THE news that chef John Villa plans to turn his former three-star Portuguese restaurant, Pico, into an Italian- American place invites mixed emotions: alarm and dismay. Does TriBeCa really need a joint called “Dominic Restaurant/Social Club?”
Villa is a great chef and Dominic might prove to be a great restaurant. But the last thing the revitalized, regionally-attuned Italian dining scene needs is a return of red sauce-drowned cooking that once ruled millions of Italian-American households.
The red-sauce peril lurks in Midtown tourist traps and in the city’s Little Italys. It spreads from perennially packed Frank’s in the East Village to Supper nearby, and from Max’s downtown to the Upper West Side.
It assumes crisis proportions in the craze for bottled tomato sauce. We expect the stuff from Patsy’s and Rao’s – but from Emeril and Bobby Flay?
What a pity it would be if the regional splendors of of Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna and Apulia were to be chased out by Rocco’s brand of one-note marinara sauce.
I love red-sauce dishes when they’re done well – like Bellini’s slow-stewed octopus, its juice subtly texturing a vibrant broth of cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic and fresh olive oil.
It’s the embodiment of idealized Italian-American home cooking, whose practitioners – in theory – toiled lovingly to adapt Old Country favorites with local ingredients.
But the sad truth is, dishes were more often done on the quick and on the cheap. Many Italian-American home cooks regarded fish as a bony curiosity best baked into oblivion. They used olive oil thick as industrial lubricant that tasted little, if at all, of olives.
They drowned overboiled pasta in clunky tomato sauces that would be laughed out of modern Italian kitchens and caked respectable cuts of veal in bulky breading.
The style found its way into scores of clip joints typified by the old Mamma Leone’s. Its time seemed to have passed, though, along with fossilized schnitzel in German-American beer halls.
Then came “The Sopranos,” a great show with a lousy menu. Remember the episode set in Naples, where Paulie Walnuts complained the food wasn’t “real” Italian?
The Soprano family’s sausage-and-pepper table scenes set the stage for Rocco’s. I thought its marinara sauce tasted out of a can, but I might have been optimistic: A recipe published in Rocco DiSpirito’s ads for Ruffino wine calls for three cans – of tomatoes, paste and puree.
Is it any wonder that Italian-American chefs steer clear of the style?
Very few first-rate Italian restaurants of any type in New York have an Italian-American head chef. Maybe memories of bad fried bacala put them off the promise of real Italian seafood, from the raw fish of Sicily and Apulia to the grilled branzino of the Tuscan coast.
The last time I checked, Tom Colicchio (Gramercy Tavern and Craft), Alfred Portale (Gotham) and Tom Valenti (Ouest) were not making spaghetti and meatballs.
Neither was Rocco DiSpirito, until he rode to the rescue of stumbling Tuscan Steak and turned it into Tuscan. But he had lots of help from European-born chef de cuisine Sandro Romano.
Most of New York’s best Italian restaurants have native-born Italians in the kitchen – Odette Fada at San Domenico, Vito Gnazzo at Il Gattopardo, Massimo Girardi at Acqua Pazza and Cesare Casella at Beppe; or chefs not Italian at all – David Pasternack at Esca, Michael White at Fiamma, Pippa Calland at Le Madri.
Italian-Americans Mario Batali (Babbo) and Scott Conant (L’Impero) are the exceptions. Conant once cooked at Chianti, a well-regarded restaurant on Second Avenue. It’s now Angelo’s Pizza, where the menu describes fettuccine Alfredo as “a classic Italian recipe of fettucine blended with heavy cream.”
Alfredo, whose recipe used no cream at all, would weep.