Best Food Writing 2010 (18 page)

GINO CAMMARATA, GELATO KING

By Sarah DiGregorio From the
Village Voice

As restaurant critics for the
Voice
, DiGregorio and her counterpart Robert Sietsema tend to cover the low-profile restaurants that their uptown colleagues ignore—thereby catching the real pulse of New York life. Case in point: this profile of one Bay Ridge restaurateur.

G
ino Cammarata talks to himself while he shops. Sniffing an orange, peering at bottles of olive oil, he mutters unhappily in Italian, remembering the smell of tangerine peel in October and the fragrance of ripening olive trees. “When I go shopping, I go crazy,” he says. If there’s anything that would make you an obsessive about food, it’s growing up in Sicily, like he did, on a farm where your father cultivates citrus, olives, and peaches. Where your grandmother always has a surplus of fresh goat’s milk. Where you work in your uncle’s restaurant, as a 10-year-old gelato-making prodigy.

Cammarata, who moved to New York in 1970 when he was 15, has just opened Piattini, a Sicilian-inflected restaurant in Bay Ridge where he serves his now-famous gelato, along with dishes like bucatina with sardines, linguini with bottarga, charcuterie, and various fish and meat secondi. Cammarata’s story is an immigrant’s tale of making it (and not making it) in New York, but it’s also a parable of the city’s restaurant industry over the last 25 years—skyrocketing rents, condos replacing restaurants, and the little guys ending up in Brooklyn.

The Cammarata family left their farm, and the “modern, American-style” gas-station-cum-restaurant owned by Gino’s uncle, to settle on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. There, Giuseppe, Gino’s father, got a job at Zampieri Brothers Bakery on Cornelia Street. “All his life, he was cold,” says Gino, describing the chilly early mornings his father spent in the orchard. “And he always wanted to become a baker so that he could be warm.”

Imagine leaving a small Sicilian farm town and arriving in Greenwich Village in the ‘70s. Hippies filled Washington Square Park—Gino thought they were exotic and fabulous: “The long hair! The guitars! I never wanted to go back to Sicily. I thought, here, I wouldn’t have to go to school.” The food was a different matter. In those days, the pasta was mushy and the tomato sauce sour. He started eating nothing but ham and eggs. On the weekends, he delivered bread from Zampieri to legendary venues like the Rainbow Room and the Waldorf-Astoria, chatting up the chefs along the way. After starting at 1 a.m., he always reached a certain midtown Italian steakhouse around 6 a.m., where the chef would give him a glass of wine.

On a recent Tuesday, the day Piattini is closed, I stopped by the restaurant to talk to Gino and check out his gelato machine. Gino is a garrulous, sturdy, middle-aged man, in a loose, white linen shirt tucked into chinos, with a gold chain around his neck. He’s prone to proclamations like, “Good food, good wine, and good women, that’s all I want!”

Gino pats his gelato maker as you would a good dog. He bought the squat, Italian-made machine in 1987, and has been lugging it around with him ever since—wherever Gino and that machine go, his followers scamper behind, seeking out what is considered the best gelato in the city. “It’s my Ferrari,” he says of the contraption. The machine churns out nine-liter batches, turning Gino’s mixtures of milk, cream, and flavorings like ricotta, licorice with mint, hazelnuts, and Sicilian pistachios into miraculous confections. The cassada—a frozen version of the Sicilian cake of ricotta and candied fruit—is a dense, creamy concoction that tastes more like ricotta than ricotta.

Back in 1982, Giuseppe—along with Gino, his brother, Enzo, and their mother, Maria—went out on their own and opened an Italian gourmet shop and restaurant called Siracusa, after the region where the family came from. This was just as well, because a year or two later, Zampieri Brothers closed to make way for condos. Siracusa was situated on Fourth Avenue near Astor Place, a kind of culinary no-man’s land at the time, populated with bookstores.

At Siracusa, Gino was in the kitchen with his parents, while Enzo worked the front of the house and the wine program. The restaurant sold Italian groceries and served Sicilian standards. In 1984, in the
Times’s Diner’s Journal,
Bryan Miller praised the gelato, the pastas—like fettuccine with porcini—and the Italian wines (a bottle of Barbera d’Alba for $9!).

But as the restaurant became more popular, the family dressed it up until it resembled, in Gino’s words, a grand hotel lobby. The look didn’t work for the neighborhood, so when the lease was up in 1992, the family closed Siracusa, made repairs, and revamped the dining room. They reopened as Bussola Bar & Grill, which had a more casual, affordable approach.

Still, the house specialty was Gino’s gelato, and when Ruth Reichl visited in 1997 for a Diner’s Journal, she gave the pasta with bottarga special mention, before noting, “The Cammaratas have always made great gelato. That has not changed.” Alas, when 9/11 rolled around, business suffered. Then, in the old familiar story, the landlord cranked up the rent from $5,000 a month to $35,000. The neighborhood was gussying up, and the Cammaratas could no longer afford to be Manhattan restaurateurs. They closed Bussola Bar & Grill in 2002. Later, the space became Ippudo.

“It was so sad. [The restaurant] was my life, me and my brother,” Gino says. He disappeared from the city for five years, working on the line as the pasta guy at a resort in the Hamptons. Then the resort was sold to make way for, yes, condos.

So Gino did what many New Yorkers priced out of Manhattan did before him—he moved to Brooklyn. (Actually, he already lived in Bensonhurst.) He and his trusty gelato machine set up in an unlikely location: a tanning salon in Bensonhurst, selling gelato from a small window. But then he found a proper spot on Fourth Avenue and Marine Avenue in Bay Ridge, and he and Enzo decided to give it another go.

At Piattini, the gelato machine is ensconced in the back, behind a small freezer display case holding the lovely green pistachio confection, the nut-dotted hazelnut, the licorice, and the blood orange-almond milk. On the handsome wooden tables and chairs, diners slurp up the Sicilian classic—bucatina with sardines, raisins, and cauliflower—and crunch on the small fried polpettes that Maria taught Gino how to make, in salt cod or squash-and-pistachio versions. Actually, Maria still likes to putter around, and sometimes takes the bus from Bensonhurst to fry up cartocci (fried shells), which Gino fills with shrimp and mascarpone.

I wished Gino luck as I headed out the door—and meant it. He replied that business was “beautiful.” “You should see the Verrazano Bridge at night!” he exclaimed. “It’s kinky!” Silence. “Not kinky! What do you say? Funky! It’s funky!”

WILL WORK NIGHTS

By Jason Sheehan From
Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen

Reviewing restaurants for Denver’s
WestWord
magazine, and now for
Seattle Weekly
, Jason Sheehan doesn’t just describe a meal, he somehow divines the inner life of a restaurant. As this flamboyant, picaresque memoir reveals, it’s an insight bred from his former life as a chef.

E
leven P.M. Sixty minutes before the first rush. On the line, they’re lighting everything. Fryers are being super-heated, burners roaring. The four front flattops and the two in the back—the cake grills—are being cleared and wiped clean of oil. Sheet pans are being laid over the grills, double-stacked, and even the ancient gas four-burner is being coaxed to life. Usually it remains covered with a thick, custom-fitted plastic cutting board, used for storage, as a shelf on the already overcrowded line. There’s nothing on the menu we can’t do on the grills, in the fryers, in the two nukers bracketed to the wall above the cold table. It’s faster not to use burners.

Only now, the cover is popped and all four rings are blazing merrily away, bleeding flames across the grated top because the gaskets are worn and the gas lines leaky.

“Why are we eighty-six?”

I get icy, pissed-off stares; quiet wrath. Nothing. I’m going to kill Lucy. I figure this is all Wendy’s fault somehow; you don’t just bring someone new into the family without asking.

“Look, guys. If this is about
him
”—pointing—“I had nothing to do with it. I just—”

Freddy kicks the front of one of the fryers. “It’s Friday, dude. What the fuck?”

“I know, Freddy. That’s what I told Lucy.”

“This isn’t about him,” James says.

“Dude, fish.
Fish
!” Freddy is shouting now. “It’s fucking Friday. Where’s all the fucking fish?”

I stand stunned. And then I fold as if punched, right up around the impact point of the sudden realization of what I’d forgotten. I close my eyes. Brace my elbows on my knees. Pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers. Try not to scream. Shit, shit, shit . . . .

Behind me, James is muttering, talking to himself. Freddy’s still yelling. Hero, laughing, slapping the board with his spatula. “You suck, wheel!”

It’s Friday night. And this being Friday night in upstate New York (all full of Catholics—Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics and Polish Catholics, Catholics who’ve come here from everywhere that Catholics have fled)—that means fish fry. Fish dinners with fries and a monkey disk of milky-sweet coleslaw, fish sandwiches going the same way, both battered and dumped in a fryer sequestered just for this foul, noxious, evil duty. Not just a tradition, an edict. God’s law. Friday fish fry.

How had I forgotten to check on the fucking fish? Favorite trick of the dinner crew: not pulling the tubs of cheap, rock-hard haddock fillets out of the coffin freezer in the back for their slow thaw. In a water bath they take two hours or more. Dumped out on a prep table and allowed to collect bacteria, even longer. The fish would’ve been on special all night, written up on the board by the front door, put on a menu insert, programmed into the servers’ POS system: SPEC FRY or SPEC SANDY. They’d probably served two hundred fish dinners earlier, would’ve gambled on how few cases to pull to leave us maximally screwed.

From my wounded hunker, I ask Freddy, “How many fillets we have?”

“Six, man. And they all stink.”

I try to think. We’ll only do half as many orders tonight—it technically being Saturday for most of the shift—but I can’t have the fish pulled from the menu. Friday fucking fish fry is pure heaven on any restaurant’s books—a fast mover with low food cost, high menu price and customers commanded by God to eat it or else they’ll go to hell. I blame the Pope, the dinner shift, the management, everyone. But the last, best curses I save for myself.

Then I stand up straight. I look around at my guys, at Wendy. Briefly, I wonder if there’s still some way I can blame this on him. “All right. Wheel sucks. I forgot to check the fish. My fault.” Mutiny in the eyes of the crew.

“But we know what to do,” I continue. “We can do this. Freddy, whatever fish is in the coolers, bury it. James, set the pans. Hero, get the hose. Freddy, on me when you’re done. Wendy, on James.” I step up to the pass, lean across the gleaming, hot aluminum, ducking my head under the glowing heat lamps, looking for Lucy. I call her over, tell her where we’re at. “How’s the floor?”

The floor is mercifully empty, servers rolling silver, slicing lemons, preening, staring dumbly at the walls—whatever servers do when there are no customers to pester. I tell Lucy to stall any new tables that come in as long as possible, then we break.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS to do a fish fry at a short-order restaurant.

The first is to slow-thaw a bunch of haddock fillets in a forty-two-degree prep cooler or under cold tap water in a clean sink. Once thawed, the fillets then need to be individually inspected; trimmed, if necessary, of excess skin or blood-dark belly meat left attached by the fishmonger; laid out on clean paper towels and stacked three deep in a clean, dry fish tub. The tubs are then stacked Lincoln Log-style in an upright ready cooler or lowboy. As soon as an order comes in, a single fillet is delicately lifted from its bedding and the company of its friends, dusted with flour and gently, lovingly dredged through a pan of room-temp beer batter made sweet and strong with buttermilk and a good stout. The gummy fish must then be thinned by running it between the index and middle fingers—sur plus batter scraped back into the pan—and only after all this can the jacketed haddock be placed carefully into a hot fryer using a swirling motion: introducing it to the heat slowly to keep the fillet from curling as the batter tightens and to keep the batter itself from just bubbling away. There’s a motion to it. A grace. Work one Friday night on fryer station in Catholic country and you will never forget it.

A couple minutes in the oil and voilà: perfect fried haddock, golden brown and puffy, religiously satisfactory and ready to be plated alongside crisp french fries and cold coleslaw. That’s the way to do it right.

Then there’s the way we do it in a hurry (the way we do it tonight):

1. Collect from the freezer the eighty pounds of frozen haddock fillets that the dinner crew neglected to pull. The fish is already separated into ten-pound consignments—each batch a solid block of chunky gray ice inside a stiff-sided but flimsy plastic box. The boxes are heavy, slippery, annoyingly hard to handle. They’ll take the skin right off your hands if your hands aren’t bone-dry. When the crew is hurrying, the odds of a broken toe from a dropped box go up dramatically. Doesn’t happen tonight, though.

2. Take those boxes out the back door, pull off the locking lids, set them up inside empty bread racks braced at an angle against the back wall, and let Hero open up with the power sprayer we use for cleaning the floors and the grease out of the hood vents. With the hose screwed into the hot water tap and the sprayer turned against ice, it might as well be a flamethrower.

3. Power-wash the shit out of the fish tubs until the steam stops and the ice starts to crumble, stopping periodically to set back up the racks that have been pushed over or to retrieve the icy fish bricks that have slipped from their boxes and gone skittering off into the gravel. During these interludes, the chances of the sprayer “getting away from” Hero and “accidentally” soaking either Freddy or me are 100 percent. Tonight, Hero gets Freddy while Freddy is lighting a cigarette, his timing perfect, catching him just as he bends to cup the flame of his lighter against the wind. Freddy jumps, sputters, charges and takes a running swing at Hero. This just gets him another shot with the hose. The two of them need to be separated briefly. I shove Hero aside, tell Freddy to go back inside, and he does, shaking water out of his long, ratty blond hair.

4. Bring the partially thawed cases into the prep kitchen, dump them out on the tables, and split the disintegrating fish-cicles length-wise into twenty portions, preserving as many whole fillets as possible. Place each chunk of fish ice into a long, shallow metal baking pan called a hotel.

5. Walk twenty laden hotel pans onto the line where James (with Wendy’s bewildered assistance) will have set up deep bains
¹
on every available hot surface, each filled with a few inches of (hopefully already boiling) water.

6. Set hotel pans on top of bains, making twenty scratch double boilers, and cover hotels with plastic wrap, now making twenty jerry-rigged pressure cookers.

7. Wait. Smoke cigarettes. Bicker angrily with crew. Freddy is off in his corner by the fryers (standing post for the absent Juan), muttering under his breath and staring death rays at Hero. Hero just keeps laughing. This is going to come to a head soon, but not yet.

8. After ten minutes or so, pull the plastic wrap off the hotels, and what you have is eighty pounds (give or take) of surface-poached, center-frozen, limp gray haddock fillets and a god-awful stink. To get rid of the stink faster, pop the filters out of the ventilation hood and just let that baby roar. Hero does this, climbing up between the grills and pulling the greasy filters out of their tracks. The suction immediately snuffs the flames on the four-burner. This is going to come back to haunt us, too. But not yet.

9. Because they are now half-cooked, the fillets will flake to pieces at the least prompting. Look at one wrong and it’s likely to dissolve into fish mush and ice. Owing to this physical instability, they can no longer take the pressure of being dredged in batter so must be casseroled. In assembly-line fashion, bring in a new set of hotels. Layer each one with batter, ease in as many fillets as it can hold using a long spatula, then cover with more batter. Stack the pans back in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up the batter and shock the fillets, then remove to the ready cooler. As orders come in, shovel fillets gracelessly into the oil. Fry long and hard. Carefully remove to plate for service.

10. Pray to whatever god might be listening that no one catches you.

Oddly, the fish actually tastes pretty good this way.

Well, maybe not
good
, but less bad than you’d think. Flaky and slightly oily outside, mid-rare in the middle. In texture it’s not unlike a poached fillet of sole, and in flavor only as bad as frozen haddock ever is—which is pretty bad even under the best circumstances.

The real problem is, going into the oil cold (and often still frozen in the center), the fillets will drop the temperature of the fryer oil precipitously. This screws with the fry cook’s timing, and when cooking for drunks—especially
lots
of drunks—the fry cook’s timing is of paramount importance to the synchronization of the rest of the kitchen. It also makes a terrible mess, pisses off the dishwashers, breaks about a dozen different health codes.

And it’s just wrong.

You probably think that wouldn’t matter to a bunch of guys like us. But it does. It matters a lot. If you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, you understand what I’m talking about. You know that little catch you get in your chest when you’re doing something you know is wrong. And if you haven’t worked in a kitchen, you’ll just have to take my word for it. All the bullshit, the punching, the posturing, the macho crap; all the bad behavior and criminal impulses; all the hard talk and pleasure-seeking and shameless conduct—that’s all true. That’s The Life, the atmosphere in which so much food is created every day. But it’s also true that we want to be
good
.

Not good people. Not good citizens. Not good in any general way. A lot of us (and I’m talking about all cooks here, not just the four guys standing with me on this line) prefer the opposite of good so long as we can get away with it.

But we want to be good at what we do because being good at what we do is what saves us—balancing out all the rest, at least in our minds, at least in
my
mind. Someday, when the heat comes down, when they finally slap on the leg irons and the Hannibal Lecter mask and lead me off to come-what-may, I want my guys to be able to say, “He was a good cook. Sure, he was a reprobate, a degenerate animal. Always broke. Always borrowing money. He was a foulmouthed, bad-tempered, cross-eyed, snaggletoothed, brain-damaged, tail-chasing fuckup and a total wreck of a human being. But man, Sheehan could really cook.”

That would be enough, I think. Mitigation—that’s all I’m after. And I’m not alone in that. I’ve known chefs who’d scream and curse and throw pans and torture cooks for any little slight. I’ve known guys who went to jail for stealing food stamps from old ladies, for sticking up convenience stores; guys who would work any angle, screw their friends over for a buck, behave in ways that are just unimaginably bad. But I’ve seen these same knuckleheads quit good jobs rather than do wrong by the food. I’ve watched them take pride in the perfect placement of scallops in a pan, in cutting a microscopic
brunoise
, in standing up under fire on a Friday night with a bunch of other like-minded bastards, throat-cutters and fuckups without blowing it for the team.