MARIANI’S
Virtual Gourmet
NEWSLETTER
September 22, 2003
EDITOR'S NOTE: This newsletter is
also available on the very
comprehensive food site www.sautewednesday.com
, which has dozens of other links to food articles
from
around the world.
Quick
Bytes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE GLORY
OF DON ALFONSO by
John Mariani
Livia and Alfonso Iaccarino (center) with the staff at Don Alfonso 1890
Every region of
Italy puts me into rapture, from the green-gold
hills of Tuscany and the waves lapping the
magical city of Venice, to the great plains of Abruzzo and the foggy
foothills of Piedmont. Every inch of Italy bewilders me with its
beauty, but none moreso than that rocky, serpentine coastline winding
south from Sorrento down to Amalfi, dotted with precious towns like
Positano, Praiano, Ravello, and Sant'Agata, this last the location
where
I recently stayed for
two days of extraordinary meals at Don Alfonso 1890 (Piazza Sant-Agata 11; 081-878-0026;
www.donalfonso.com), one of the great restaurants in
Europe.
Don Alfonso's greatness only begins with its
cuisine, which is a refinement of the culinary traditions of Southern
Italian and the Mediterranean but incorporates a total effort on the
part
of so many people, led by chef Alfonso Iaccarino and his ebullient,
gentle wife Livia. Their dedication is amazing, from the moment
you arrive and settle in the garden with a glass of prosecco to the
last service of espresso and chocolates. All is performed not
only with a concern for your comfort but for their own personal
pride, from which they obviously take real enjoyment. Rarely have
I seen a staff, under maître d' Costanzo Cacace, so eager
to manifest its professionalism in the most
endearing ways, whether it's the advice from sommelier Marizio Cerio on
choosing
a wonderful local Campanian wine or listening to Livia tell you the
evening's specials.
The restaurant's name is explained by the
first
Alfonso Iaccarino, grandfather to the present generation, who opened a
hotel on this spot in 1890, maintained by and expanded to a restaurant
by his son Ernesto, whose own son Alfonso, with Livia, has focused
even more on the restaurant, retaining only five charming rooms for
overnight guests. Today they have been joined by their sons, Ernesto in
the kitchen and Mario in the dining room.
Sant'Agata lies well
above
the sea, and while the town itself is hardly imposing, the view from
the promontory gives you a breathtaking view of both the Gulf of Naples
and the Gulf of Salerno. One of the reasons Don Alfonso's
food is so wonderful is that so much of it comes from the family's
organic farm, called La Peracciole, which lies halfway down a hillside
at the end of a spaghetti tangle of a dirt road. 
Here the Iaccarinos harvest everything from lemons and
zucchini to tomatoes and eggs taken --quite gently, of course--from
their own chickens. Alfonso,
who looks a bit like Giancarlo Giannini, drives headlong down to La
Peracciole at least twice a day to collect the provisions for lunch and
dinner, and also to say hello to his animal friends on the farm--the
horses, goats, and chickens that dot the property (right), from which the isle of
Capri is viewed in bold definition against the two blues of the water
and sky.
Back
at the restaurant Livia attends to the staff and arriving guests,
and Mr. Cerio is deep down in the astounding wine cellar (left) that drops vertically into
stone vaults built in the 16th and 17th centuries, and even farther
down into a Roman-era hillside. Here are housed tens of thousands
of international bottlings, with the very best from France and the U.S.
and an Italian cache few restaurants anywhere can match, with hundreds
of rare vintages from the best producers, often in large-format bottles.
In the high season the restaurant is open for lunch
and dinner seven days a week, with breakfast served to overnight
guests. The menu runs with the seasons too, so Alfonso's
signature dishes are available according to the availability of high
quality provender at any time of year.
The main dining room (below, right) is wide and very
airy,
done in
off white with linens the color of lime sorbetto, with simple tile
floors and straight-back wooden chairs, with the only splashes of bold
color
some very fine Impressionistic paintings. There is no smoking
in the dining room, out of respect for the delicacy of Alfonso's
cooking. Service is extremely gracious and very friendly, so that
spending just 24 hours here makes you part of the extended family at
Don Alfonso 1890. My wife and I spent two days there and felt we
were leaving our relatives behind when we left. I suspect ours
was not a unique response to these warm, sweet, proud people.
Over the course of our time in the region we dined
at DA1890 three times, pretty much tasting everything on the menu, and
my notes are extensive with exaltations like "Superb!" "Enlightening!" "Raffinato!" and
"Perfetto!" We
always sat down to a selection of four
different breads, then Livia would discuss what she thought would
be a good meal for the day. There were wonderful morsels of
zucchini flowers stuffed with porcini
and mozzarella; a single plump panzerotto
("big belly"
pasta) stuffed with mozzarella and ricotta;
flower-shaped ravioli with caciotta
cheese, cream and basil, and the
restaurant's famous strascinati,
a dish of finger-sized cannelloni with
meat, mozzarella and tomato, created by Alfonso's father, Ernesto, and
so delicious it drove the Neapolitan poet Salvatore di Giacomo to write
an entire poem about it.
There were amuse geules of chicken smoked over hay,
with a celery purée, apricots and cardamom; fish like orata (bream) filled with
greens in a raw olive oil, and smoked cernia
(grouper) with anchovies marinated
in vinegar. Grouper as a fish course was marinated in honey and
lemon with a cherry
tomato salad and shrimp mousse. Lentils from the island of Ponza were
made into a minted soup with squid. Duck breast came with sweet
summer peaches and a reduction of Aleatico wine, and a confit of duck
was tinged with star anise; kid was roasted simply with peas and herbs.
Pigeon was baked in a salt crust, perfumed with oriental spices and
served with a traditional whole wheat bread sauce. Platters of
local cheeses with lovely names like tiescelli
and caciotto malfitane.
Desserts are exceptionally delicate here, starting
with a soufflé of limoncello liqueur made at the
farm, and there was a sprightly tart lemon pudding with little
lemon profiteroles. The lightest, most fragile of sfoglatelle
contained cherries.
We asked Mr. Cerio to serve us only the wines of the
Campania
region, and we saw how impeccably they married to the lightness of
Alfonso's cuisine-- noble whites like Aglianico and the ancient
Falanghina and Fiano di Avellino, and the unexpectedly subtle rossi of
Ischia and the big red Taurasi.
Don Alfonso's food is very delicate, remarkably
light, and even a mutli-course meal will send you happy, not reeling,
from the dining room. Then off to sleep and to delight in the
notion that such beautiful people and beautiful food exist in such a
beautiful place.
Dinner at Don Alfonso 1980 ranges from about
$70 to $95, including service and tax, but not wine, included.
Next Week:
More About Amalfi
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEW YORK CORNER
The
Lever House Restaurant
390 Park Avenue; 212-888-2700
by John
Mariani
Mies van der Rohe's
glass-robed Seagrams Building may be more famous, but The Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft,
across the street
opened six years earlier and was
actually
the one that kicked off the modernist style of metal and glass
in sheer profusion, its tower set perpendicular rather than parallel to
Park
Avenue. So
revolutionary was it at the time that people feared the blue-green
glass walls might fall out if leaned against . In fact,
I had an uncle who rented space in the then-new building and hired a
250-pound
maintenance man to run smack into the walls at full tilt in front of
prospective clients, just to prove the thing wouldn't budge.
But while the Seagrams skyscraper has long had a
restaurant at ground level--the great Four Seasons, designed by Philip
Johnson, who took full advantage of the huge windows of the
building--the Lever House has never had a real restaurant aside from a
cafeteria
or corporate dining room. So the opening six weeks ago of The
Lever House Restaurant (380
Park Ave.; 2120888-2700; had to be something quite special for
designer
Marc Newson to attempt. Strangely enough, while Newson has tried
hard
to reproduce something of the 1950s International Style in the decor of
the restaurant, he, or whoever decided to put the restaurant here, has
taken zero advantage of the building's
extraordinary expanses of glass. Instead the restaurant is set
down a tubular ramp that appears to be heading towards the old TWA
baggage claim at JFK. There is one window on the south side next
to the bar,
but it's curtained to prevent anything like a view.
The 130-seat dining room itself is done in cool
gray-brown
tones, with a honeycomb motif repeated in etched glass and the
carpet. My guests and I
tried to puzzle out what the room looked most like: I opted
for
the tram stations at Altanta's airport; one guest said it looked like a
General Electric Pavilion at any World's Fair of the post-war era; another, himself an interior designer,
said, "If you stick big daisies to the wall, it might
look like the set for 'The Dating Game.'" My
wife said it looked like the carrier in which she takes our cat
to
the veterinarian. Add to this a noise level that can burst
eardrums, and you've got a space more attuned to SoHo or TriBeCa than
midtown Manhattan, which may be explainable by the fact that the owners
of the new restaurant also run downtown hipster spots like Mercbar,
Canteen,
and Joe's Pub. Fortunately they didn't seem to be playing any
piped-in music; perhaps I couldn't hear it above the din anyway.
Nevertheless, curiosity-seekers for the next big new
thing jammed the place, overwhelming a well-meaning service staff that
tries hard just to get the food out.
The real draw here should be chef Dan Silverman's
cooking (he had been at Alison on Dominick
and Union Square Cafe), which is clean and
subtle, very Midtown really. It's food that's very easy to enjoy,
beginning
with some puffy focaccia bread and olive oil delivered to a very
well-set table. A tartare of fluke--an underappreciated
species--was perfect, with a tangy spring onion and orange dressing,
the fish itself velvety and wonderfully fresh. Sliced Pekin duck
breast had more tang in the sweet-sour cherry sauce, and my Southern
friend swooned over the fried okra with a yellow and green romano bean
salad (I swooned a little too). Fresh foie gras was seared and
cooked to a perfect texture, served simply with pickled peaches (you
can see the sweet-sour drift in Silverman's cooking, eh?).
Lobster tempura would have been better had the fried shell of batter
not separated from the lobster meat, and beef carpaccio, actually
seared, came with a salsa verde
and parmesan cheese that was little
more than ho-hum.
It takes a damn good salmon to get me to eat it
with any relish, but Silverman's wild Alaskan example was of excellent
flavor, with a light herb butter and wild mushrooms, though I could
have done without the shards of carrots on the side. Colorado
rack of lamb also had a rich flavor, sidled with fava beans (oddly
cold), arugula and pecorino salad, and the same can be said of the veal
chop with wild mushrooms and sautéed spinach, though this last
accompaniment was very salty one evening. The only shrug at our
table was over a roast chicken whose skin was flaccid when it should
have been crisp, though the bread salad and summer squash had a lovely
homey touch to them as sides. If Silverman's food seems both safe and
comforting, it also displays precision and good taste, even while
lacking perhaps a certain passion and intensity. I suspect he'll feel
out his clientele and go further than he is now.
Pastry chef Deborah Snyder, formerly at
Union Square Cafe, provides a first-class ending to the evening with
ideas like warm fig and cornmeal cake with corn ice cream, lemon
meringue pie with blueberry compote, and a chocolate-crème
fraîche
dome and cashew cake.
The wine list at Lever House is
extremely well chosen, without clichés, with lots of good
bottlings under $40. Trophy wines like Colgin and Togni seem to run
about 100 % above retail plus a few bucks. Appetizers run
$12-$18, entrees $24-$34.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE CHAPTER ON GRILLING IS VEH-RY INTERESTING
The Bundesnachrichendienstes
(Germany's secret service)
has published a cookbook of
recipes created by its own agents
entitled Topf Secret—Schnitzel for Spies
(The word "Topf" means "pot.")
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quick
Bytes
*
From Sept. 22-26 Smith &
Wollensky Restaurant Group holds is 33rd National Wine Week
offering 10 wines for $10 with lunch. For restaurant list and
info visit www.nationalwineweek.com .
* Starting Sept. 24 NYC's Petrossian
(911 Seventh
Avenue) launches a monthly series of deluxe caviar workshops, from
Sept. – Jan., with seminars on caviar history, from
harvesting to the current state of the international caviar industry, a
cooking
demo by Chef Michael Lipp and comparative caviar tasting, with
champagne toast,
conducted by Eve Vega. $150 pp. Call 212-765-6641.
* On Sept. 24 Chef John Howie of Seastar Restaurant & Raw Bar (205 - 108th
NE; 425- 456-0010;
www.Seastarrestaurant.com) in
*
On Sept. 28 NYC’s Eleven Madison Park (
*
On Oct. 1 Rick Tramonto
and Gale Gand of Chicago's Tru (
* On Oct. 7 Washington DC’s Andaluca
restaurant welcomes the vineyard manager of Marques De Grinon
at a 6-course wine dinner. $85 pp. Call 206-382-6999 or visit www.Andaluca.com.
*On Oct. 6 McCormick
& Kuleto’s in
*
Between Oct. 9 and Dec. 10, a series of 7
dinners will be hosted by Vincent’s on Camelback (
* On Oct. 11 The
Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Association hosts
its
“Celebration of Harvest”
festival at Rancho Sisquoc Winery in
*On Oct.
14 NYC’s Center for Women’s Health at
NY Presbyterian Hospital and the Jean
Sindab African American Breast Cancer Project will sponsor an
auction of wines,
dinners, and cooking lessons with a dinner at JP Morgan Chase (270 Park Ave.)
For info write to Director of Operations at Office of development, NY
Presb.
Hospital, 525 E 68 St., Box 123, NY 10021.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.
copyright John Mariani 2003