MARIANI’S

  June 5, 2005                                                       NEWSLETTER

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FINDING BERGAMO by John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER:  HAKUBAI by John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR: NY VS TX by Mort Hochstein

QUICK BYTES

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Finding Bergamo
by John Mariani
Photos by Galina Stepanoff-Dargery

        I  can't say I knew much about Bergamo before visiting this large walled city in Lombardy. It lies along  the usual tourist route for those visiting Italy's northern lake country, and it is just off the A4 between Milan and Verona. Still, it's not in the category of must-see cities like Florence, Rome, and Venice, so it is often bypassed by Americans; Europeans, however, have found it easily accessible and flock to it for its myriad pleasures, which have somehow been maintained despite a millennium of various domineering rulers and nations that took their toll on the city, until Garibaldi liberated Bergamo from the Austrians in 1859.
      The outskirts of the city offer little to draw the eye, and we stayed at a boring but efficient modern business hotel just over the bridge, Una Hotel Bergamo (154 Via Borgo Palazzo; 035-308-111), strikingly ugly  in total contrast to the antique beauty of the city five miles away, but serviceable at about $110 per night.
     The lower, newer part of Bergamo is fairly nondescript except for  the Carrara Academy, whose collection includes an array of Renaissance masters like Tintoretto, Bellini, Lotto, and Titian, and for the broad Piazza Matteotti that leads to the upper part of the city, which you enter through 16th-century Venetian portals.  Take the funicular up to the old town or park your car wherever you can, then walk straight into the heart of Bergamo, up steep, shiny cobblestone streets to the Piazza del Duomo, which is as splendidly sized as any in northern Italy, not grandiose but human in scale. Equally beautiful is the Piazza Vecchia (above), with its 12th-century bell tower and graceful fountain.  Beyond these there are winding narrow pathways teeming more with locals than with tourists, and the farther you get from the center, the quieter the city becomes behind its ancient walls.
     Bergamo, not Venice, is the birthplace of the commedia dell'arte,  so the shops have a good selection of masks to buy. But this is not a highly dramatic city; instead, it has a dearness in its close quarters and streets, which are all scrubbed clean; the many shops, pasticcerias, and food stores burst with color. With so many cultural influences determining their city's fate over the centuries, the Bergamasks are sophisticated but not overly effusive and strike a distinct northern reserve. But teenagers, like their contemporaries everywhere, bound from one side of the street to the other, singing pop songs, finding their friends, and skidding past their elders, who  walk with a gait that is not frail but deliberate and slow, so as to take in a good day's sunshine, the purple twilight of an evening, the starry skies at night. Around the Piazza Vecchia everyone flocks to the fountain, and visitors stroll  to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.  This is the center of Bergamask life, never frantic, ever sweet.
     For those who wish to dine at the highest level of Bergamask gastronomy, one restaurant has risen quite beyond its humble name, Taverna Colleoni dell'Angelo (7 Piazza Vecchia; 035-232-596). Set just to the side of the Piazza Vecchio, it is a large  18-year-old restaurant with a comfortable formality inside, tuxedo-clad waiters, and an unpretentious gentility that makes lingering here a great luxury. There are many outdoor tables (right) where you may watch the passeggiata of Bergamo life in the Piazza.
       Taverna Colleoni respects Lombardian culinary traditions while bringing them to a level of refinement just below the point where Italian might be stretched into something else.  Here the food is not so much simple as it is wholly thought through for maximum flavor and just enough prettiness to make you sigh and wonder how the Italians do it with what seems like so little effort.
       The wine list is exceptionally good, worldwide in its scope, including American labels like Atlas Peak, Opus One, and Rubicon; the tablecloths are a heavy azure damask, set with lace doilies, silverware with heft, thin glassware, and fresh flowers.
        We began our meal with an amuse of marinated salmon on greens and radicchio, while we sipped a glass of sparkling prosecco. We followed that with a 2000 Rosso dei Frati Priori with no more pedigree than "vino da tavola," yet it was delicious, peppery, and quite tannic.  Our antipasto was a plate of large shrimp, calamari, and lentils scented with rosemary, followed by  two lovely pastas--trofie (tiny squiggly dumplings) with stewed tomatoes and taleggio cheese,  and tajarin (the Lombardian name for tagliatelle) with porcini mushrooms, cream, and an unexpected spoonful or two of blueberries that worked well.  Next came perfectly cooked monkfish with the curious addition of a lemon grass stalk that gave piquancy to a dressing of tomato and zucchini. A flavorful, tender veal medallion came with a mushroom sauce and creamy yellow polenta.
     There's an excellent variety of cheeses, many Lombardian, including sweet Gorgonzola, which we savored with the last of the wine, then we treated ourselves to a slice of rich savarin cake capped with spun sugar and a perfect espresso. By then it was getting late , but children still ran free in the Piazza, until, at the stroke of ten o'clock,  Duomo bell chimed 100 times to call everyone home.  The piazza grew quiet by the time the bell tolled its last.
     The bill, in these hard times for the American dollar, came to 167 euros ($210), which included the antipasto, pastas at 14 euros each ($17.60), main courses at 18 euros ($22.50), the wine at 30 euros ($38), tax and service.  As usual in Italy, there is a coperto (cover charge), here somewhat higher than I'm used to at 6 euros each ($7.50).  Good thing we dined on damask.
 
     T he next day we strolled for the entire morning through the old town, up the mansion-flanked Via Bartolomeo Colleoni and around the still solid fortress, past windows piled high with bread and pastries, pizza and focaccia.  We passed numerous trattorie, at a loss to decide which one to enter, until we saw the sweet facade (left) of Vineria Cozzi (22 Via B. Colleoni), which immediately won our hearts.  Inside is a bustling wine bar and to the rear two small dining rooms, with red-and-white diamond-patterned floor tiles, bent metal chairs, a walls of yellow-ochre banded with green wainscoting, one hung with an enchanting cherub (below) who watches over you while you dine.  In the background Alicia Keyes' CD was crooning softly. 
      We were starving that day after all our walking, so we tore into the antipasti, which included an array of salume, cheeses, and breads. 
      Our pastas were cansonsei, which means "little britches," twisted like candy wrappers containing cheese, sausage bits, and sage, in a rich sauce of butter and Parmigiano, and  plump ravioli with smoked cheese on a bed of spinach, braised fennel, pignoli and sweet raisins.  Then came a very good confit of duck with roast potatoes, grapes, and prunes; disappointing, however, was a plate of roast rabbit whose meat was dry, its polenta insipid.   Full with wine and food, we lingered over coffee, waiting to see who else would come through the door of this ebullient little trattoria.
     With a bottle of sturdy Valtellina wine, our bill came to only $95,  including, as always, tax and service. The wine bar up front is where you may sample and sip and pay very little for a fine casual lunch.
   
    The joy in coming upon a city like Bergamo derives from nearly missing it along the route then finding yourself enchanted by its quiet beauty and the sweetest form of serendipity. She has waited for you for centuries, and now you'll never forget her.

NEW YORK CORNER

HAKUBAI
The Kitano Hotel
66 Park Avenue at East 38th Street
212-885-7000
www.kitano.com

      The cliché about Japanese design and dining--"serenity"--might well be inappropriate to describe the frenetic  eating scene in Tokyo's Ginza district, but it most certainly applies to the tatami rooms and kaiseki dinners held at restaurants throughout that food-mad city.  In NYC this might best be appreciated in the quiet and genteel atmosphere of Hakubai  in the Kitano Hotel on Park Avenue, which seems just slightly and safely distant from the hurly-burly of midtown hotels to the north, east, and west of it.  Formerly the Rockefeller-owned Murray Hill Hotel, it's been in the Kitano orbit since 1973 and fitted out with a splendidly spacious lobby (left) and fine artwork that includes photography of New York,  a huge Fernando Botero bronze entitled "Dog" everyone wants to touch, and  four works by Red Grooms in the Garden Cafe restaurant on the main level.  Upstairs is a swank lounge.

      The showcase restaurant here, however, is downstairs, leading to a foyer and into a spare dining room with 84 seats, flanked by three tatami rooms, where the multi-course kaiseki dinners are featured and spread over a leisurely evening ($80-$150  per person).    You sit at the traditional low table-- legs comfortably allowed to dangle--and are served an array of dishes chosen by the chef and brought by a kimono-dressed waitress with a dexterity in bending, kneeling and placing of dishes that is as unobtrusive as it is charming.
       A kaiseki dinner begins with an array of appetizers, each carefully conceived and part of the decoration in color and symmetry.  Executive chef Yukihiro Sato, who has long worked for Kitano properties and at Hakubai for ten years now,  is a master of the kaiseki tradition, which dates back more than 500 years in Japanese culinary history.  The word "omekase" means "Put your trust in me," and, for $150 per person, Sato will do everything to show off his innovative and traditional sides.
      On a recent evening in a tatami room here, (right) my wife and I were served in the organized ritual of kaiseki, beginning with housemade sesame-laced tofu, which had a cooling, lulling effect on the palate. Next came real spark, in aloe with Japanese lime vinegar, then saline brineyness with marinated mackerel pike.
      Eel sushi followed, fat and luscious in its purity of flavor, and then a soothing dish of simmered spinach and matsutake mushrooms. A tender shrimp cake was sandwiched between tempura-fried matsutake mushrooms, then, when our appetites were at their peak, came fried shrimp rolled in shiso leaf, and a rich loin of duck with yam stems, and, finally, grilled dry sardine with the sauce of an egg yolk.
      On another evening we went to the main dining room (left) and ordered from all over the menu's categories--grilled silver cod with soy bean paste, a custard full of crab with shark's fin sauce, an excellent assortment of sushi and sashimi, and Kobe-style beef shabu shabu which is seared with a sizzle on a hot rock at the table (below).
      One of the best things about dining at Hakubai are the numerous options at every price level. There is a business lunch  at $24, bento box lunches at $36,  $55, and $65, and a 4-course light ladies' lunch at $32.  The selection of sakes is impressive.
      After dinner one of the best ideas for a night on the town is to head upstairs to the bar-lounge to listen to a  continuing series of classic and modern jazz musicians.  And if further night wandering is not in the cards, you may then retire upstairs to a room at the Kitano and wake the next morning in peace and quiet, with only the rush of Park Avenue below to stir you.

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

NEW YORK VERSUS TEXAS by Mort Hochstein

     It was just a bunch of good ole’ boys  from Texas facing off against their counterparts in New York.  Objective: to prove that “mine (in this case "my Rhône wine") is better than yours. You lose, you pay the tab for the evening.  And that’s what happened to the boys from Austin at Amuse Restaurant recently in NYC.
     The Texans lost because one of their gang did not come up with the top rated and most expensive wines that everyone else entered in the competition. The wine that won was a 1988 La Mouline, submitted by Larry Fink, CEO of the New York investment firm, BlackRock. The approximate retail cost today is about $650, if you can find a bottle.
       It might actually have cost Fink (on paper) $1,300, because each entrant supplied two bottles.  The winning bottle carried a 100-point rating from wine guru Robert M. Parker, whose advice guided  most of the contestants. “I knew my La Mouline would kick butt,” Fink exulted afterward.
         The second place wine was an ’83 La Mouline entered by former computer software entrepreneur Ross Garber of the Texas team. It cost about the same as the winner in today’s market.
   But then there was a ’90 La Chapelle Hermitage entered by Austin’s Bill Walters. It finished next to last.  Ah, but last place belonged to Kent Lance, an Austin real estate developer who defied the odds and  the pleas of his teammates. Lance entered a modestly respectable ’94 Coudolet de Beaucastel. Lance, president of the Texas Wine and Food Foundation, said he could have entered one of the “big guns, but threw out the Coudolet to see what might happen. I’ll be hearing about this one for a long time.”  The wine might cost $40 in today’s market, according to wine merchant Dave Sokolin, a member of the NY team. Sokolin’s ’91 La Mouline, another Parker perfect, finished tenth out of 17 bottles.  By not slavishly following the ratings, not digging into the golden oldies in  his own cellar or shopping a sure thing at his  local wine merchant, Lance lost lots of bucks and considerable  face in the Texas wine community.
     “Still,” he said afterward, “it cost me less to lose than some of these guys paid for their wines,” a statement not altogether accurate. But it is  likely that one or more of the contestants, lacking a  strong Rhône  in their cellars,  went to the ratings book and paid big bucks at  their local merchant to buy an entry ticket for the event.
    Another Texan, venture capitalist Bill Wood, arrived in New York and realized he had brought a mismatched pair of Rhône Wines. He spent a busy afternoon working the phones to locate a  second  ’90 Landonne in New York, and after an expensive foray into Manhattan wine sources, pried loose a mate, at no small cost.
      The bill for the evening at Amuse was a little over $7,500, and Lance picked up most of it. Fortunately for him Goldman Sachs investment banker Dave Wender of the New York team was penalized for  ranking  his own wine, a ’91 La Landonne,  as the worst, and that cost him a quarter of the tab. Lance also rated his own wine worst, but why rub it in?
        Despite the high stakes battle, there was none of the hushed decorum of normal wine tastings. Instead there were outbursts, nasty comments about the wines being tasted blind, a real no-no in the serious wine world, more than a few off-color jokes, and advice on buying wine. That came most notably from New Jersey realtor and large format collector Charles Klatskin, who urged his colleagues to buy their cellar selections directly from the winery, because “that’s the only way you can be sure the wine has been handled properly, even though it may cost you  more.”  Klatskin, after tasting one disliked entry—everyone commented on that one--also stood up to advise the Austin crew that there was a Chase bank branch nearby if they needed  refinancing.
         Ann Colgin, producer of the cult wine Colgin California Cabernet Sauvignon, came away as the best of the tasters, ranking the entries closest to the final results.  Colgin, whose ’81 Chave Hermitage finished 11th, will host the rematch, in answer to Lance’s plea for a chance to get even “as soon as possible.” That will probably be in November at Colgin’s California estate.
        After the competition, the winners continued having fun at the expense of the losers at dinner. But the Yankees sweetened the evening with more Hermitage supplied by Conklin, and a Château d‘Yquem from BlackRock executive Rob Kapito.  The value of the wines that flowed freely over the table in both parts of the evening was estimated at a little more than $20,000. It was just another night on the town, ending with an early morning return to Austin via private jet for the losers.

FOOD WRITING 101: Try to keep goofy metaphors to a minimum, especially in your first paragraph.

"Like many an Oprah's book club selection or a typical Best Picture nominee, BLT Fish affirms the enormous appeal of the middlebrow, the special spark when high tips its hat to low, refinement links arms with accessibility and art consorts with commerce. If Le Bernardin took Bubba Gump's Shrimp Company as an illicit amour, the precocious, spirited love child might look like this. . . . It has the flexibility of a yogi master, the balance of a Romanian gymnast. And it clinches the verdict: Laurent Tourondel is back in the swim."--Frank Bruni, "Elevator to the Ocean," New York Times (April 20, 2005).

TRUE, BUT HE DID GET RID OF THE BUGS

PLAN B: ELIMINATE GARY WILSON'S YEAR-END BONUS

Northwest Airlines has just announced it will eliminate serving bags of little pretzels on its flight in order to save $2 million a year.



                                                                                                 Northwest Airlines Pres. and CEO Gary Wilson



DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

In response to my mention in last week's newsletter that the Russian Czars ate their beluga caviar from a silver spoon,  eagle-eyed reader Henry Togna noted correctly that they more probably ate it from a bone or mother of pearl spoon.

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly.  Editor/Publisher: John Mariani. Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani,  Naomi  Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson,  Edward Brivio, Mort Hochstein, Lucy Gordan, Suzanne Wright. Contributing Photographers: Galina Stepanoff-Dargery,  Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.

 John Mariani is a columnist for Esquire, Wine Spectator, Diversion and the Harper Collection. He is author of The Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink (Lebhar-Friedman), The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway), and, with his wife Galina, the award-winning new Italian-American Cookbook (Harvard Common Press).  

 Any of John Mariani's books below may be ordered from amazon.com by clicking on the cover image.

copyright John Mariani 2005