience (or a combination of experiences) I'd had in Umbria, Tuscany, and Le Marche, both by the aesthetics of the space and the smell of a wood-burning fireplace I'd not smelled anywhere outside of Italy. (I'm still puzzled as to where that exact smell was emanating from, and how...)

To begin to sate your appetite, start with a crostino appetizer like the simple sheep’s milk ricotta with herbs, or go for the Sardines in saor (a classic Venetian dish) – wonderfully paired with homemade focaccia that’s lifted with the addition of lemon. A classic fritto misto is made all’Americano with Ipswich clams and rock shrimp, species native to these shores of the Atlantic. Then, pull yourself away from the appetizers, since the pasta is well worth saving room for. Those aforementioned ravioli are delicious (and, we suspect, much lighter than Carmellini’s grandmother’s original version). So are the orechiette with broccoli rabe and duck sausage, a sauce more pesto-light than anything, lacking both the kick and bitterness of the signature pasta preparation of Puglia, but tasty anyway. Sides include a delicious sauteed spinach with chickpeas and ricotta salata (see photo).

The stuffed mountain trout (photo at right) main course with lentils and pancetta is in homage to landlocked Umbria, and beautifully presented. The garlic chicken is a simple, wonderful joy, meriting the inclusion on the menu of a fowl usually limited to staff meals in Italian restaurants. And when the porchetta sandwich is available…well, just make sure you order it. Period.

Savory thin-sliced porchetta with caramelized onions and vinegar-cured peppers, spices...fantastico.

Desserts are well-executed if a little staid, but desserts were never a strong point of Italian cuisine. With DeMasco’s talents (and they’re evident in the savory breads and the like coming out of the kitchen), I’d like to see her apply some of that Midwestern sensibility that Carmellini wields so successfully, to  the desserts. If there’s one thing the American tradition has perfected – well beyond the Italian tradition – it’s sweets.

377 Greenwich St (corner of N. Moore and Greenwich). 212/925-3797. www.locandaverdenyc.com.

The Breakfast Club, Part 2

Continuing with my trip down memory lane (brought on by the "death" of my laptop and the subsequent retrieval of old files, including our brunch menus)...the Pasquino American Sunday Brunch in Rome...

Since the Pasquino restaurant, the spot we'd secured for our brunch venture, was a part of the landmark Pasquino English-language Cinema complex, we decided to play with the whole movie/Hollywood theme -- hence "The Breakfast Club" moniker (after the 1985 John Hughes flick). Full disclosure: In a recent conversation with my friend Patrick, he reminded me of our original working title for our brunch spot, before we'd even secured a location: Daney's. That's right, like Denny's, but combined with Dana. The Americans in the group found it hilarious, and Patrick even printed out a terrible prototype of the logo, having doctored the bright yellow Denny's sign. I wanted nothing to do with "Daney's." Grazie a dio I was able to talk them out of it and we moved on to a location with an already built-in theme with which to work. Can you imagine me, slinging hash in a hairnet at Daney's?! Holy crap.

Team Breakfast Club:

We enlisted the help of my American roommate Leah, for kitchen help. Our friend Elizabeth pulled out her long-dormant waitress skills from her post-grad days. We brought in a couple of other Italian friends to help serve, and we put Peppe behind the bar, our "Calabrese Connection" whom we taught to mix a mean Bloody Mary. Martin helped in the kitchen, but felt his "talents" were best utilized in the front-of-house (he ended up doing a little of both). Gareth and Patrick were our friendly English-speaking male servers, helpfully flirting with our young female clientele. We realized we were still short-staffed in the kitchen though, so we turned to a young American college student named Paul, per Patrick's recommendation. (Us: "Does he have experience in the kitchen?" Patrick: "He sure looks like he could cook up some pancakes!") We arranged for an "interview" with young Paul to make sure he was rigorously vetted. We met at one of our favorite spots at the time, Ombre Rosse, next door to the restaurant (where we had something close to a group 'corporate account' bar tab). After being subjected to torturous questions from us ("How much bacon do you think you could handle cooking at one time?", "Quick! What are the components of a cobb salad?" and "How awesome are cats!?" [Gareth]), we hired the poor guy -- who, incidentally, ended up making a fine short order cook.

We got to work on our menu, knowing we wanted to include brunch staples that weren't available anywhere else: pancakes and bacon, eggs served a variety of ways with classic sides, bagels and lox (for me), sausage biscuits (for Martin), and that elusive Eggs Benedict, for us all. Bagels were nowhere to be found in Rome, so I had to make a few dozen of them at home every Saturday night (quite a task, as it turned out). In addition, I had a full baking roster to round out our menu: New York cheesecake, brownies, and a variety of other sweets and savories. We had several booze and broccoli Romano-fueled dinners over which we discussed menu items and their respective names. We decided to name each dish after a film or a movie reference. Some favorites? "O Bagel, Where Art Though" was fitting as a riff on the Coen Brothers' Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? but also because of the difficulty of finding a damned bagel in The Eternal City. And I still chuckle thinking about our name for a vegetarian sandwich: "Honey, I Left Out the Meat!" (Also hilarious were the various Italian pronunciations of these dish names by our Italian servers who had no clue about what they were ordering from the kitchen: "Cosa sono i pan-cake??") Even our drinks had some great names, including a "Fellini" instead of a bellini, and a "Something About Bloody Mary." Genius, no?

We secured our food orders through our various restaurant and green market connections. One of our biggest dilemmas was finding passable "American style" smoked bacon. We located a purveyor, but the bacon came packaged in whole slabs of pork belly, so we convinced Patrick to sweet-talk the owner of a nearby alimentari (food shop) into letting us use his meat slicer for the bacon. We had a built-in laundry service, as Patrick owned the Wash 'n Dry laundromat in the neighborhood. Gareth created CDs to provide our brunch soundtrack. We revved our publicity engines by plastering the city center with our brunch posters, and of course, utilized the ever-effective Italian method of raccomandazione: word-of-mouth.

And so, with all of these elements in place, we began the first real American Brunch in Rome, THE BREAKFAST CLUB, on April 1 (no joke), 2001. We did approximately 90 covers -- restaurant parlance for one customer's entire order, however many courses that may entail -- that first Sunday. We were a hit! We turned tables 2 to 3 times in those 4 hours. We were buzzing along. It wasn't perfect, but it was clear we had a great concept on our hands, and there was definitely an audience hungry for good, authentic brunch food prepared with love and served with a smile.

 
We celebrated afterward at our old haunt next door, Ombre Rosse -- a bunch of chairs gathered around a couple of small tables outside under the umbrellas in Piazza Sant'Egidio. If memory serves me correctly, we spent all of our week's profits on rounds of drinks for the remainder of the evening. We were exhausted. But it was gratifying, for sure. And fun. Really, really fun.

Stay tuned for part 3...

The Breakfast Club, Part 1

I'm one of many people who firmly believe that Sundays were made for brunch. It's a distinctly American concept (and one facet of food culture New York can be credited with perfecting), though brunch's popularity has spread around the globe. To wit: in places like Italy, where Sundays have traditionally been days of rest centered around a large family lunch, brunch is catching on. Kind of.

As an expat living in Rome, I spent a lot of Sundays with friends lounging at trattorias for some curative pasta and hair-of-the-dog vino. But every so often, we'd long for a good old American brunch: the savory-sweet combos of pancakes and bacon, the perfection of Eggs Benedict. And a bagel, for the love of the Lord, a bagel. Since Italians are so enamored of many American concepts -- Mickey Mouse, McDonald's, Hollywood -- it's easy to see why brunch, in all its yummy goodness, would also become an appealing "trend." What we witnessed all over Rome, however, was failed attempts at "American brunch" (quotation marks intentional). Versions of Italian Sunday lunch got slapped with the brunch label all over town. Those places that actually tried for traditional brunch menu items got lost in the execution of the dishes. Hell, even The Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood failed miserably. But time and again, my friends and I would hope against hope, dragging our hungover bodies into any place with a "Vero Brunch Americano" sign outside. 

This scramble for scrambled eggs took a pivotal turn for the worse one afternoon when we sat down at a pretty restaurant not far from Campo de' Fiori that boasted "Eggs Benedict" on its sign in the window.  After waiting for an hour and a half for what we'd decided must be the most perfectly-cooked eggs benny ever, we were served a piece of toast cut in half, topped with a hard-boiled egg and a slice of tomato. And fries. Upon further inquiry, our server admitted that the chef didn't really know what Eggs Benedict was, and that they were new to this whole brunch thing. You don't say. Well, we put in a good effort trying to explain, in Italian, the finer points of eggs benny and well-cooked bacon and hash browns. Then we looked around the table. Wait a minute, we thought. We're sitting here with an American chef (me), an American who'd bartended for years (Marty), a guy who'd had some history in the service industry (Patrick), and one Brit who loooved bacon and would do anything for a proper Sunday brunch after a night slurping suds at Sloppy Sam's (more on that some other time: Gareth). Why not do our own American brunch in Rome?!

Through a connection of ours, we set up a meeting with one of the owners of the newly-opened Pasquino restaurant, a subterranean risto-lounge next door to the much-loved Pasquino English-language cinema. It had all the qualities we were looking for in a space: it was new, fun and modern, in a great location in the center of Trastevere (a great nabe in Rome, a mishmash of old-school Romans, international expats, and American students), and most importantly, it was closed on Sundays. We cut a deal to give a percentage of our brunch profits to the owners in exchange for the keys to the place on Sundays. And so, The Breakfast Club was born...

Pesce d'Aprile!

Yes, it's April 1st everyone: known in America as April Fool's Day, and in Italy, bizarrely, as Pesce d'Aprile, translated as "April Fish." All over the Italian peninsula today, giggling school children are sticking colorful paper cut-outs of fish on unsuspecting schoolmates' backs (hilaaaaarious, I know). Of course these pranks aren't limited strictly to fish, or to schoolchildren. But today in New York, the sun is finally shining and it's 63 degrees out. So I don't really care about pranks right now. I want to take in the sunlight and the temperate weather.

So, at the risk of seeming like a humorless twit, I'm going to skip the practical jokes and concentrate on the pesce part of the Pesce d'Aprile: fish. When I think of spring warmth and sunshine, I think of Sicily. And lemons. My first trip to Sicily was in the month of April, and it was a glorious week with some of the most amazing Italian food I'd ever tasted (authentic Sicilian is still perhaps my favorite regional Italian cuisine). The recipe below highlights the island's wonderful citrus, in a dish of Fish with Salmoriglio -- a light, lemony, herby sauce shot through with plenty of garlic that's a perfect foil to meaty or oily fish. Pesce spada (swordfish) or mackerel would be the most likely fish varieties used in Sicilia. I like to use the large bunches of dried oregano that come from Sicily and Calabria as the main herb in the sauce, though adding a bit of parsley and rosemary work to give the sauce some extra green notes, both in flavor and color.

Salmoriglio is best with white, flaky fish or steak fish, I think, but also works with shellfish and grilled meats. Whatever you pair it with, it imparts a bit of sunshine to the dish --  a bit of agrumi (citrus). Very Sicilian. And much better than that other Sicilian notion involving fish, particularly popular in Corleone: sleeping with the fishes. Buon Pesce d'Aprile! And buon appetito! 

PESCE CON SALMORIGLIO

(4 servings)

4 1-inch thick slices or fillets of whitefish (about 1½ pounds), cleaned

1/2 cup good quality extra-virgin olive oil (preferably Sicilian
2 lemons

1 clove garlic, peeled and chopped finely
Pinch of oregano, or a mix of fresh herbs (oregano, parsley, basil, rosemary, thyme)

Salt & pepper to taste

- In a small bowl, zest one of the lemons (careful not to include the white pith), and juice both lemons. Stir together with garlic. Slowly add 1/3 cup olive oil in a stream to make a sort of citronette. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside. (If you want the garlic taste to be mellowed, heat this mixture in a pan and warm for 5 minutes to cook the garlic a bit).

- Warm a couple of tablespoons of the olive oil in a large sauté pan over medum heat. Sprinkle the fish with salt just before placing it in the sauté pan. Sauté until golden brown. Flip and proceed the same way on the second side.

- In the meantime, chop the herbs finely. Add to the lemon-garlic-oil mixture. Adjust seasoning as needed.

- Transfer fish to a platter, drizzle with the salmoriglio sauce, and serve warm or at room temperature.

On the Radio

As disco diva Donna Summer once sang, "...they said it really loud, they said it on the air, on the radio...". Anyone who's ever seen me once upon a time at Subbass on a friday night in Rome, or at a karaoke bar in New York -- well, you know how I feel transformed with a microphone in hand. That feeling came rushing back to me last week when my friend Peter D. and I were the featured guests on NY Public Radio's Let's Travel Radio with Susi Raphael.

The subject was Italy, and we focused on sustainable travel and World Heritage sites as well as the food and wine and culture of the Italian peninsula (that's what I was there for!). We covered Rome and Florence/Tuscany, because even though they're heavily traveled by tourists, they're timeless draws for visitors -- and have so much to offer culturally, visually, historically, culinarily, you name it. But we then shifted the focus away from cities that are perhaps over-touristed (La Serenissima, Venice, anyone?) and towards lesser-known cities and regions. In the north, we featured Vicenza, Verona, and the "non-Venice Veneto," as well as Torino, a wonderfully undervalued alpine city that was once the seat of Italian royalty and is today very much a hidden culinary gem. Then we headed south to Puglia and Calabria. These areas offer dramatically different landscapes than up north, but are truly Mediterranean and offer wonderful food, wine, and value for travelers. We ran out of time before we could even discuss the wonders of Sardinia and Sicily -- two of my favorite areas in Italy. So, until next time. I could get used to this having-a-microphone-in-front-of-me thing...

Check out our podcast: http://www.letstravelradio.com/podcasts/2010/3-25/

Comments welcome!

Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me...Hungry

It's one of the most amazing structures on the planet, in my opinion: the Pantheon. It's regal, majestic. It's still the largest dome in Rome, because even the greatest architectural minds of the Renaissance couldn't figure out how to create a dome for St. Peter's that bested the Pantheon's -- a milennium and a half later. And don't even get me started on the gorgeous marble surrounding you upon entering. The strange thing about the dome here? The oculus, or "eye" in the center. That's right, to put it simply: there's a hole in the roof! This helped the dome remain structurally sound for so many centuries, but that means that when it rains, it indeed pours -- right inside the Pantheon itself. There are drains built into the floors for this, of course, but the Pantheon caretakers put up velvet ropes around the perimeter of the slippery marble area that gets wet below the 8-meter-wide oculus.

I lived down the street from the Pantheon for 7 years. So when I hear the sound of rain hitting pavement, my thoughts veer towards the piazza del Pantheon, the public echo chamber of cobblestones and scurrying tourists with umbrellas under the cover of darkness. Rome is magically lit at night, and the Pantheon becomes a towering structure of columns and dome that seems to glow from within, especially when viewed through waterlogged-weary eyes. And the sound of water pouring through that oculus. 

It makes me think of one cozy place at the corner of one edge of the piazza, away from the hustle of McDonald's (sadly, yes, this piazza has one) and the overpriced formality of La Rosetta. Armando al Pantheon, a restaurant that's been around for eons, has the lived-in warmth of the best kind of old-school Italian trattoria. I've ducked in here many times, closing and shaking my umbrella, breathing in the heady scent of truffles in-season, or the Italian 'trifecta' aroma of garlic and tomatoes cooking in olive oil.

The menu doesn't disappoint, featuring all kinds of Roman staples (artichokes, puntarelle, bruschette, and soups) to start, as well as traditional primi -- tomato-based (amatriciana, arrabbiata) and cheese-spiked (carbonara, cacio e pepe, alla gricia). The main courses are Roman comfort food: veal roast and baked chicken and roasted lamb, stewed oxtail and Roman tripe and sauteed lamb "bits and bops" (as my Brit friends would say) with artichokes -- classic coratella.

An older signore who owns a nearby antiques shop told my friend he's been going to Armando several days a week for lunch for the last 25 years. Local Romans have been coming here since it opened in 1961. And I remember a wonderful lunch I shared here with my parents and older brother one rainy early October afternoon. There was an older gentleman seated at a table near us, smartly dressed in a 3-piece tailored wool suit, the kind that strikes a balance between classic Italian tailored and tweedy professorial. He couldn't have been taller than my 5'6" mother, and just as slight. He ate by himself, and every server knew him by name. My father was transfixed by this Italian gentleman quietly consuming plate after plate of homestyle Roman wonderfulness. He went through various salumi with bread, a plate of Roman artichokes, a main course of baby lamb with vegetables and potatoes. Red wine, ovviamente. Every time another course came out, my Dad kept exclaiming, "Wow! Where does he put it all?!?" Then a mixed salad. Then the server made the mistake of bringing him an espresso. "Ma non mi ha portato il dolce!" the gentleman said -- but you haven't brought me my dessert! The server was all apologies and swiftly served him a plate of profiteroles, cream-filled choux pastry bathed in chocolate sauce. Now that's what you call a lunch, alla romana. At the foot of a structure built in 27 BC. Rain be damned.

Side note: In life, there are few coincidences. I lived down the street from the original Pantheon for 7 years, and for 4 years, I lived down the street from Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda, at The University of Virginia. Long an admirer of classical architecture and Palladian design, Jefferson built the Rotunda to honor the Pantheon and the Palladian design principles that were based on this classic structure. They're separated by more than 1800 years, but both boast their own classical beauty. I love them both.

Festa Delle Donne

March 8th in Italy is the Festa Delle Donne, or Women's Day. This has been a tradition for a long time in Italy and in many countries around the globe -- and recently the holiday has picked up steam in the U.S. (The photo above features the mimose, the official flower for this holiday in Italy). All over the Italian peninsula on March 8th, groups of women take over restaurant dining rooms en masse, leaving the men to stay home and cook for themselves! This year, we celebrate Festa delle Donne just after an historic win at the Oscars last night for Kathryn Bigelow -- the first female ever to win best director. Congratulations and forza donne! 

For a great website featuring information about all things Italian, check out my friend GB's wonderful Italian Notebook, and sign up to get a daily dose of Italy at www.italiannotebook.com. Thanks, Geebs, for the photo I lifted above!