IN THIS ISSUE O, CHEF WHERE
ART THOU? By John Mariani
NEW YORK CORNER
LOVE AND PIZZA
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
By John Mariani
NOTES
FROM THE WINE CELLAR
HAVE THE ITALIAN WINE LAWS BECOME
A COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE FARCE?
By John Mariani
❖❖❖
On this week's episode of my WVOX
Radio Show "Almost Golden," on Wed. March
24 at 11AM EST,I will be
interviewing Harvey Sachs, biographer of Arturo
Toscanini.WVOX.com.
The episode will also be archived at: almostgolden.
O,
CHEF WHERE ART THOU?
By John Mariani
In a world where the "celebrity chef"
has become an oxymoron, not cooking in one's
restaurant has become a measure of one's
success. Such absentee chefs prattle on by
repeating the late Paul Bocuse's hoary throwaway
line, "Who cooks
when I'm not in my restaurant? The same person
who cooks when I am there," to the effect that it
makes not a smidge of difference whether a
celeb chef ever shows his face in any of the 15
restaurants he is paid to put his name on. Even the august Michelin
Guide insists that its inspectors judge a
restaurant only
by what’s on the plate, not if the chef is
there cooking it. So, chefs like Alain Ducasse,
Joël Robuchon, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten all
get a wink-and-a-nudge and stars galore for
setting up restaurants everywhere from Tokyo to
Las Vegas, then leaving them to open yet another
somewhere else on the globe. Ducasse, who once ran only one restaurant
(Louis XV in Monaco), now runs 55 restaurants with
22 Michelin stars around the world; and
Vongerichten has his name attached to 45
restaurants from New York to Shanghai. Even the
late Robuchon has
his name on dining rooms in Las Vegas as well as
casual counter eateries named L’Atelier in Tokyo,
Paris, Las Vegas, New York, and London. Nice trick
from the grave. These chefs—actually their corporate p.r.
people and fawning food media—insist that even if
they were in their restaurants, the head chef
doesn’t really cook much but is more of an
overseer. True and not true. If they are in the
kitchen, head chefs do not simply walk around
seeing if the chicken is ready for Table 12 (which
is the expediter’s job.) But their presence, their
cajoling, their refining of what their staff is
cooking is crucial to getting the best from the
kitchen.On
the assumption that the best chef in the kitchen
is the man whose name is on the door, how could a
kitchen stay in tip-top shape if the master chef
only swings by every few weeks, or even months? Does anyone really believe that these chefs
with management contracts that call for them only
to appoint a chef de cuisine and appear in the
restaurants two or three times a year bounce from
one restaurant to another making sure all is to
their liking, 365 days a year? Do the math: If a
chef owns 50 restaurants, that means he could only
spend one week in each of them per year. Even
given the absurd histrionics of Gordon Ramsay
screaming his head off at minor infractions by his
cooks (below), it shows what a chef-owner
is in fact consumed with. Every chef de cuisine, sous-chef, line
cook, captain and waiter I’ve ever known has told
me that a restaurant is a very different place
when the master chef is not there, so why should
we be paying top dollar for lesser work? Do the
musicians in the New York Philharmonic play as
well if the conductor is off playing golf? What these chefs’ defenders insist is that
their clients choose first-rate staff, which might
be true of the initially appointed
chef-de-cuisine. Yet few chefs stay in one kitchen
for very long, so who is the next chef to be
appointed? The second-in-command? The third- or
fourth? So, too, line cooks and dining room staff
have an astonishing turnover, about which
celebrity chefs are never informed. If you run 50
restaurants, will your manager tell you the pastry
chef quit and the maître d’ moved on? No, that is
the job of the company/corporation that signed
contracts with the celebrity chef. Most important of all
is that the spirit of the master is missing, on
both sides of the kitchen door, when he or she has
not been on premises for months, even years, at a
time. The great chefs want to see their guests,
ask them how the evening has gone, ask how to
improve the restaurant, and make their
presence—sometimes quite a charismatic one—felt.Indeed,
one of the principal pleasures chefs say they get
from their presence is seeing how much people love
their food. Ducasse once said that when he is not
at his restaurant, “The walls sweat me.” Not a
pretty metaphor (maybe it sounds better in
French?), and a very inane one. For, if a chef is
not willing to interact with his staff and his
guests, what exact function does he serve?And
what, after paying $250 per person, do we get for
our money?
❖❖❖
NEW YORK CORNER
By John Mariani
LOVE
AND PIZZA
EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO, I announced
that for
the time being, I was unable to write about or
review New York City
restaurants because of the onset of Covid and
instead published a serialized version of
my 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. For fifty-two weeks readers have
followed her from Columbia University to
Milan, to a budding modeling career and how
falling in love would change her life. Now we
come to the end of Nicola Santini's story, and
I thank everyone who has had kind words to say
about the book.
NEXT WEEK I will be
giving an update of all the places Nicola
Santini visited and ate at in the book, so
that the reader can follow in her
footsteps. The following week, since I
had so much fun serializing Love and
Pizza, I will be starting another
serialization in April of a completely
different kind of novel, but one with plenty
of good food and wine. I hope you'll enjoy it.
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 and
paintings
By Galina Dargery
CHAPTER
FIFTY-TWO
However happy the young lovers
were, Tony Santini matched them upon hearing
the news that Marco would come to work at
Alla Teresa.“Now,” he said to himself, “now we
show people what we can do,” and he dreamt
of the new crowds who would be coming up to
the Bronx to eat at his restaurant. When Tony and Marco met to finalize the
deal, Nicola sat with them, everyone giddy with
anticipation.“Big sister, I love you,” said Tony.
“And, Marco, I don’t know what you two have
going on but you do anything to hurt my sister
and the whole Santini family—plus all of
Belmont—will come after you and kill you.” Marco laughed and said, “Then you will
not have chef.” “Okay,” said Tony, “we’ll just put you in
the hospital for a few weeks and take it out of
your paycheck.” Nicola then spoke up. “By the way, Tony,
we all love the movie star photos on that wall,
but you never did anything with the other wall
over there.” Tony
acknowledged
he just hadn’t gotten around to it and said, “I
also ran out of movie stars.” “Well, then, may I make a suggestion?
Marco, as you know, is a painter, and what he
paints are women and food, very sexy but okay
for a family restaurant. You hang Marco’s
paintings on that wall and you’ll get a lot of
attention, maybe even bring in the gallery
crowd.I’ll
talk to some I know. And Marco can sell them and
make some money.” Tony leaned back and said, “I love it.
When can you hang them up?” Several of Marco’s recent paintings were
soon hung on the blank wall—he’d already alerted
a friend in Naples to be ready to send
others—and the comments by the regular clientele
were very positive. Within a week, he’d sold two
of his works and at very good prices. Tony found a job for his current chef at
another Belmont restaurant, and Marco gave two
weeks’ leave to the Harrisons, who’d probably
squeezed out all of Marco’s publicity value by
then.They
wished him luck, gave him a generous bonus, and
he began to pack up. It took several weeks for Marco to find
his ingredient sources and just as long to train
his kitchen staff, which was largely Mexican.But
when things started to click, the food improved
to the point where those few patrons from
downtown or the suburbs who did eat at Alla
Teresa started to spread the word and it was
very good. Tony and Marco started to see a steady
flow of newcomers who had heard about the
restaurant and came to check it out.When
they got up to leave, they had nothing but
praise for the food and service.Many
wanted to meet the chef.One
couple even said they’d eaten Marco’s food on
Capri. Then, on a Wednesday morning,
the phone started ringing off the hook, both
with reservations requests and congratulations.The New
York Times restaurant critic had reviewed
Alla Teresa and awarded it three out of four
stars—which was a monumental achievement for an
Italian restaurant in New York. “When was the guy here?” Tony asked
Nicola. “They come in anonymously.You’re
not supposed to know them on sight.” “Well, the guy obviously has great
taste.” Of course, Tony’s family protested that
Alla Teresa should have gotten four stars—only
one Italian restaurant in New York had ever gotten
four stars and that was more than ten years
earlier. The review read, “While New York has seen
a broader spectrum of regional Italian cooking
in recent years, none has ever come closer to
reproducing the true flavors of the great
trattorias of Italy’s southern provinces as has
Alla Teresa. Chef Marco di Noë may well be
the best advertisement for cucina
Italiana this city has ever had.”
The news was like a cataclysm, for while
Manhattan restaurateurs knew well the enormous
power of The
Times to drive business, Bronx
restaurateurs had never experienced that kind of
clout.By
the end of that evening, Alla Teresa had turned
the tables twice and Tony and Marco nearly ran
out of food. And the onslaught of satisfied
customers—and great reviews—did not stop.Alla
Teresa was the success Tony had always wanted it
to be; even more, he could not have been prouder
to have achieved what he’d set out to do, and he
knew that Marco and Nicola had been a big part
of that.And
the Bronx had something new to cheer
about.
***
The question of
Marco and Nicola living together was still moot,
but they agreed they’d have to step lightly on
the subject with the Santinis.So the
question of where they would live, separately,
came up fast.Nicola told Marco about the apartments on
Riverside Drive and in SoHo, but he felt he
could not afford a place in either neighborhood
nor was he inclined to live so far away from
work. Marco was in the kitchen at Alla Teresa
making a fresh tomato sauce when he brought the
subject up with a new twist. “Nicolina,” he said, “what would you say
if I got an apartment in Belmont?You
know, I feel very close to my roots here.I can
speak Neapolitan with some of the residents,
really get my food sources right, and I wouldn’t
be so dead tired after work thinking I had to go
back to an apartment so far away.” Nicola thought a moment then said,
“Y’know,Marco,
I have no ties to Riverside Drive or SoHo, and
I’m pretty used to going to Columbia three days
a week for classes.Maybe
I’ll even buy a car.And
I feel the same way you do about Belmont.I
didn't for awhile.I hate to admit it, but I thought I’d
outgrown it and that I had more in common with
the people of Milan and northern Italy.But
I’ve come to see that there is certainly no
better, richer place to pursue art history than
in New York.And my family is here and now you, my
darling Marco. So, okay, I’ll get an apartment
here, too. Maybe in the same building.” “Ha, your family will not like that.” “Okay, maybe a block or two away.The
main thing is that we get to be together.” “Bravissimo,”
said Marco, “and who knows, in a little while
things will . . . evolve.” Nicola kissed him on the mouth with true
southern Italian passion, pinching his cheeks at
the same time. “My God, Nicola, you break my jaw!”
laughed Marco. “Good.Then you won’t talk so much!” Marco kissed her back almost as
forcefully, then, giving himself a little shake,
said, “Okay, I need to work. I need to work!” Nicola tickled him a little as he turned
to the sauce pot to which he had just added a
little salt, pepper and basil. Then Marco took
Nicola’s beautiful hand, put a wooden spoon in
it and said, “Nicola, listen.
Always stir the sauce clockwise.”
Have
Italian Wine Laws Become
a Counter-Productive Farce?
By John Mariani
After years
of seeing more and more Italian wines being
granted official recognition as among the
finest wines being produced, the claims have
started to pale to the point where one wonders
what there is to believe anymore. Back
in 1966, when most Italians could not even name
more than a handful of wines not made in their
own region, one could hardly blame the rest of
the world for having no more than a nodding
acquaintance with any beyond the straw-clad
bottle of Chianti or the soda pop-like Asti
Spumante and Riunite Lambrusco. Travelers to
Italy would find outdated wine lists at
restaurants with dusty bottles of undrinkable
wines sitting on ledges around the room. House
wines were simply terrible. It was time, then, for the Italian
government, in league with Italy’s winemakers,
to set up some regulations by which a label
would promise the purchaser of a bottle of
Italian wine that it was made based on certain
historic traditions and that what the label said
was in the bottle really was in
the bottle. DOC (denominazione
di
origine controllata) laws were established
in 1967 to cover 250 zones producing 650
distinct types of wine. (Italian cheeses had had
such laws since 1955.) These, while not
guaranteeing quality, did prescribe norms of
aroma, flavor, color, alcohol content, acidity
and other factors. A DOCG (denominazione
di origine controllata garantita)
designation, passed earlier but not much used as
of 1980, was a higher standard for delimited
wine zones and guaranteed that the wine was of
superior quality, based on traditional blends of
established grape varieties. Since only five
wines were so designated—Barolo, Barbaresco,
Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile
di Montepulciano—DOCG was far more restrictive
than France’s designation of 60 Bordeaux as crus.
Right from the start, the laws were accused of
being politically promulgated, but there was no
argument that they lifted the reputation of
Italian viticulture to international status and
soaring sales. One real problem was that some of
the most progressive wineries, especially in
Northern Italy, were producing wines that did
not use the traditional grape blends of their
zones, despite being hailed with industry market
names like “Super Tuscans” (below).
These, under the laws, had to be labeled merely
vino da
tavola, “table wine,” just as all non-DOC
wines were. Later on, under protest, the laws
added the label term IGT (indicazione
geografica tipica), meaning little more
than a typical wine of the region. But the
real problem has been how, since 1967, the DOC
and DOCG appellations have expanded to numbers
so high that it’s difficult to imagine how any
wine made in Italy could fail to acquire one.
(The raising of the mediocre wine Albana di
Romagna to DOCG status in 1986 raised hackles
considerably.) By 1992 there were eleven DOCG
wines.By 1998 there were 18; today there are a
whopping 75, which includes many that are but
single estates. There are now also 330 DOC
zones, which, while questionable, is not
outrageous for a country that produces as much
wine as Italy does. What is
questionable—as with most luxury products
today—is how unusual is a wine that gets DOCG
status? Especially since (unlike in France) a
poor vintage might result in all the
wines of that type being delimited to a vino da
tavola label, which in actuality almost
never happens. It’s not as if these wines are
particularly rare. Like Rolexes, if you’ve got
the money, you can buy them everywhere. The
problem is that so many of the DOCG wines made
today have nothing like the quality level they
used to have when rules were more restrictive.
Nowhere is this more evident than with Brunello
di Montalcino, once made by only a half dozen
estates in Tuscany, now pumped out by more than
200.
The producers of Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco
Superiore DOCG are currently boasting of
having 92 million bottles of were
certified DOCG in 2020. There are now oceans of Barolo, many
indistinguishable from Barbera, a lesser
Piedmont wine that now also enjoys DOCG status.
And there are IGT wines that sell in excess of
$150 a bottle whose alcohol levels hit 15% and
higher—a level that appalls most traditional
winemakers and sellers, but currently enjoys
high ratings from the wine media. Part of that
rise in alcohol is due to global warming, though
most of it is due to the way the winery
purposely makes the wine. Because I am a wine writer a lot of wine
comes to my door that I dutifully sample, and
more and more I am tasting $25 wines that taste
every bit as good as $125 wines, particularly
wines from Piedmont and Tuscany. A Barolo from a
small terroir may still result in an exquisite
wine, but another, from an adjacent vineyard
purchased five years ago, may be thoroughly
mediocre and still charge a high price. No one in the wine industry, in or out of
Italy, believes that all the DOCG wines deserve
“guaranteed” quality status, and most believe
that by heaping DOCGs on so many wines, adding
to their numbers regularly, dilutes the
appellation and makes a mockery of the quality
claim. And in the process, the truly superior
wines become allied in the wine media with the
rest. Some of the finest must labor under the
IGT appellation. It seems impossible
that the Italian government will ever reverse
gears and start whittling away at the number of
DOC and DOCG wines currently on an ever-growing
list. Which makes the labeling something of a
farce, not unlike children’s soccer leagues for
which every child receives a trophy at the end
of the season. At a time when all wineries
everywhere are suffering from a glut of product
and dropping sales, especially in restaurants,
having so many receive a politically driven
imprimatur from the Italian government and a 90+
rating from wine media that never give any wine
less than an 85, the only good thing is that
good wines—though not necessarily great
wines—will be available at a cheaper price than
they have been in a decade.
❖❖❖
LEAST APPETIZING FOOD
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"In the Necessary Defense
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2021).
·
Sponsored by
❖❖❖
Any of John Mariani's
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The Hound in Heaven
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But when tragedy strikes, their wonderful dog Lazarus and
the spirit of Christmas are the only things that may bring
his master back from the edge of despair.
“What a huge surprise turn this story took! I was
completely stunned! I truly enjoyed this book and its
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“He had me at Page One. The amount of heart, human insight,
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Perhaps ‘wow’ would be the best comment.” – James
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“John Mariani’s Hound in
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“John Mariani’s concise, achingly beautiful novella pulls a
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“Amazing things happen when you open your heart to an
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enrich our images of family, love, and loss.” – Dr. Barbara
Royal, author of The
Royal Treatment.
Modesty forbids me to praise my own new book, but
let me proudly say that it is an extensive
revision of the 4th edition that appeared more
than a decade ago, before locavores, molecular
cuisine, modernist cuisine, the Food Network and
so much more, now included. Word origins have been
completely updated, as have per capita consumption
and production stats. Most important, for the
first time since publication in the 1980s, the
book includes more than 100 biographies of
Americans who have changed the way we cook, eat
and drink -- from Fannie Farmer and Julia Child to
Robert Mondavi and Thomas Keller.
"This book is amazing! It has entries for
everything from `abalone' to `zwieback,' plus more
than 500 recipes for classic American dishes and
drinks."--Devra First, The Boston Globe.
"Much needed in any kitchen library."--Bon Appetit.
Now in Paperback,
too--How Italian Food Conquered the
World (Palgrave Macmillan) has won top prize from the
Gourmand
World Cookbook Awards. It is
a rollicking history of the food culture of
Italy and its ravenous embrace in the 21st
century by the entire world. From ancient Rome
to la dolce
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pizzerias to high-class ristoranti,
this chronicle of a culinary diaspora is as
much about the world's changing tastes,
prejudices, and dietary fads as about
our obsessions with culinary fashion and
style.--John Mariani
"Eating Italian will
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John Mariani's entertaining and
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won over appetites worldwide. . .
. This book is such a tasteful
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and arouse your appetite for
gastronomical history."--Don
Oldenburg, USA Today.
"Italian
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these establishments are zestfully described
in How Italian Food Conquered the World, an
entertaining and fact-filled chronicle by
food-and-wine correspondent John F.
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"Mariani
admirably dishes out the story of
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cuisine put gusto in gusto!"--David
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"Equal parts
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story of the (let's face it) everybody's
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"A fantastic and fascinating
read, covering everything from the influence
of Venice's spice trade to the impact of
Italian immigrants in America and the
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Ciao
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"John Mariani has written the
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❖❖❖
FEATURED
LINKS: I am happy to report
that the Virtual
Gourmet is linked to four excellent
travel sites:
I consider this the best and
savviest blog of its kind on the web. Potter is a
columnist for USA
Weekend, Diversion, Laptop and Luxury Spa Finder,
a contributing editor for Ski and a frequent contributor
to National
Geographic Traveler, ForbesTraveler.com
and Elle Decor.
"I’ve designed this site is for people who take
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Eating Las
Vegas JOHN CURTAS has been covering
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VEGAS – The 50 Essential Restaurants (as
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He can also be seen every Friday morning as
the “resident foodie” for Wake Up With the
Wagners on KSNV TV (NBC) Channel 3 in
Las Vegas.
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.