If most of the old clientele fail to notice that what was once a kind of Ellis Island plus great American food is now just another fancy Brooklyn restaurant, this should come as no surprise. They would be in for quite a shock if they were magically transported back to the Lundy’s of their youth. From the perspective of today, it would seem so noisy, so hot, so … uncouth. What aging in oak casks does to wine, time does to memories: polishes and refines, mellowing harsh flavors and smoothing out the tannins. The name may be the same, but it isn’t Lundy’s Restaurant at all—it’s the Lundy’s Restaurant Museum.
RAO’S
When you mention Rao’s to someone, you can see their eyes light up. Probably they’ve never been there—you can’t get in the place—but they’ve heard about it: the location, the ambience, the mystique, all those stories. You can only imagine what it’s like. And then one night, you get lucky. You get in and find out it’s all true.
— Regis Philbin
Rao’s (pronounced “Ray-o’s”) might best be described to those who have never heard of it as the greatest Italian neighborhood restaurant you’ll never eat at. In contrast to Lundy’s, Rao’s six booths and four tables are permanently reserved by a small group of regulars whose hold on them only death and bankruptcy will ever break. Rao’s is the toughest place in Manhattan to get a table; the few guidebooks that mention it also tell you not to even bother trying.
This fact alone is enough to whet the appetites of certain highly competitive American alpha males. In fact, everything about Rao’s—its obscure, distant location in East Harlem; the fact that there is only one seating each evening (Monday through Friday; the place is closed weekends); the Italian grandmotherly nature of the cooking; the tough-guys-can-be-suave, Frank Sinatra atmosphere—nurtures a very particular kind of masculine self-image. Lundy’s was a family restaurant, but you see no children in the photographs of Rao’s. There, mostly, you see guys—well-dressed, successful guys. Sure, they bring their ladies as well as their buddies, but there’s no mistaking it: this istheir place.
Their place, not surprisingly, started up as a saloon. When Rao’s opened its doors in 1896, East Harlem was the largest Italian community in the United States. Rao’s was just another neighborhood joint where, in the days when bottles were unaffordable luxuries, folks would line up in the evening to have their beer pails filled. It wasn’t until 1958, when Vincent Rao took over the family business, that the place began to evolve from a bar that served food into a restaurant with a bar.
Vincent liked to cook; more specifically, he liked to grill steaks, veal chops, and chicken over charcoal on a brazier set up on the street beside the saloon door. The customers began to come as much for the meat as for the drinks, and eventually Vincent persuaded his wife, Anna, to bring her pots and pans and recipes over from where they lived in the house next door. As it happened, Vincent was born, grew up, lived all his life, and died in that house. He and Anna were a wholly unselfconscious part of a neighborhood where people liked to eat well and had at hand abundant resources with which to do so. As Nicholas Pileggi writes in the introduction toRao’s Cookbook:
Italian food stores sold macaroni in bulk and lined their walls with glistening golden gallon cans of imported olive oil. Fish stores sold dried cod, or baccalà, stacked like cords of firewood near the door, and bushels of snails, baskets of live crabs, and barrels of eels were always available. Cheese stores made their own mozzarella in the mornings and it was bought warm; the ricotta was so fresh it had to be sold in tall tin cans with holes in them to drain away the excess water. Loaves of freshly baked bread—both long and round, with seeds or without—came out of neighborhood bakery ovens two or three times a day.
In such a community, restaurants serve home cooking prepared at its best to customers who think there is no better eating than the dishes their mothers used to make. Well, Anna Pellegrino Rao was that mother, and, under her iron rule in the kitchen, Rao’s became known for what Mimi Sheraton would describe in a glowing, three-star review as its “simple, honest, and completely delicious Italian food.”
That review appeared inThe New York Times in 1977, at what, it turned out, could not have been a better moment. The neighborhood was already undergoing the traumatic conversion that would end with the Italian community all but entirely dispersed to the city’s outer boroughs, leaving Rao’s one of a few holdouts in an area now predominantly populated by Puerto Ricans and African-Americans. If Sheraton had not reviewed Rao’s—had not given Rao’s the review she did—it’s unlikely that the restaurant would have lasted for long.
Of course, neither Vincent Rao nor his nephew Frank Pellegrino—then a waiter and now the restaurant’s proprietor—want to see it that way. Frank, who was a professional singer until he was persuaded to join the family business, often entertains patrons with his renditions of old standards. Among them, you can be sure, is Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.” Pellegrino tells Rao’s story with the modesty of a man utterly convinced that his family got where it did just by being true to itself, no matter the odds against it.
The family take on the impact of theTimes review was that it was a monstrous, unsought, and unwanted intrusion, producing an avalanche of calls—many from wealthy, famous people—demanding reservations at a tiny local restaurant already booked to capacity every night.18Vincent Rao was sure that giving all these people reservations, even in the distant future, would mean—as Thomas McNamee writes in a recent piece on the restaurant inSaveur19 —that
the fancy people would take over—regulars were not the sort to plan dinner three months ahead—and then the fancy people would run on to their next infatuation, and Rao’s would be screwed. [Consequently,] they worked out an understanding with their regulars: Tony and Larry, this is your table every other Tuesday, okay? No matter what. You just come…. From then on, every table at Rao’s has been “owned” every night, by a regular customer.
According to McNamee, this arrangement has continued, to ensure that “the fancy people … are comfortably outnumbered … by regular customers.” This seems to me a bit disingenuous: you can still fit in a lot of high rollers if the regulars’ claim to those ten tables is, as he also says, often limited to a “monthly … bimonthly … even quarterly” basis.
Be that as it may, this policy made Rao’s the restaurant into Rao’s the legend. The regulars were thrilled to rub shoulders with the likes of Woody Allen, Tony Bennett, Rob Reiner, and Vic Damone, while the glitterati were equally delighted to be in the same room as Jimmy Cigars, Johnny Roastbeef, Little Jerry, Father Pete, and Nicky the Vest. (Frank Pellegrino himself has received the sobriquet “Frankie No” for his practiced ease in turning down reservation requests.)
In a sense, you could say that each half of the room is there to flatter and entertain the other—and at no cost to the management. Writers about Rao’s like to point out how democratic this arrangement is: barbers, delicatessen owners, and plumbers on the one hand; on the other, whatThe Washington Post has described as “billionaires, beautiful people, politicians, guys in dark suits, corporate moguls, entertainers, and sports stars.”
But, really, there’s nothing democratic about Rao’s. A stroke of luck gave the restaurant the opportunity to skim the cream from the dining public—i.e., to take the celebrities, the big spenders, and the owners’ cronies and shut the door in the face of everyone else—and they grabbed it. Even so, you gotta love ’em for it, right? I mean, everybody loves a winner—why else would you want to share table space with Chuck Barris and Dick Clark?
There it is. To “own” a table at Rao’s is to savor power, something even tastier than the best-cooked Italian food. The aura of this place in New York City is such that to have eaten there even once is for many the experience of a lifetime. To be “lent” a table for an evening costs the giver nothing even as it reaps eternal gratitude from the recipient—who in turn does some reaping of his own from the people he (as it most likely is) chooses to bring with him.
What a
bout the food? Once again, they say it’s terrific, and, once again, you and I will never know. As a cookbook, this one is better than Lundy’s, if only because Kathy Gunst, who did the recipes for that book, was denied access to the original Lundy’s recipe file—a rather insurmountable handicap. InRao’s Cookbook, you get an appealing collection of Italian-American recipes, many of which Rao’s actually serves: not only old standbys, like shrimp scampi, veal parmigiana, andpasta e fagioli, but also less familiar traditional neighborhood dishes, like risotto with veal sauce and fillet of sole with fennel and white wine.
Still, to prepare this food at home, however expertly, is one thing; to eat it at Rao’s is another. A restaurant’s food—the making of it and the eating of it—is the medium, not the message. At Rao’s, you aren’t handed a menu; instead, the owner himself sits at your table and discusses what you’ll have. The food, like the best home cooking, is comfortingly familiar and straightforwardly good, cooking that puts eaters, whatever their level of sophistication, at their ease. The customers know each other, so conversations ramble from table to table. The jukebox is the best in town. And, after your meal, Jimmy Cigars sends over a smoke with his compliments.
Rao’s, in other words, is the sort of great neighborhood joint you can’t find in the real world anymore, because the neighborhoods necessary to support them are no longer around. The experience of eating there is very like that of eating at Lundy’s, but with a reverse twist: a meal at Rao’s lets Americans feel like immigrants, or, as Frank Pellegrino would put it, like part of the family.
If Lundy’s aging customers welcome the return of that restaurant so they can show their children what the old days were like, Rao’s is the place to which their children—should they be so lucky—would love to take their parents, to show them how far they’ve come, and, at the same time, with great unconscious irony, how faithful they’ve remained to their roots. Put these two restaurant stories together, and what the result says about the immigrant experience in this country is so emotionally powerful and complex as to be beyond words.
What it also says about the experience of eating in restaurants in general is almost as volatile and difficult to grasp. People eat all kinds of stuff and think it good, which is why restaurants that serve indifferent—even bad—food are a dime a dozen, and those that serve truly delicious food are a statistical anomaly. If a restaurateur honestly thinks his food is good, the chances are his customers will, too.
To understand what makes a place succeed, you have to take the forces that drive the owner to want to feed us and those that drive us to want to eat there, and then see what happens when the two collide. This isn’t always pretty—but, in a real restaurant, it’s always richly human. That’s why Matt and I left that New Brunswick restaurant in such a state of shock—the food itself may have been real, but the cook was not. It was as if we had wandered into a haunted house and been fed by a ghost. Even a take-out meal, hot from a real kitchen, is more redolent of human connection.
Then again, surely there are diners who wouldprefer that much distance from the cook. Perhaps the restaurants that don’t seem odd to us are merely the ones that are odd in the same way we are. Going out to eat can be a very pleasurable experience, but—perhaps because of this—it is also at bottom a very mysterious one.
In one of my favorite reminiscences from Bob Cornfield’s book, Roberta Temes tells of how, when she was a junior in high school, her parents moved from a Bronx tenement to an apartment in a two-family house on a quiet, tree-lined street in Brooklyn. Their first Sunday in the new neighborhood, they all took a stroll down to Sheepshead Bay, where they were stunned to see what seemed like an endless line of cars up and down Emmonds Avenue, waiting patiently to get into Lundy’s parking lot. On the way back home, Temes recalls,
my parents wore their serious faces and talked to each other, not to us. They were proud of their new sunny and spacious four-room apartment. But their notion of upward mobility did not include the strange concept of “eating out.”
RAO’S FAMOUS LEMON CHICKEN
(adapted fromRao’s Cookbook, by Frank Pellegrino)
[serves 6]
1 cup fresh lemon juice
1 large clove garlic, minced
½ cup olive oil
½ teaspoon dried oregano
½ tablespoon red wine vinegar
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 2½- to 3-pound broiling chicken, halved
3 or 4 leafy sprigs of Italian parsley, minced
Preheat the broiler for at least 15 minutes. Meanwhile, make the lemon sauce by whisking together in a small bowl everything but the chicken and the parsley.
Put the chicken halves on a rack over the broiler pan. Put this under the broiler and cook, turning the chicken once, for about 30 minutes, or until the skin is golden-brown and juices run clear when the bird is pierced with a fork.
Remove chicken from broiler, leaving the broiler on. Using a very sharp knife, cut each chicken half into about 6 pieces (leg, thigh, wing, 3 small breast pieces). Remove the rack from the broiler pan and pour off any grease. Coat each piece of chicken generously with the lemon sauce and place it back in the pan skin side down. If any sauce remains, pour it over the chicken.
Return the pan to the broiler and broil for 3 minutes. Use tongs to turn each piece skin side up and broil for an additional minute. Remove the chicken pieces from the broiler and arrange them on 6 warmed dinner plates. Pour sauce into a heavy saucepan. Stir in the parsley and place over high heat. Bring to a boil, cook for 1 minute, then pour the sauce over the portioned chicken. Serve with crusty bread to sop up the sauce.
KITCHEN DOINGS
BEANS IN A FLASK
Recently, while making my way through Paolo Scaravelli’sCooking from an Italian Garden, I came across the following rather evocative passage:
When I was a child bread was baked once a week at the villa. Since the brick oven was large, it took time and lots of wood to heat it, so that it was practical to bake other foods at the same time. One of the real treats was beans baked in a flask,fagioli al fiasco. Beans were placed in a large chianti flask … [along with] water, oil, garlic, and sage. Fresh sage leaves were placed … in the neck of the flask to seal in some of the vapors. The flask was deposited in the oven on the smoldering embers and left for a few hours. When retrieved, the water was absorbed, the beans cooked, and the flask intact. We would eat the beans cold with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Beans cooked in this simple manner were light, tender, and richly flavored.
The flask in the fireplace! The very phrase can still evoke an echo of the shiver of excitement I felt when, back in the late seventies, I first came across the dish in Ada Boni’sItalian Regional Cooking. It is illustrated there with a color photograph, and this, especially, my imagination seized hold of and embellished into something more akin to a vision than an image—a vision, moreover, that remains almost as clear now as it was then.
It is centered, of course, on the flask itself, made of thin, bubble-pocked, green-tinged glass, its long, narrow, graceful neck reaching up from an unsteadily bulbous body. It is tucked in the corner of a handsome stone fireplace among the glowing embers, its mouth stuffed with a tuft of straw, its belly with a mass of beans flecked with bits of herb and garlic and red pepper, all cheerfully seething away.
I discovered, when I returned to the book to check this memory, that I had actually conflated two pictures. The fireplace with its hot embers appears in another photograph on the same page showing the grilling of a Tuscan steak. Thefiasco with itsfagioli is nestled instead into a very sweet, tiny, square charcoal brazier designed, the caption informs us, especially for the purpose of cooking this dish.
What a complex business cooking really is. After all, even at the time of which I write, I had garnered enough experience as a cook at least to suspect that cooking beans in a wine flask was less a culinary method than an invitation to disaster—as the very name of the dish suggests.Fagio
li al fiasco —that last word is not a misprint. I just didn’t care. And why? Because I had then and still have now a terrible weakness for anything made of glass.
Matt bears with patience my collection of old milk bottles, odd-sized jam jars, clunky drinking glasses, cruets, and the like. Empty, cork-stoppered, dark-green-glass olive oil bottles multiply like rabbits in the cupboards. I’m not sure I know why this is so. Part of the reason is purely tactile—that cool, smooth surface—and visual—the teasing way glass takes invisibility and makes it visible, takes fragility and makes it hard as nails. But it is also, I think, because of the tension inherent in glass, every jar and bottle an explosion waiting to happen.20No wonder the idea of using an extremely fragile glass flask as acooking pot made me dizzy with pleasure.
In those days, I was without a fireplace (or, for that matter, a charcoal brazier), which was probably just as well, but Chianti flasks were easy to come by, and it was only a matter of days before I was popping beans into the first of what would prove to be many. This, as it turned out, wasn’t because the flasks kept on breaking but because the first one did—spectacularly—the second or third time I used it. (You don’t know the full meaning of the wordexplode until a flask of boiling-hot beans goeska-poof in your kitchen.) So I deduced a helpful rule of thumb: reheating untempered glass over a flame makes it increasingly unstable.
Eventually, however, I found a flask-shaped, heavyweight clear glass vase that succeeded where the Chianti flasks had failed, and I made until I wearied of the thrill—or, really, of burning my fingers while shaking the cooked beans down and out the narrow neck. This proves to be an almost impossible dish to decant at table, which, in a way, defeats the whole purpose of the enterprise; emptying the bottle in the kitchen robs the event of all its éclat.21
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