Virtual Gourmet

Kathryn Winnick and Matthew McConaughy In "Failure to Launch" (2006)

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IN THIS ISSUE

THIS WEEK

How the Give and Take from Everyone Everywhere
Made American Gastronomy
the Most Diverse in the World
By John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER
LOVE AND PIZZA
Chapter Four
By John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
The Best Restaurants Are Selling and
Delivering Their Best Wines at Discount Prices
By John Mariani

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How the Give and Take from Everyone Everywhere
Made American Gastronomy
the Most Diverse in the World

By John Mariani

    It is too facile simply to say that all people are immigrants from somewhere, but in the case of North America, everyone had to get here from somewhere else, and everyone brought with them their own culture, all of it eventually suffused throughout the American continent, giving us all the richest cornucopia of foods of any country in the world.
    The first immigrants came at least 15,000 years ago. But it was not until Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492 that the Eastern and Western hemispheres collided gastronomically in a titanic event to be called the “Columbian Exchange.” The Genoese explorer had specifically been hunting for a spice route to the Orient—spices then being worth their weight in gold for Europeans who craved them—but instead Columbus found a new world with foods like potatoes, tomatoes, corn, cacao, sweet and hot peppers, beans and strawberries, all of them shipped back to Europe, where people were astonished by these wholly unknown foods.
    Imagine Italian food without the tomato, Irish food without the potato, Indian, Thai, and Chinese food without the chile pepper. And no chocolate anywhere but in Mexico. Now consider that the Columbian Exchange brought to America wheat, coffee beans, chickens, domesticated ducks, cattle, bees, pheasants and dozens of fruits and vegetables like artichokes, carrots, yams, eggplant, garlic, olives, lemons, apples, pears, rice and tea. Imagine the American prairie with millions of buffalo but no wheat fields waving, Ohio and New York with no apple orchards, the Hudson River once teeming with sturgeon but the Hudson Valley devoid of wineries, the Carolinas without rice paddies. Such was the radical transformation of gastronomy on both sides of the world, and it caused empires to grow and nations to go to war over American plantations.
    From every immigrant culture came new foods and new ways to cook it: pigs brought by the English to the earliest colonies were now roasted as barbecue; the Germans who settled in the Midwest in the early 19th century grew hops to make beer, the Spanish grapes to make wine. Africans taken as slaves brought their yams and ground nuts, which became important crops in the South. French Huguenots who emigrated to Louisiana from Acadia in 1755 adapted their native dishes to become chile-spiked Cajun jambalaya (right) and crawfish boils.
    The streets were not paved with gold but with food markets, so the new arrivals often could spend less money for much more food in greater variety than in their home countries. Also, their practical need to adapt to their new world, coupled with a deep nostalgia that caused them to cling to the old, required using the former to satisfy the latter. Italian- or German- or Chinese-American, even Tex-Mex cuisines, were all filtered through memory but made by necessity with what was available. Hunger may have driven them to America, but the ability of the immigrants to adapt helped them prosper and feed their families in ways unimaginable before.
    After the Civil War, poor Southern Italians brought the tomato back to America to produce a rich hybrid called Italian-American food; the Jews of Eastern Europe did the same, selling pastrami and knishes, latkes and bagels in delicatessens, while others ran the seltzer concessions and candy stores. Chinese workers on the western railroads of the 1860s adapted their noodle dishes to become chow mein, while the Irish made corned beef and cabbage into a signifying dish, though one totally unknown back in Ireland. The Greeks created an entire diner industry of which there was no trace back in Greece. For so many immigrants, entering into the United States’ welcoming food markets was easy access to the American Dream.
    American food culture was give-and-take, making do, diversifying, modifying, and expanding, all the while maintaining a revered connection to the way it was done back in the old country. There was no such thing as “soul food” back in Africa, but here it was full of rice and beans, fried chicken and collards, pork chops and sweet potato pie, developing the name soul food in the 1960s as a part of ethnic pride in African-American culture. The French never ate potatoes or ever saw a French-fried potato until the early 19th century, but love of the spud was ubiquitous in America. Italians could open an Italian-American menu and not recognize dishes with names like veal parmigiana, chicken tetrazzini, fettuccine Alfredo, chicken Vesuvius, hero sandwiches or Italian cheesecake, much less ever go to a New York-style Italian steakhouse that served huge baked potatoes, shrimp cocktail and five-pound Maine lobsters. No resident of Tokyo or Osaka had ever heard of negimaki or California rolls. And certainly no Mayan or Aztec had any concept of what chili con carne, chimichangas or fajitas could possibly be.
    American restaurants have a history of adaption—curry houses, chop suey parlors, pizzerias, rathskellers, Irish bars, delicatessens, cafeterias and chili parlors were all American adaptions by immigrants who may never have eaten at a restaurant back in the old country. The pizza, which originated in Naples in the 17th century, became far better known and widely sold in America by 1950 than it was in Italy until the 1980s, and the Japanese imported the idea of Benihana of Tokyo teppanyaki grills, renaming them Benihana of New York (left).
    The tiki bar (below), as envisioned by “Trader Vic” Bergeron in Oakland, offered a vast menu of dishes completely made up to sound like they came from Polynesia, like crab Rangoon, bongo bongo soup, and the Mai Tai cocktail. A Greek immigrant named Thomas Andreas Carvelas perfected soft ice cream and called it Carvel. The remarkable first Horn & Hardart Automat, constructed using German machinery, opened in Philadelphia in 1902. Yogurt was popularized in the1940s by Barcelona immigrant Daniel Carasso, who created the Dannon brand, later adding fruit preserves to create the first “sundae-style yogurt.”
    Drive-ins, soda fountains, fast-food chains, pancake houses, fish camps, ice cream parlors and barbecue joints lined the American highways, many of them done up in the shape of the food they served, like White Castle in Wichita, Randy’s Donuts and Tale o’ the Pup, both in Los Angeles.

    Then, in 1939, the exhibitors at the New York World’s Fair (left) showcased the kind of cuisine that was more like what was actually being eaten in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Formosa, and other countries. None was so influential as the Fair’s French Pavilion restaurant, later recreated as Le Pavillon in New York by French immigrant Henri Soulé, who set the standard and template for what became French-American haute cuisine. Its menu of frogs’ legs Provençale, consommé royale, pâté en crôute, and chocolate mousse were slavishly copied by all French restaurants to follow, with names like La Grenouille, La Caravelle and Le Périgord.
    Still, after World War II, the nation’s gastronomy was in real danger of turning away from its immigrant roots based on seasonal, fresh ingredients and toward mere convenience and cost effectiveness of frozen and canned food, not to mention TV Dinners. As Henri Soulé (right) once moaned, “Some of the richest people on Earth will dine here tonight [at Le Pavillon]. And for all the money on Earth, I couldn’t give them the simple good things that every middle-class Frenchman can afford from time to time. Six Marennes oysters. A partridge—very, very young. Some real primeurs—the first spring vegetables. A piece of Brie that is just right. ... And some fraises des Bois.”
    Yet by the 1970s, new waves of immigrants, especially from Asia, brought more and more new foods, many of which were soon planted in American farms. Overnight delivery by FedEx and DHL from everywhere made a cornucopia of wild mushrooms, fresh seafood, cheeses and extra virgin olive oil.
    A little book that became a bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé (1971), and the pronouncements about the healthfulness of the so-called Mediterranean Diet that stressed eating vegetables, grains and oils over proteins and carbohydrates had an enormous effect on the post-war baby boomers, who were soon relishing the “ethnic” foods of their own ancestors, leading to more interest and hunger for “real” Italian food, “real” Greek food, “real” Spanish food, rather than the hybrid cuisines they had grown used to since the 1950s.
    As a result of more than 400 years of immigrant history, America has not just the richest gastronomy in the world—one that ravenously accepts from other food cultures while influencing them in return—but one in which all those who accepted the challenge to come here contributed to and enjoyed. With all of them—from the seafarers of Alaska and the slaves of the South, the wheat-growing Swedes of the Plains and the Vietnamese boat people of Seattle, the cannoli-makers and pastrami-briners, the folders of phyllo and the smokers of trout, the pretzel twisters and the tortilla patters, every one of them has contributed to our vast and delectable potluck of so many wonderful things.

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NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani

LOVE AND PIZZA

Since, for the time being, I am unable to write about or review New York City restaurants, I have decided instead to print a serialized version of my (unpublished) novel Love and Pizza, which takes place in New York and Italy and involves a young, beautiful Bronx woman named Nicola Santini from an Italian family impassioned about food. As the story goes on, Nicola, who is a student at Columbia University, struggles to maintain her roots while seeing a future that could lead her far from them—a future that involves a career and a love affair that would change her life forever. So, while New York’s restaurants remain closed, I will run a chapter of the Love and Pizza each week until the crisis is over. Afterwards I shall be offering the entire book digitally. I hope you like the idea and even more that you will love Nicola, her family and her friends. I’d love to know what you think. Contact me at loveandpizza123@gmail.com
—John Mariani

To read previous chapters go to archive (beginning with March 29, 2020, issue.

LOVE AND PIZZA

By John Mariani

Cover Art By Galina Dargery

CHAPTER FOUR

    At Columbia Nicola had no such problem with the male students, who either seemed to come from privileged backgrounds and cared very little about their course work or were quite the opposite, burying themselves in their work and competing very intensely, sometimes openly nasty to their fellow students.   Nor was Nicola particularly interested in jocks, especially at Columbia, whose sports teams had deplorable records.
        Nicola did have a momentary crush on one professor, a lecturer in Psychology who had a Dutch name so difficult to pronounce that he asked his students to “just call me Diercks.” But he turned out to be such a dullard in class that she saw no point in pursuing him. And then there was her professor of the History of Modern Art, whose own name, Rhys St. John, she found strangely charming, because she never heard of anyone outside of an English drawing room comedy with such a name. At first she was embarrassed by not knowing whether Rhys was pronounced “Reese” or “Rice,” and it was attached to a last name that in the first day of class he pronounced as “Sin Gin,” a sound so exotic to Nicola that he might as well have been from Sumatra. But he definitely was not. “Reese Sin Gin” was half Welsh, half Irish, a mongrel mix evident in the red-gold cast of his carefully mussed long hair, which he constantly brushed from his brow and around his ears in the presence of his female students. At six-foot-one, he towered over most of them, but since Nicola was herself five-foot-nine, the playing field was not quite so tilted in his favor as with other women students.
       St. John, who apparently owned just two, very similar brown tweed jackets, had a habit of lecturing with a cigarette in his fingers that he never actually smoked, carefully wafting the smoke in the air like filigree and very slightly tapping the ash into a small aluminum foil tray on his desk. He’d bring the cigarette close to his lips, then pause to say something he believed was brilliant as he let his eyes focus on one of the women students. Quite often that was Nicola.
      At the end of each lecture St. John would put out the cigarette, which he’d probably bummed from a male student, and finish what he was saying in a low tone of voice, “ ... and after that, van Gogh”—pronounced like he was clearing his throat of phlegm, “van GOCK”—“put down his ragged paint brush ... and shot himself through his own sad heart.” Then St. John would very gently close the book he had lying open throughout the class, even though he’d never read a word from it, and he’d sniff and mutter, “hm.”
    It did not take Nicola long to recognize that St. John’s hand movements, curlicues of smoke, and modulated speech were all part of a pattern, one that was in many ways effective in teaching his subject; he kept his students awake most of the time and even imparted some thoughtful ideas for their consideration. But she also knew that the act was aimed squarely at the women in his classes and St. John’s reputation for philandering made for widespread gossip, much of it true. One time he came to class with a chipped tooth, daring not to glance at a female student whose ring finger was bandaged that day.
    The first time Nicola met with St. John in his office to go over what he expected of her in the coming semester, she had applied some lipstick before entering. Getting up from his leather swivel chair and rising to his full height, his first words were, “Well, I must say you women students get lovelier each year,” delivered with a lilting, burring brogue. “Come in, come in, sit down, Miss--?”
    “Santini, Nicola Santini,” she said, smiling slightly.
    “Well, you're as pretty as your name, Miss Santini. Sit down, sit down. So let’s talk about the coming semester, what I expect of you, and, of course, what your own interests might be.”
    Nicola momentarily wanted to be taken in by St. John’s charms but she was savvy enough to know they were well practiced, so she dove right in to discuss what her interests were, ignoring for the moment her professor’s.
    “I’m most interested in Italian Renaissance art,” she began.
    “Isn't everyone?” he interrupted with a light laugh.
    Nicola plowed on: “So, while I want to know as much as possible about all the visual arts, I think that’s going to be my focus, especially the Venetian painters.”
    “Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese.”
    “Yes,” she said. “I don’t think I have any particular talent for painting myself, but I believe I would make a good teacher.”
    “At the college level?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “So you’re aiming to go to grad school in Art History?”
    Nicola smiled and turned her head. “Yes, if I can afford it. It’s gotten very expensive.”
    St. John patted his tweed jacket pockets. “Hm, you don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”
    “Don’t smoke,” she answered.
    “Well, no matter. Now, about grad school, since I haven’t had you in class for very long, I don’t know how good a student you are, but I have heard some of the other professors speak highly of you.”
    Nicola widened her eyes and said, “Really? They’ve spoken to you about me? I know so few of them.”
    “Well, let’s say I might have asked about you. I’ve seen you around campus and here in the halls.”
    At this Nicola relaxed her shoulders, sensing that St. John’s interest was increasingly non-academic in nature. But she told herself simply to stay cool and not to encourage him in any way.
    “So what do you expect from me?” she asked.
    “Oh, not that much. This is a pretty basic course, and I try to cover a lot of material. So if you do the readings and a decent five-to-seven-page paper, you should do fine. I do like students who show real interest, though. I swear some of these people sit in class with their eyes half closed throughout the whole semester, never asking a question, seemingly terrified I might ask them one. They cut more classes than they attend.” Then, putting his hand very lightly on Nicola’s forearm, he said, “May I confide in you?”
    Nicola said nothing. He said, “I have certainly noticed that you do not fall into that crowd. I think you’ve asked some very good questions in class and, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve never cut a class.”
    Nicola shook her head and said, “Not when my parents and I are paying for this.”
    The word “parents” drew St. John up and he said, “Of course, of course. I wish more students had that attitude. Too many of them are just trust fund babies whose parents pay for every dime of their education, so they just don’t really care. Most of them take my course just to fulfill a curriculum requirement.”
    Now Nicola thought it best to lay it on the line: “I care very much. I don’t come from a rich family and I don't live in a rich community. I’m a Bronx girl and I’m proud of it, so I never take what my parents have done for me for granted. I also don’t know if, assuming I do go to grad school and eventually teach, I will ever be able to repay them in every way I’d like to. I know what my grandparents did, coming to this country with very little and making sure their children and my brothers and sisters got the best education possible. Columbia is a real stretch for a family like mine, and I never forget that for a minute.”
        “That is so terrific,” said St. John, “Christ, if I only had more students like you, my job would be a lot easier and much more rewarding.” Then he paused, looked Nicola up and down, leaned over and put his hand again on her arm, almost whispering, “So ... you’re not just smart and beautiful but you’ve got a real moral compass, too. Amazing. And very rare.”

"Thérèse sur un Banquette" (1932) by Balthus

    Nicola kept herself from saying something stupid like “I bet you say that to all the girls” because she knew he had a practiced retort for something like that. Instead, she said, “Well, thank you. I hope I live up to your faith in me.”
    St. John almost bowed. “And I in yours,” which he realized sounded like bad grammar, even slightly creepy. He stood up and said, “So, then, see you in class Thursday.”
    Nicola said yes, smiled and left, noticing that as she walked away St. John had arched his head to watch her. Nicola muttered to herself, “Christ, this man is trouble,” and wiped her lipstick off on the back of her hand, as if she’d just been kissed by a drunkard. She then went to the library to read St. John’s next assignment, a book on the painter Balthus.

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NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR

FINE DINING RESTAURANTS ARE SELLING THEIR
FINEST WINES FOR TAKE-OUT
By
John Mariani

The Wine Wall at Mastro's in the Post Oak Hotel in Houston, TX

    One of the ironies of the current pandemic is that you may now be able to enjoy your favorite meals from fine dining restaurants as well as drink discounted prestigious wines from their list.
    In an industry with small profit margins to begin with, and a significant percentage of those profits coming from wine and spirits sales, restaurateurs are scrambling with new business models to keep them afloat during the coronavirus pandemic. And those that have managed to stay open by offering take-out and delivery service have found that their customers may have as good an appetite for fine wines as they did on premises.
    Sauvage restaurant in Brooklyn has turned its website into an on-line wine shop, with most bottles costing $20-$30, and June Wine Bar, also in Brooklyn, is selling selections at 50% off.
    Such offers are really rather drastic, considering a restaurant may buy a bottle of wine from a distributor for about half the price you’d pay in a wine shop, then hike up the price on the wine list 100-300 percent.
    Even a few of the grand hotels of Europe are now offering take-out food and wine from their classic menus for both in-house guests and locals. The restaurants at the 176-year-old Baur au Lac (left) in Zurich, Switzerland, are closed but you can order on-line and have it delivered to your home, including wines such as a Paladin Brut Millisimata Brut Prosecco 2018 for $17.60 and Saint-Saphorin Grand Cru “Les Blassinges” from the Vaud region for $19.65.
        At New York’s Michelin-starred Italian seafood restaurant Marea, wines on their reserve list are all 25% off, including prestigious Italian labels like Alteni de Brassica Sauvignon Blanc 2015 from Gaja, among the most illustrious Italian wine producers, which runs $350 on the regular list but $262.50 for take-out.
        At the restaurants at the Post Oak Hotel in Houston, which includes Mastro’s Steakhouse, Keith Goldston, master sommelier of parent company Landry’s Inc., is even pairing Gaja wines with two pizza offerings: Ca' Marcanda Promis 2016 with a pepperoni, marinara and mozzarella pizza for $70, inclusive, and a 2014 Barbaresco (right) with a roasted mushroom, white truffle oil and oregano pizza for $225. “We’re also offering all 39 selections of Gaja wines at a 20-50% markdown from the wine list price,” Golston said.
    According to Gaia Gaja (left), fifth generation of the family that owns the company, “In these difficult times fine dining and fine wines are surely a luxury, but they can also be a source of support for people confined at home. A take-out of a fine meal and wine is a way to bring home a taste of normalcy and hope. I think it’s a great service to people. We are seeing some restaurants in Italy doing this too,” citing San Lorenzo restaurant and Pierluigi restaurant in Rome and Ribot in Milan.
    At Wolfgang Puck’s Spago (right) in Beverly Hills, which has always had a strong celebrity and show business clientele, wine sales have been both at the value end and the high end, now discounted. “We have an offering that ranges from $18 to $650 and now most wines we are selling are between $25 and $100,” says Philip Dunn, Spago’s Director of Wine and Spirits/Sommelier. “Our prices for the most part are better or at least the same as most off-premise retailers. We have surprisingly sold a fair amount of Champagne, Ruinart Rosé, Dom Pérignon, vintage Krug, Deutz and Laurent Perrier as well as Moët & Chandon mini bottles. Others that do well are Gaja in half-bottle, Groth Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon and Pichler & Puck Grüner Veltliner.  Our offerings change as we run low on stock.”
    At the restaurants within the Post Oak Hotel, Goldston says, “We are seeing a little bit of value shopping, but most of our guests are ordering their usual favorites and we are even seeing a slight uptick in ‘trophy wine’ sales as some are seeing this as an opportunity to drink great wines—‘if not now, then when?’” Puck's famous salmon and caviar pizza (above) is part of their take-out program.
    Asked if wine sales through take-out have been a good income producer at a time the restaurants are closed, Goldston said, “Absolutely, and they are especially appreciated as they are a revenue stream that doesn't require a lot of labor.”

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MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Publisher: John Mariani. Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani, Robert Mariani, Misha Mariani, John A. Curtas, Gerry Dawes, Geoff Kalish, and Brian Freedman. Contributing Photographer: Galina Dargery. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.