I know that I’m not alone in my adoration. I’ve seen it in my restaurants every day for more than two decades: the look on customers’ faces when a plate of piping-hot pasta is set down before them is more anticipatory, more gleeful, than it is for any other type of dish; and when they take that first bite, I can see that something deeper than mere appetite has been satisfied.
The amazing thing is that for all the passion they inspire, the majority of pastas, including the most beloved ones, are intrinsically simple. Like pasta carbonara: to my mind, it’s a perfect dish and one that I never tire of. I also never tire of making it: the fact that the egg and cheese are cooked by the heat of the pasta itself amazes and delights me every time.
When I arrived in New York, if I wanted a well-made pasta I had to make it myself. Most of what I saw in restaurants was limp noodles in a soupy sauce. Recipes had been misinterpreted and reinvented so many times they had become like the story in a game of telephone that, by the time you get to the last person, bears little resemblance to the original. For example, to many Americans, even some wonderful chefs, Bolognese means a meat sauce to be served over pasta. But a true Bolognese isn’t really a sauce: it’s ground meat that’s cooked with tomato and wine, then enriched with milk and cream, but only enough to facilitate its coating the pasta.
Part of the beauty of a Bolognese, and of many pasta recipes, is that once you know how to cook, you don’t need a scientific formula, just the gist of the steps. Don’t believe me? Try this: Procure some ground pork, ground veal or mortadella, and ground beef. (Don’t worry if you make too much because you can refrigerate or freeze it.) Heat some olive oil in a wide, deep, heavy pan and add some minced onions, carrots, and celery. (This mixture is called a soffritto.) Add the meats to the pan, season them with salt, pepper, and ground nutmeg, and brown them really well, breaking them up with a wooden kitchen spoon or, even better, with a fork. Sprinkle the meat with some red wine, just enough to moisten it. Then add some crushed canned tomatoes and tomato paste, but only enough to coat the meat. Stir the meat and tomato products together until they are indistinguishable. If the meat seems dry, you can add a little chicken stock or veal stock. Next add equal amounts of cream and milk, cook just enough for them to thicken, then cover the pan and braise the meat in the oven until smooth, dark, and creamy. After about an hour, toss the meat with cooked pasta and, if it seems a little dry, add some of the pasta’s cooking liquid (we’ll talk about this in a moment) to bind the sauce and make it just wet enough to coat the pasta.
The Bolognese that these steps produce is rich and meaty, and when I serve it to customers, many of them think it’s my interpretation of a Bolognese. But the truth is that this is as classic as you can get; the other sauces that Americans have been eating for years, those crimson-red, creamless sauces, are something else entirely, an Americanized version that seems like a crumbled-up burger stirred into a tomato sauce, with no seasoning or intensity.
This is why I ended up cooking the pasta myself when we first opened Sapore di Mare, because there was so much unteaching to be done, so much wrong knowledge to remove from cooks before I could impart the right way.
So, if you can try to free your mind for a moment, to forget all you think you know about pasta making, if you are willing to reboot your pasta hard drive, then allow me to share some thoughts about how to cook and think about pasta.
The first thing you need to understand about pasta is that it’s a dish of uniformity; it’s not the application of a liquid or a semiliquid to a solid. To some degree, the pasta and its sauce are supposed to be indistinguishable from one another; it should be impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. This sounds like a simple concept, but it’s not. As with any seemingly simple cooking—any dish that involves only a few ingredients and a straightforward technique—the success or failure rests in the cook’s keen eye, a sense of smell that’s canine in its sensitivity, and hands that think for themselves. In other words, the only way to be a good pasta cook is by cooking and eating a lot of pasta.
Things are better than they used to be when it comes to pasta in the United States, but there’s still much that isn’t understood, even by some of the best chefs. The most important phrase in pasta cooking, when it comes to dried pasta anyway, is surely al dente, which means “to the tooth.” We say that properly cooked pasta is still toothsome; not chewy, but offering some resistance to the teeth. But even pasta that’s properly al dente often fails the crucial test of being fused with its sauce. The reason is that pasta should only be partially cooked when it’s drained of its cooking liquid; it’s supposed to finish cooking in its sauce, soaking it up as it reaches doneness, and attaining that crucial uniformity.
So, when I teach somebody how to make pasta, the first thing we focus on is how to cook the pasta itself. It’s, of course, important to select a good brand; my favorites are De Cecco and, for short pasta, Se-taro. If you can’t find those, Barilla is widely available and perfectly respectable. You need to begin with a lot of water, enough that the pasta will tumble when it boils so that it cooks evenly; you want each piece or strand to move about freely. The water should also be well salted because you want to actually taste the pasta, both its flavor and some of the salt.
Pasta that’s cooked al dente will have a pinpoint of chalk-white rawness at the center, and there’s nothing wrong with removing a strand from the boiling water and biting or cutting into it to check for this. Before draining the pasta in a colander, it’s a good idea to scoop up some of its cooking liquid in case the dish needs correcting at the last second; that liquid can thin a thick sauce, and the starch it’s taken on helps bind the dish. Once the pasta is drained, it should be added to the pan in which the sauce has been prepared or reheated. The pan should be wide and deep enough to allow you to toss them together, over and over, until the pasta has taken on some sauce and the remaining sauce generously coats the pasta.
There are two marks of a perfect pasta: one is that it should stand up on the plate. What I mean by that is that when you take your tongs and transfer a serving from the pan to a dish, the pasta shouldn’t collapse into a stringy puddle; instead, the mound should maintain its shape and height, even when one starts to eat it. The other mark of a well-made pasta is that when the pasta is gone, the plate is empty, save for perhaps a thin coating of sauce—just enough to be mopped up with a piece of bread (called scarpetta, which means “heel” because the hunk of bread resembles the heel of a shoe).
(These two defining tests, by the way, led to many arguments between me and my customers in the early days of Il Cantinori and Sapore di Mare. There were innumerable times when diners would send their pasta back to the kitchen because they deemed it “raw,” or because it didn’t have enough “sauce.” Sometimes, in the heat of service, I’d get pretty angry and sarcastic about it, like the time a waiter brought a spaghetti alla rustica into the kitchen and told me the customer had said that it wasn’t “saltati” enough, saltati being the word for “jump” or “sauté.” I put the plate on the floor, hopped back and forth over it three times, then picked it up and handed it back to the waiter: “Now it’s saltati enough,” I said. “Take it back.” But I usually took the plate back to the table myself and did my best to explain the situation, namely that this was the right way to make pasta and that I wasn’t able to make it any other way. Some people were curious and grateful; others not so much. But I simply wasn’t willing to serve pasta the wrong way in my own restaurant.)
Those are the basics of pasta making, but there are many decisions that go into any pasta. The one that must be answered every time is what type of pasta goes with what sauce, which is of course a very complicated question because there’s often no single correct answer. I look at it in a rather abstract way: it’s like choosing a suit. The right suit will show off the beauty of a man’s body and also the elegance of the suit. By the same token, there’s a conversation that goes on between pasta and sauce. They should complement each othe
r in a way that, in hindsight, makes their coupling seem inevitable.
Once again, examples are the only way to illustrate this. One of my signature dishes since the days of Il Cantinori has been rigatoni alla buttera, made with hot and sweet sausage, peas, and a touch of cream and tomato. The rigatoni offsets its intensity with the size of the pasta and also with that big, gaping tube of space in its center. Pasta car-bonara only works with thick strands or tubular pasta like spaghetti, bucatini, or fettuccine. I usually opt for fettuccine because it’s both long and flat, so there’s more surface area to accept the sauce. The caramelized onion and pureed tomato in spaghetti alla rustica might be overwhelming with short, thick pasta; instead, a long noodle is required to ensure balance.
Another age-old debate is when to use fresh pasta and when to use dried. In many ways, it hasn’t been resolved, but many American food critics have a predisposition against dried pasta. They believe that true fine dining, if it includes pasta at all, means fresh pasta because to them dried connotes a bulk item. Years ago, a prominent food writer had dinner at my restaurant Coco Pazzo, then went to a supermarket and figured out how much the individual ingredients cost. He then wrote an article about the huge gap between what we charged and what you could make the dish for at home. I took great offense at this because I wasn’t in the food preparation business; I was in the fine-dining business and I put enormous value on the ability of me and my cooks to make some of the most authentic pasta in New York City. It wasn’t just the ingredients people were paying for: it was the know-how that went into the dish and the setting in which they ate it.
That debate aside, my general feeling is that fresh pasta is best for rich, creamy, smooth sauces, and for tomato-based and seafood sauces dried is the way to go. The one pasta that should be avoided at all costs is capellini, also called angel hair pasta. Though it’s used in many seafood dishes here in the United States, in Italy it’s only called for in one dish, capellini in brodo, or capellini in broth. That’s what it was created for and that’s the only way we use it.
But all of this information is only somewhat useful. You can only be told so much about making pasta. If you want to understand and master it, you need to immerse yourself in it until you’ve absorbed it and it’s become a part of you, like that perfect, elusive coming together of pasta and sauce.
NINE
Mothers and Sons
IN AUGUST 1988, as Sapore di Mare was going full tilt in the Hamp-tons, back in the city Il Cantinori had settled into a very pleasant, half-speed respite. It was that laid-back time when the Village undergoes its annual transformation into a ghost town, so quiet that you can hear your own shoes clicking and clacking on the sidewalk as you stroll the breezy tree-lined streets on your way to work each morning.
I didn’t mind the calm at all: a lot of the restaurants back home would have been closed during August, so I looked at whatever business we did as gravy, especially since I had seen the way it picked up again every fall—the reanimation of the city that starts with Labor Day and ends with the Jewish High Holy days. It was also a welcome counterbalance to the action at Sapore, which was bursting at the seams on the weekends, beginning with Thursday night, when our customers migrated from the city to the country. I actually had come to love the end of summer because the break from our normal pace afforded me all sorts of indulgences, like spending more time chitchatting with customers, or checking out new restaurants. The dining scene in New York was mutating, expanding, evolving a little bit every six months. Within a few years of when I threw my hat in the ring with Il Canti-nori, a number of American chefs and restaurateurs had begun to change the face of the dining scene in New York. Down in Tribeca, Drew Nieporent had opened his first restaurant, Montrachet, with the chef David Bouley. Just a few blocks away, Danny Meyer had opened Union Square Cafe; and a few blocks the other way, Jerry Kretchmer and his partners had opened Gotham Bar and Grill, which after a dodgy first year had found new life with a young chef named Alfred Portale. It was true what they said about rising tides lifting all boats. New restaurants were popping up left and right and chefs were becoming celebrities, garnering more and more coverage in newspapers and magazines—and not just in the food pages. New Yorkers were becoming passionately interested in food, and I’m sure that it was one of the things that kept Il Cantinori going so strong for its first five years.
That August, one of my regular customers, Fred Pressman, the owner of Barneys department store, pulled me aside and told me he had a piece of possible business to discuss with me. I had always considered Fred something of a kindred spirit, a fellow merchant and man of good taste, so I was curious to know what it was that he had in mind.
“Would you be interested in opening a restaurant with us in Chelsea?” was the question.
Today, Chelsea is perhaps the hottest neighborhood in New York City, but in the late 1980s is was a semi-industrial wasteland, a spillover area just north of the West Village and one of the city’s curious no-man’s-lands, long past one heyday and awaiting the moment when the cyclical nature of New York life would make it fashionable once again. I had never expected that I might help bring that eventuality about, but that’s what was about to happen.
The Pressmans owned a four-story building a block north of Bar-neys where they had planned to open a restaurant in partnership with Roberto Ruggeri, owner of Bice restaurant in Milan. But something had gone down with Roberto. Fred declined to say what it was, but he gave the impression that a major catastrophe had been averted, and that he didn’t want to be associated with Roberto any longer and had pulled the plug on the deal.
I already had partners, and I didn’t really need another restaurant, but I couldn’t resist the attention, and I was intrigued. To me, the Pressmans had more money than God: with partners like them, who knew what kind of access—to people, to money, to prestige—I might end up with? For all of my success, there were still times, like those moments when I’d stand out behind Sapore and gaze over the collection of cars in the parking lot, when it didn’t seem real, when I still expected that it might all go down the tubes or be taken away from me. There were still times when I felt like that mute in the airport when I first arrived in 1980, with that sensation of being stared at like King Kong, like a curiosity, a side show. Part of my success was based on my “otherness,” but that same quality made me always feel like an outsider, a permanent foreigner. So the Pressmans didn’t just represent advancement to me; they represented the security and acceptance of people with access to the power brokers of New York.
In addition to all of that, there was that feeling of easy camaraderie with Fred, the sense of a soul mate, of somebody who “got” me.
The only thing was that I was just getting my financial legs under me: Jessie and I had a child on the way, and I had taken on a lot of debt when I assumed ownership of Sapore.
So I told Fred that the only way I’d want to pursue anything was if the Pressmans bankrolled the project; my contribution would be my know-how, my taste, and my time. He said they were fine with that and we made an appointment to look at the space together. I walked over from Il Cantinori one midweek afternoon and was struck that Chelsea was almost without character: it had neither the skyscrapers of Midtown nor the old New York charm of the Village. It was a sprawling neighborhood of housing projects and 1960s-era apartment buildings with a smattering of delis and diners. Eighteenth Street itself wasn’t any more promising: there was an electrical substation across the street from the restaurant space, and next to that was a plumbing supply store—not exactly the view New Yorkers liked to be presented with when they entered and exited a restaurant.
But when we stepped inside, I could see right away why the Press-mans thought a restaurant would be the thing to put there: the room was high-ceilinged, with western exposures, meaning that it would be light, but not blindingly so, at lunchtime. There were enormous arched windows and exposed brick walls. In the only-in-New York department, the space had once been a storage faci
lity for floats and such from the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it had been cleared out and so was empty except for some industrial kitchen equipment that had been delivered when they were getting ready to open it with the Bice team. There was also an emergency exit that led to the enormous Barneys parking lot, and it occurred to me right away that we could build a patio there for outdoor seating, which in my opinion was a must, if only because I myself loved dining outside in the summer and had become addicted to it on the Porch at Sapore.
It was the perfect union of functionality and theatricality, and I began what was fast becoming a familiar exercise for me as I imagined the new restaurant we might build there: I saw an airy dining room with long white tablecloths, dark wood at the edges, and flowing drapes over the windows. I had been thinking that my next restaurant should have a pizza oven, and I imagined it along the western wall. I could smell the smoke and I began to smell the food: garlic and herbs and that winey, beefy aroma that made me think of my mother’s kitchen, which naturally led to one of the biggest ideas I’d ever had: home cooking was the root of all Italian cooking, so why not go to the source and bring together a team of Italian mothers and grandmothers to consult on a new restaurant? In a matter of seconds, I could see the public relations potential: food journalists hungry for the next big concept would eat up the idea that the restaurant’s recipes came from actual, bona fide Italian mothers whom I would import from Italy and parade in front of them. My only immediate concern was finding home cooks who also knew how to function in a professional kitchen, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t simply hire an American chef to pull it all together.
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