By the time he started thinking about college, he was spending most of his non-school hours playing the saxophone, and when he wasn’t playing the saxophone, he was cooking. He thought about going to culinary school instead of college, but he’d been a vegetarian since birth—his parents, siblings, and most of his extended family are vegetarian—and while he didn’t want to cook meat, he also wasn’t interested in seeking out a specialized vegetarian culinary school, which seemed limiting in the long run. Anyway, he would always cook, he reasoned, whether or not he was a trained chef. He would always need to eat. But if he wanted to keep at his music, and if he wanted to go somewhere with it, he would need formal training. So he decided to try for a conservatory slot in saxophone, upping his practice schedule from a couple of hours a day to three or four. There’s a video taken around that time, at his high school’s Battle of the Bands. I wish you could see it. Brandon is seventeen, singing lead and straddling the sax in a band called “Ummm . . . ,” and he’s deep in his Jim Morrison phase, with dark sunglasses, long curly brown hair, and his shirt unbuttoned to the navel, for which he would later get detention.
The following year, he moved to Ohio as a freshman at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He declared a major in saxophone performance, but the urge to make something—not just memorize and perform a piece of music that someone else had made—was still there, and in his second year, he added a minor in music composition. After graduation, he moved to New York to work on a master’s at Brooklyn College Conservatory, sharing an apartment in Manhattan with a violinist and an opera singer. Meanwhile, I had left Oklahoma City and headed west to Stanford, where I studied human biology and French and was frequently asleep in my dorm room bunk bed by ten o’clock, though I did flirt with rebellion by cutting my hair short, dyeing it calico, and stealing pre-portioned balls of Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough from the freezer of my dining hall. When I graduated, I spent a year teaching English in France before moving to Seattle in 2002 to start graduate school in anthropology at the University of Washington.
Brandon and I met in 2005, when a friend of his suggested that he read Orangette, the food blog that I had started the previous summer. He did, and then he sent an e-mail to pass on a few choice compliments that evidently were very effective. He described himself as “a musician (composer) getting my master’s part-time in NYC, while being a full-time food snob / philosopher / chef.” Let’s ignore the snob / philosopher part; he was only twenty-three, so he gets a pass. But the chef part! He was referring, I would learn, to his part-time job as a cooking-and-grocery-shopping go-fer for a wealthy uncle, and to the fact that he liked to have friends over to dinner. But, people: I should have seen it. This man was not going to be a composer. By the second letter, he was describing the smell of flaming Calvados on crêpes, and to explain what type of music he wrote, he offered this:
I guess it’s considered classical. I usually write for choirs or orchestras or chamber groups, although sometimes I use electronics or make sound sculptures or installations. For a food analogy: I won’t make salads with raw chicken, lychee, pork rinds, and lemon zest with a motor oil, goat cheese, and olive oil dressing, just because no one has done it before. I try to make “dishes” that taste like nothing else, and taste good. Being a composer is really no different from being a chef or a choreographer.
I should have seen it, but I didn’t. And until a few months after we were married, I don’t think he did, either.
PENNE ALLA VODKA
I am sorry to report that Brandon no longer remembers the recipe he was taught as a teenager. But once, on a trip to Florida for his cousin’s wedding, we ate a first-rate penne alla vodka at an Italian restaurant called Tramonti, and this recipe is based on our memory of that one. For everyday purposes, we like to make the sauce with half a cup of cream, which yields a creamy-tasting result without veering into special-occasion territory. In a restaurant, they’d probably use more, and you’re welcome to experiment.
If you have a box grater, pull it out for this recipe. The cheese should be grated very fine, almost to a powder, and the rasp side of a box grater is the best way to do it.
One 28-ounce can whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes, strained, juices discarded
2 medium cloves garlic, pressed
1/2 teaspoon sugar, or to taste
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more for cooking the pasta and finishing the sauce
1/2 teaspoon red wine vinegar, or to taste
Pinch of dried oregano
3 tablespoons (42 g) unsalted butter
2 ounces (55 g) pancetta, chopped
Half a medium yellow onion (about 125 g), finely chopped
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1/2 cup (120 ml) vodka
1/2 cup (120 ml) heavy cream
2 grinds of black pepper
1/4 cup (14 g) packed fresh basil leaves, roughly chopped
12 ounces (340 g) penne rigate
2/3 cup (55 g) finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano
* * *
In the bowl of a food processor, combine the tomatoes, garlic, sugar, salt, vinegar, and dried oregano. Blend until smooth. Taste: If it’s slightly sour or bitter, add a bit more sugar. If it tastes flat, add a bit more vinegar.
Set a large pot of salted water on high heat. (It should taste pleasantly salted, a little less salty than seawater.)
Warm a Dutch oven (or other wide pan with a capacity of about 5 quarts) over medium heat. Add the butter, and when it has melted and is beginning to foam, add the pancetta. Cook, stirring, until the pancetta begins to crisp, about 5 minutes. Add the onion and the red pepper flakes, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Raise the heat to medium-high, and add the vodka. Cook 3 minutes, stirring regularly. Add the cream and black pepper, and simmer to thicken slightly, about 2 minutes. Stir in the tomato mixture and the basil, and simmer briskly, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes.
When the sauce has simmered for a few minutes, put the pasta into the pot of boiling water and cook until al dente, about 12 minutes.
Drain the pasta, and add it to the pot of sauce. Stir in the Parmigiano-Reggiano. Taste for salt, and adjust as needed. Serve immediately.
Yield: 3 to 4 servings
2
For the first fifteen months that Brandon and I were together, we weren’t actually together: he was in New York and I was in Seattle. Neither of us had much in the way of extra cash, but we took turns flying to see each other every month or six weeks, over long weekends or holidays. The first time I went to visit him, he took me to Di Fara.
“This pizza,” he told me solemnly, “it’ll change your life.”
I’d known Brandon for less than two months, but I already could have told you that he says this kind of thing on a regular basis. That early summer night, as we rattled through the subway tunnels from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I had no way of knowing that when he said that the pizza at Di Fara would change my life, it would, you know, actually change my life.
I could appreciate his enthusiasm, though I could only cautiously return it. Pizza is nice, but I had never before considered spending an hour and a half in an overheated New York City subway car just to eat a couple of slices. Where I grew up, the state meal involves fried okra, black-eyed peas, and chicken-fried steak. My childhood pizza education came mostly from Domino’s, or from the Tony’s brand frozen pizzas with “hamburger”-flavored topping that I was allowed to eat on nights when my parents were out, if I wasn’t having turkey tetrazzini.
“You’ll see,” he assured me. “It’s the best thing you’ll ever put in your mouth.”
Di Fara Pizza is a one-man show, owned and operated since 1965 by Domenico DeMarco, a slightly stooped septuagenarian with flour on his shoes. His kids might take your order or make change or stir a pot in the back kitchen, but he’s the only one who touches the pies. We arrived around nine o’clock, and the small, fluorescent-lit shop was still worki
ng its way through the evening rush. We took our place in the crowd that stood pressed against the chest-high counter separating DeMarco’s giant electric oven from the dingy dining room. (Di Fara is not a fancy place, nor is it a pretty one: its five or six folding tables are generally covered with smears of grease and Parmigiano-Reggiano dust.) DeMarco was alone behind the counter, shuffling back and forth from the workbench to the oven, tending his pies. The man is deliberate. He does not (and probably, at this point, physically cannot) move quickly. No one said a word as we waited, at least two dozen of us, watching him the way a pack of lions watches a grazing zebra.
DeMarco makes pizzas in two styles: traditional New York round, and square (also called Sicilian-style). Brandon ordered us a couple slices of each, despite the fact that there was prosciutto in the sauce for the square pizza.1 He would not, he whispered, let vegetarianism get between him and a Di Fara pie.
The square pizza at Di Fara is a complex, multi-step thing: a 1/2-inch-thick crust pressed out into a pan, topped with a long-simmered San Marzano tomato sauce, slices of fresh mozzarella cut from a fist-sized ball, slices of aged mozzarella, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano that he feeds through a hand-cranked grater as he goes, plenty of olive oil poured from a copper jug, and fresh herbs snipped with scissors. It’s sort of like focaccia—focaccia that oozes so much cheese and tomato that you need a knife, a fork, and three napkins to eat it. By the time we had dispatched our slices, I was prepared to eat anything that Brandon Pettit told me to.
The round pizza was even better. “Viff iss incredible,” I said, mid-chew. DeMarco paints the crust with an uncooked tomato sauce, lays slices of aged mozzarella and fresh mozzarella on top, and gives it all a generous splash of olive oil before he slides it into the oven. Minutes later, after he pulls the baked pie from the oven with his bare hands, he sprinkles it with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano and snips fresh basil on top. The thin crust puffs at the rim, taking on a texture not unlike a good baguette: crisp where it greets the tooth but chewy on the inside, flecked with bubbles. It’s Neapolitan-style-meets-New-York-style, bendy but not floppy, mottled with char along the rim and underside. We ate, and then Brandon ducked into a convenience store down the block for a couple of cold beers, and then we thought, Oh, what the hell, and ordered two more slices.
It was only later that Brandon explained how much it meant to him that I had liked Di Fara. Shortly before we met, he had taken another girl there on a date, and she wasn’t enthused. They broke up shortly afterward. “I felt like she didn’t understand me,” he confessed. I thought he was exaggerating for emphasis, but as it turns out, Brandon isn’t the only one: a New Yorker friend of ours says that she once had the very same response to a date who didn’t like Di Fara. It’s not a place that people are neutral about. If you do a search online, you’ll find page upon page of heated arguments about Di Fara, about whether DeMarco uses Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano (either, depending on the day), whether he uses buffalo mozzarella or cow’s milk mozzarella (sometimes both, and sometimes only the latter), how many cheeses he uses in all (three or four, depending on whether he’s got buffalo mozzarella on hand; see previous argument), whether his pizzas are pleasantly charred or burnt to the point of unpleasantness (the former, mostly, though the latter does happen; the guy is old), whether his pizzas are overrated or God’s own personal gift to the borough of Brooklyn (make it stop make it stop make it stop).
In any case, when we got engaged the following spring, we knew where to celebrate. We opened a bottle of Champagne, called our families, and got on the subway.
* * *
1. Vegetarians, take note: DeMarco’s daughter Maggie, who helps to run the business, recently told me that because of the number of vegetarians who come to Di Fara, they stopped using prosciutto in the square sauce in 2005 or 2006. I suppose there’s a good chance, then, that the slices we ate had no prosciutto? Either way, there’s no way to know: the sauce was wonderfully stewy and rich.
3
I don’t know how I failed to mention it earlier, because it’s absolutely perfect, but Brandon’s first job was at Pizza Hut. He was fifteen, and he needed an after-school job, so he worked as a server at a Pizza Hut on New Jersey’s Route 17. Lest you’re hoping to pick up some insider tips for making those famous breadsticks or the Ultimate Cheese Lover’s™ Pizza (“MADE WITH ALFREDO SAUCE!” the ad copy screams), I should tell you that he never cooked there, though if he had, the work would have consisted largely of taking preformed pucks of dough out of a freezer.
From Pizza Hut, he moved up to TGI Friday’s at the Palisades Center Mall, where he was also a server, hauling trays of Loaded Potato Skins, Parmesan-Crusted Crab Salmon (Is it crab? Is it salmon?), and Brownie Obsession®. He liked being a server. It wasn’t always fun, admittedly: diners come to restaurants with expectations that are not necessarily based in reality. But because each table was different, each day was different, and the shifts went by quickly. Cooking in a restaurant, on the other hand, is repetitive by definition, and cooks never make the kind of money that servers do. Brandon had no interest in being a cook. The closest he came was a stint one summer in college, at a place called Pasta Amore, in Piermont, New York, where he was an expediter, a fancy name for the person who adds garnishes and makes sure orders are correct before they go out to diners.
While he was in graduate school, he did odd jobs for an uncle in New York City, buying groceries, running errands, and cooking the occasional dinner. Shortly after we met, that work began to taper off, so he got a serving job at Balthazar, the renowned brasserie in SoHo. You would think this was a great gig, but he was hired for the breakfast shift, which began at the punishing hour of 6:00 a.m., and he learned the hard way that he would be sternly reprimanded if he broke form for an instant, even for something as trivial as adjusting his eyeglasses.
By the time Brandon moved to Seattle in June of 2006, he was ready to be done with the restaurant industry. I didn’t spend much time thinking about what our professional lives might look like in the years to come, but the rough plan, the logical plan, was that he would become a professor of music and I would write. There were, of course, his violin/boat dreams, but those were hobbies, after-hours projects. Ours would be a sturdy, quiet existence, the kind that involves corduroy blazers with elbow pads, couples yoga, and recreational bonsai cultivation.
But that was a long way off, and Brandon needed a job. He was starting a PhD program at the University of Washington that September, so he could only work part-time. We tossed ideas back and forth as we unpacked boxes, and one night near the end of that first week, we decided to celebrate his arrival by treating ourselves to a nice dinner out. I suggested Boat Street Cafe. Boat Street is known for its pickles (which are now sold nationwide; don’t miss the prunes), and because Brandon is into pickles and vinegar (there were two dozen different bottles of vinegar tucked away in his moving boxes), I knew that he would like it. We ordered a starter portion of pickles, and what arrived looked like a painter’s palette: a heap of turmeric-colored cauliflower, wedges of magenta beet, pale green fennel bulb, and a streak of tiny farm carrots, each bite bright enough to force my nostrils into an involuntary flare, the whole thing tamed with a pour of green olive oil. Sitting there at a slate table with a mossy tree branch jutting out of the wall above our heads, Brandon decided to come back with his resume the next morning.
I should specify that the resume Brandon took to Boat Street was for serving. It listed all the jobs I just told you about. But when Brandon introduced himself to Susan Kaplan, one of the two owners, she had just—as in, an hour earlier—lost a lunch cook. Her eyes locked onto the sentence that read, “Personal assistant for CEO in New York City: shopped for groceries, ran errands, cooked meals for a family of five.” That was the only mention of cooking on the entire page, and of course, the CEO was Brandon’s uncle. But Susan needed a cook, and Brandon was going to be it.
That afternoon, Susan called Brandon�
�s references. The first person listed was his mother. Because she is an honest woman, she told Susan the truth: when Brandon cooks, the kitchen winds up looking like a pack of wild dogs has run through it. But Susan had an abundant supply of kitchen towels and bleach, and anyway, she liked that he was a composer. She would almost always hire an artist over a trained cook, she once told me, because artists have a keen sense for details: you can teach an artist to cook, but you can’t always teach a cook to understand nuance and detail. She called Brandon the next day and hired him, and in doing so, she gave him not only his first cooking job, but a look inside a restaurant that was different from any he’d seen.
In some ways, Boat Street is an odd establishment. It has two chef-owners, Renee Erickson and Brandon’s boss Susan, and they run two separate but adjoining kitchens. Susan runs lunch and catering out of one, and Renee runs dinner out of the other. The kitchens are a little haphazard, pieced together, soft around the edges, with spices in Mason jars and maps of France and a chipped enamel jug on the ledge over the prep sink.
“The nicest thing,” Brandon told me after one of his first days there, “is that they have real silver spoons in the kitchen.” Most restaurants have cheap stainless spoons for tasting, and the general feel is industrial, impersonal. Boat Street has good spoons and wooden cutting boards, stuff you would use at home.
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