MARIANI’S

            Virtual Gourmet

Cover Story:  Trieste, Friuli's Fusionary Melting Pot by John Mariani

Bare Naked Tables by John Mariani

New York Corner: Raffaele and San Pietro

Quick Bytes

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TRIESTE: FRIULI'S FUSIONARY MELTING POT
by John Mariani

      “Fusion cuisine”—by which various elements of various Eastern and Western food cultures are combined in both artful and wacky ways--may seem the most contemporary of culinary buzzwords.  But nowhere does the enrichment of a region’s food culture by others seem more pronounced than in the beautiful port city of Trieste and its surrounding region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in northeastern Italy.
    Here, in a city whose population speaks primarily Italian, whose Fourteenth-Century Gothic Basilica of St. Justus sits on a Fifth-Century  Roman foundation and whose buildings are a blend of eastern European neo-classic sobriety with Venetian filigree and Austrian flourishes, one can begin the day, as did expatriate Dubliner James Joyce, at the Café Pirona with a Viennese pastry and  a  cup of  espresso mit schlag.
      Piazza dell'Unita d'Italia, Trieste  photo: Th. Ulich

   Or you might sit down that evening at a beer hall called Kapuziner Keller (1 Pozzo del Mare; 011-39-040-307997) and gobble up beef gulasch with dumplings studded with the Austrian-Italian ham named Speck, and a crisp, buttery veal cutlet called  both Wiener schnitzel and cotoletta del contadino milanese on the menu.  In fact, Kapuziner Keller (right)  is a very cheery spot that would not be out of place anywhere in Austria or Bavaria, with a long communal table and lots of German and Italian pennants.  It draws a young crowd that comes for the various beers on tap and for the mix of Austrian and Italian food served here on the bare wooden tables.  Indeed, the menu in this unassuming, very gregarious beer hall sums up what is so revelatory of Trieste’s gastronomy and history: Kapuziner’s menu lists everything in both German and Italian—a platter of wursts is subtitled affettati misti bavaressi (“mixed Bavarian sausages”), while Röstbraten in Balsamik-esseg und Parmesan mit Tofkartoffeln is copied as tagliata di manzo all’aceto balsamico e parmigiano con patate saltate.  Those Speck-inflected dumplings with the gulasch are called Knödel in German and canederli in Italian on the menu.  Then there’s the double listing for Wiener schnitzel and costoletta alla milanese—a flattened veal chop with its bone still attached, lightly breaded, sautéed in butter until golden and very crisp but still juicy on the inside, served with sliced lemons—an icon of both Viennese and Milanese gastronomy.  Yet no culinary archaeologist has ever been able to pin down which came first, the Austrian or the Italian version.  In Vienna the dish might be made with pork and accompanied by fried or boiled potatoes and pickles; in Milan the side dish might be saffron risotto or polenta.  The dish is not mentioned at all in the first widely published Italian cookbook, The Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi in 1891, though as "Wiener Schnitzel" the dish found its way into American print by the 1860s. Wherever it originated it is a staple of both Italian and German food cultures, which coalesce nicely on the menu at Kapuziner Keller.   
     How this kind of fusion occurred is bound up in the history of a city whose ancient origins are both Celtic and Balkan.  By the Thirteeenth Century Trieste was under the control of Venice, then in the next century under the protection of Austria.  In 1719 Holy Roman Emperor (and King of Hungary) Charles VI declared the city a free port (mainly to bolster the French Trading Company there); just after World War I, Trieste rejoined Italy, but was later claimed by the Slovenians of Yugoslavia.  Finally (or at least for the time being), the city was split into two zones by the U.N.—one, part of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the other, of Yugoslavia (whose Serbo-Croatians called the city Trst.)
      Which sounds like an awful lot of pull-and-tug history and culture  for a city that stretches only eight miles along the Adriatic to absorb.  But walk around across Trieste’s magnificent Piazza di Unita d’Italia (above) flanked with Nineteenth Century municipal buildings and up the wide boulevards of Corso Italia, past the Roman amphitheater dating to the Second Century A.D., and along the quays of the Adriatic and you’ll have a strong sense of a very northern Italian style of life—refined, well-dressed people who speak cadenced Venetian Italian inflected with German and Slovenian words. The city is impeccably clean and tidy, surrounded to the north by green hills that lap over into Slovenia, where the towns have names like Lokev, Sežana and Pliskjovica.  By the same token the broad streets and the architecture of the Piazza could easily be mistaken for similar buildings in eastern Europe, like Warsaw, Vienna, or Belgrade—whose architecture was of course influenced by Italian neo-classic and baroque styles.

          There is a very strong coffee culture in Trieste, and there seems to be a café or two on every street, usually fronted with tables and chairs outside.  In this regard, too, the fusion of one culture to another is imbedded in the history of the region.  Coffee culture began in the Muslim Middle East and was once even considered subversive by the Vatican.  It was only natural that Venice would pioneer the idea of the coffee house by the Seventeenth Century (the first coffee house opened there in 1654), soon adopted in France and England, but didn’t make much headway in Austria until 1683, after which Vienna became famous for its cafés.  The Italians, of course, invented espresso, but it was a Hungarian named Francesco Illy who invented the first automatic espresso machine in 1935—in Trieste, where the Illy headquarters are still located.
         Friuli’s montasio cheese is melted with potatoes and apples to make a fritter called frico, and the area’s prosciutto is considered by many superior to the more famous ham of the same name made in Parma. They also make the German-style bacon Speck.
    In the hills of Friuli vineyards produce dozens of wines varieties, from Pinot Grigio and Merlot to less familiar ones like Zidarich Vitovksa, Müller-Thurgau and Blaufränkisch, which have the same aromatic spiciness of similar wines in Alsace, Germany and Austria. 
          My first meal in Trieste set the pattern for the fusionary food culture I was to find throughout the region.  Set up a winding hill street called the Via Comici, the wonderfully rustic, multi-room Antica Trattoria Suban (2 Via Comici; 040-54368) dates back to 1865, and is still run by the family that gives the restaurant its name, now under paterfamilias Mario Suban, who loves nothing better than to show off his regional cuisine.  You might easily mistake the décor of dark wood and pretty folk motifs for a chalet in the Tyrol (right), yet there seems an equal number of Audis and Alfa-Romeos parked outside, since it draws people from all over the region and across several borders for its cooking.
     I began with a carpaccio of beef marinated in the local olive oil and served with a celery salad, then had a trio of dishes that were an amalgam of Italian pastas and eastern European dumplings—potato gnocchi with tender beets and melted French Brie cheese, faggottini (“little bundles”) of potato with spinach, sausages and veal, and palacinke alla mandriera—a Hungarian crêpe perfumed with a minty local basil. With this I drank a delightfully fresh, young Riesling Renano; then came a fillet of pork with arugula and a mixed grill of beef and lamb, accompanied by a velvety merlot.  I finished with a semifreddo del Papa, a kind of frozen custard cake with raspberry and blueberry sauce, with which we sipped a slightly sweet and fairly rare Picolit from the Colli Orientali.
          Just a few blocks from the Piazza is one of the city’s most highly recommended ristoranti, Al Bagatto (2 Via F. Veneziano; 040-301771), though certainly not for the rather cool demeanor of owner Giovanni Marussi (who does tend to lighten up if you engage him in a discussion of his superb winelist:  Ask his advice and he’ll point to an unusual local wine from the Carso region, like Zidarich Vitovksa, which does indeed taste more like an Austrian or Slovenian wine than a more highly fruited Italian varietal.)
          Al Bagatto is one modestly sized room with a wall of wood pieced together from wine cases and paintings of gigantic forks and spoons.  His clientele (Al Bagatto does not get a “crowd”) comes well dressed even for lunch, and there is always a table or two of people celebrating an anniversary or birthday with friends, some of whom speak Italian with a clipped German accent, others with a rolling Slovenian lilt.  Signor Marussi will pluck a just-bought fish from the tank to show to customers, and I certainly did not refuse his recommendation of an orata, perfectly grilled to the point of keeping it succulent and its flesh meaty, simply dressed with olive oil (there are about six bottles to choose from on each table) and lemon. I began with freshly made pappardelle with tomato and abundant scampi (a Venetian word for a prawn, not a shrimp) from whose shell I plucked the every last tiny morsels of sweet, white meat with absolute delight.
        For a similar seafood experience, but with outdoor tables, try Al Bragozzo (22 Riva Nazario Sauro; 040-304-001), a lovely place to sit and enjoy the twilight and a view of the water.

          The restaurants throughout the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia share these same attentions to freshness, seasonability, and local availability, all of it filtered through traditions that indicate whence the restaurant family and chef derived.  Indeed, there’s even a very cute calendar published of the region’s female chefs and waitresses whose restaurants have eclectic names like La Subida, Alla Luna, Majda, and Korsi.   One of the liveliest and most popular among Friulians who want to eat very well is Trattoria Gostilna Devetak (48 San Michele del Carso; 0481-882005), located near the Slovenian border and run by the Devetak Agostino family since 1870, now in the hands of Gabriella, Nerina and self-taught chef Michela, who is from Brescia and married into the family.  The bread is made in the restaurant, the vegetables picked from the garden, and the olive oil is the finest from the region.  More than 16,000 wines are cellared below.
          Here in dining rooms that look very much like a private house set for a large family dinner (left), with fine linens and lace, you half expect someone to strike up a riff on a zither. With exceptional grace Nerina and her staff minister to guests who find here an extraordinary amalgam of dishes that seem to get more and more localized, from Slovenia, Austria and Italy to Friuli and Carso, the hill region wherein the restaurant resides.  We began our meal sipping a lemony Pinot Grigio from a vineyard named “Runc” as an aperitif, then sat down to a pretty tart of wild asparagus and freshly whipped mayonnaise, accompanied by a Sauvignon Blanc from a Carso winery named Boris Skerk. (I should add that many of the wines I sampled in the region were from young producers who were unknown there even ten years ago.)   The pasta course was called mlinci, an “ancient recipe” of pasta sheets actually baked to a brown brittleness and dressed with spices, local herbs and smoked ricotta cheese, which went very nicely with a wine I’d never heard of called Prulke di Zidarich Benjamin.
     Next came a juicy suckling pig with white asparagus and a fondue of cheese accompanied by potatoes with pork cracklings—a dish one might readily expect to find on tables throughout eastern Europe—with a robust red wine from Isonzo called Vencjar by Giovanni Blason.  Dessert was an old family recipe for a yeast cake (traditionally served at Eastertime) called ghibanizza, whose name derives from either of two linguistic possibilities—a Friulian dialect for the word “abundance,” because it is usually stuffed with raisins, cocoa, candied fruit and grappa, or Slavic for “snail,” because it is often shaped in a coil.  Devetak’s version epitomized everything that makes the region’s food so extraordinary: A rich Friulian cake with an odd name, here served with honey and poppyseeds—a spice closely identified with eastern European kitchens—and then splashed with a sauce of strawberries, accompanied by a sweet wine called Il Loghino.
          The food and wines of Trieste and Friuli are delicious proof that there is no single identifiable thing one can call “Italian,” just as the food of Tuscany, Sicily, and Lombardy are both Italian and regional.  But more so than anywhere else in Europe, the conflux of traditions and the harmony of  so many flavors from so many places shows that food is the great sweet glue that binds people together.

                            Castello di Miramare, northwest of Trieste

BARE NAKED TABLES
by John Mariani

         I have noticed with increasing disappointment the number of new restaurants that have chosen not to put a tablecloth on their tables. Of course, if asked why not?, these restaurateurs will invariably respond that a bare table is part of their "design statement," even to the point of describing the wood as coming from some remote jungle in Kuala Lumpur then polished for six months by a Native American  artisan in Big Sur.  To which I say, Baloney!  The real reason they do not put tablecloths on their tables is because they don’t want to pay a whopping linen bill each week.
     I admit that such bills can mount up--tens of thousands of dollars per annum--but not using tablecloths doesn’t seem in any way to reduce the price of a meal at such restaurants, which are usually the same restaurants that set the barren tables with cheap wine glasses and don’t put salt and pepper shakers on the table. Not too many years ago, and still in Europe, a "cover  charge" was added to the bill to cover the cost of the linens. Now, of course, it's built into the price of your meal.  Believe me, your dinner is no cheaper because the restaurant doesn't use tablecloths.
      The reasons for using a tablecloth are many and obvious: Elementally it provides a fine, soft clean surface on which to dine, which guarantees a hygienic certainty to the proceedings.  A bare wood or Formica tables is wiped down with a damp cloth throughout an evening of changing patrons, hardly the best way to prevent the next guest from picking up the same germs he would if the silverware or glassware were merely to be wiped off. As any epidemiologist will tell you, you probably catch other people’s illnesses through skin contact than through sneezing or even kissing.  So a barely wiped bare table is a festering point for germs.
     A tablecloth also provides brightness (unless it’s black) and a bonhomie that bare, cold, hard wood or plastic will always lack. Your hands don't stick to it; minor drips and spills seep into it, not into your clothes; a tablecloth also soaks up noise in a restaurant, while a hard surface bounces noise around the room; a tablecloth is easily cleared and crumbed by a waiter, while cleaning a hard surface is awkward and ineffective.  Esthetically speaking, a tablecloth is itself a design statement about the degree of luxury a restaurateur wants to manifest, whether the cloth is simple cotton, damask, or embossed linen.  Indeed, no restaurant in Europe above the bistro or trattoria level--would ever have naked tables.  Even at the bistro and trattoria level you will usually find tablecoths, often with the restaurant's name woven into them.
     True, a tablecloth is an extra expense for a restaurateur, but it doesn’t seem to bother the owners of Sparks Steakhouse in NYC and a very few other establishments where, after the main course dishes are cleared, the waiter deftly rolls a fresh new tablecloth over a soiled one at dessert time. I’ve always been impressed by that gracious maneuver--something you wouldn’t even find done in an haute cuisine restaurant in Paris.  It speaks volumes about the way something should be done rather than the cheapest way to achieve minimal results.
    I certainly have no problem with a casual eatery placing  an antiseptically clean sheet of paper over a tablecloth, or even the utilitarian spread of newspaper or brown paper they use at crab houses.  (As every taxi driver knows, newspaper is a very clean base on which to deliver a baby.)  So to those restaurateurs who have yanked the tablecloths from their tables while insisting it’s part of their design statement, I respond that colorful plastic cups, knives and forks, and patterned paper napkins might well be a design statement too, but we haven't descended that low yet, except, maybe, on airplanes.

NEW YORK CORNER
by John Mariani

Raffaele
1055 First Avenue
212-750-3232

San Pietro
18 East 54th Street
212-753-9015
www.sanpietro.net











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HOW'S THAT AGAIN?











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DOESN'T ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT GET A SAY IN THIS?

After being told by the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission that, after 28 years, The Sutler Restaurant in Nashville had to remove antique photos showing women's bare breasts, owner Johnny Potts took down the photos from the walls and blacked out the nipples on his menus, only to be told by the same Commission that, on second thought, Potts was not in violation of any laws.  According to the Tennessean, "Potts said he didn't know what he was going to do about his menus, which all now have black marks over the women's breasts. He said it would cost thousands of dollars to replace them." One photo with genitals remains in storage.

* From July 16-18 The 3^rd Annual  Toast of Breckinridge will feature celebrity chef demos,  a winemaker’s dinner, a grand tasting, wine,food seminars and a martini workshop, topped off with a jazz and champagne brunch. Weekend passes $225 pp; single events $75 - $90. . . . From Aug. 13-15 the Telluride Culinary Arts festival will feature 5 of Telluride's restaurants, including Cosmopolitan, Allred's and 9545  for a progressive dinner.  Highlights include cooking demos  by chefs Michael Lomonaco, John Ash and Bryan Moscatello, complemented by an art show with over 100 international artists.  Weekend passes $255 pp;  grand tasting tickets, $75.

* From July 15-17 the 24th Annual Sonoma County Showcase of Wine & Food, entitled "Cinema  Varietal -- Take 14" celebrates Sonoma’s wines, vintners and master chefs,  including a Golf  Tournament at Oakmont Golf Club; Winery Dinners and Lunches; Live Auction at St. Francis Winery; Silent Barrel by the Case Auction;  the Taste of Sonoma County at Clos du Bois, where 90 vintners pair their best wines with "tastes" created by guest chefs. Proceeds benefit the Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Santa Rosa Junior College, St. Joseph Mobile Primary Care Clinic, Sonoma County agricultural programs and farm worker housing and health care. Complete package for 2 people $1525 prior to May 17. Sat. package for 2 is $550. Visit http://www.sonomawine.com or e-
mail showcase@sonomawine.com . Call 707-586-3795 or 800.939.7666.