Eating Italy: A Chef's Culinary Adventure (23 page)

THE 7 CLUB WAS FULL OF GORGEOUS ITALIAN WOMEN WORKING OUT. WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE OF FROSIO, THE GYM WAS MY SAFE HAVEN BETWEEN SHIFTS AT THE RESTAURANT. BUT SINCE CLAUDIA AND I STARTED DATING, I HADN’T WORKED OUT IN WEEKS. IT WAS GOOD TO GET BACK IN THE GYM.

When I got back to work, I finished icing the last of the
piccola pasticceria
(petit fours), one of my specialties. During lunch, Jack Donadoni came into the kitchen and told me that Stefano Arrigoni was in the dining room and wanted to know who was making them. Stefano was the owner of Osteria della Brughiera, another Michelin-starred restaurant just down the road from us in Villa d’Almè. Tall and artistic, Stefano came for lunch at Frosio once a week and was impressed with my desserts. When I came out to talk with him, we hit it off right away, and he said I should come to La Brughiera for dinner.

“You should definitely go,” said Jack. “The food is incredible. La Brughiera is one of Bergamo’s thirty Michelin restaurants.” Jack was always bragging about Bergamo being called “
la città più stellata
,” “the city with the most stars,” and Lombardy having the most Michelin-starred restaurants in all of Italy. I’d already eaten at several of them and felt lucky to have cooked at two of them—Frosio and Loro. It was time to check out another.

La Brughiera opened in 1991. Over the years, Mario Batali, Michael Schlow, and other Italian restaurateurs in America have eaten there. It’s a shining example of simple, refined Italian food. Stefano also owns an art gallery in Bergamo, and the physical spaces of La Brughiera are impeccably designed—a perfect blend of contemporary and rustic. You enter the restaurant through an iron gate leading up a pebbled walkway past a minimally decorated patio with umbrella-covered tables. In the foyer, stunning paintings—both modern and classic—adorn the walls. The dining rooms are to the left. The
cantina
, to the right. When Claudia and I came for dinner, Stefano’s father, Walter, was in the cantina, slicing dark red prosciutto and deeply marbled coppa on a gleaming antique Berkel meat slicer. Guests are invited to linger in this dimly lit wine cellar with some Franciacorta and hand-carved salumi before heading to their tables for dinner. Hundreds of wine bottles line the old stone walls, and a green marble table offers all manner of homemade pickles, cheeses, breads, and salumi. Stefano brought Claudia and me past the meat slicers, through a brick archway, to the cavernous curing room, where pancetta, guanciale, prosciutto, culatello, culaccia, and other sausages hung on meat hooks from a wet ceiling. Kneeling on the floor, he pushed the lid off a chilly tomb of Carrara marble to show us thick slabs of rosemary-rubbed
lardo
curing, layer upon layer, inside. For a moment, I was transported back to the Mangili butcher shop by the salty smell of aging meat and fat.

As we reentered the cantina, Stefano told me that his chef, Paolo Begnini, started in 1996, just a few years after they opened. Paolo is a tall, broad-chested guy with thin eyebrows. Paolo handed Claudia and me each a piece of unsalted bread rubbed with tomato and two-day-old fresh sausage. Suddenly, it seemed that all of my culinary experiences of the past year, from butchering to baking to dining to home cooking, were captured in that one bite of bread and meat.

Claudia and I sat down for dinner and the dishes came to the table without a single order. Treviso with shaved artichokes,
fried egg and fresh local cheese. Veal and truffle pâté on toast with a salad of guinea fowl, cipolline onions, and hazelnuts. Squash gnocchi stuffed with porcini and topped with Parmesan fonduta and shaved white truffles. Bavette pasta with baby octopus and sage. Scampi with caramelized citrus. Panfried veal brains with green beans and mustard vinaigrette. Pan-seared duck breast with citrus, cauliflower butter, and duck liver pâté.

This was the kind of food I wanted to cook more of! The ingredients were impeccable; the techniques, flawless. Paolo’s pasta was ethereal and perfectly married with the sauce. His flavor combinations were concise. Presentations were uncluttered. Every dish rang true. Even desserts were a revelation. Passion fruit soufflé with pineapple-ginger sorbet. Light and crispy apple fritters with cream and cinnamon. Molten hot chocolate puffs with bourbon vanilla crema.

I felt like I’d been given a great big bear hug by the chef. For the Italians, when you walk into their restaurant, it’s like walking into their home. Even though we’d just met, both Paolo and Stefano welcomed us like old friends. That dinner lasted until two in the morning as Stefano sat with us, pouring vin santo and nibbling
cantucci
(almond cookies). He asked me about America, how Claudia and I met, and what we hoped for in the future.

Over the next several months, we went back to La Brughiera again and again. It became our favorite restaurant. By this time, I’d eaten all over Italy in various restaurants in various regions. But I still found Paolo Begnini’s cooking to be the most inspiring. Every time I ate there, I learned something new. His taste was slightly more Tuscan than Bergamascan yet unlimited by allegiance to any one Italian region. He employed ingredients and techniques from all over Italy and the world, using the full range of his talents as a chef. He traveled to Tuscany to get the best coppa, sought out the best
prosciutto in Parma, and bought the best local produce from Bergamo, putting most of it on the menu and preserving the rest. He made use of every culinary technique he had mastered and constantly researched and tested new ones.

By the end of that year, I was full of inspiration but completely out of money. As an American, I didn’t have a work visa and couldn’t get a legal job. Luckily, Frosio offered to keep me on at the restaurant and pay me under the table. I had told my dad I would send home money to pay off my school loans from the Culinary Institute of America. It wasn’t easy to stay in Bergamo, but I had to. Important things were happening. With Claudia, it wasn’t just another crush. And with my cooking, it wasn’t just another chef job. I was maturing as a chef and as a person. I was falling in deep.

That winter, I moved in with Claudia and her mom.

SMOKED COD SALAD
with
FRISÉE
and
SOFT-COOKED EGG

Marco Pierre White used to serve a sunny-side up egg on panfried whitefish. I loved that. The idea here is similar, but the egg is soft-cooked in the shell. You peel off the top third of the cooked white to expose the egg yolk. When you slide your fork into it, the yolk flows out onto the fish, enriching it like a ready-made sauce. With some pancetta in the frisée salad, it makes a salty, crunchy, sharp, sweet, bitter, creamy start to a meal.

MAKES 6 SERVINGS

1½ pounds (680 g) skinless cod fillet, cut into 4 to 5 pieces of equal thickness

2 tablespoons (6 g) minced chives

3 tablespoons (45 ml) olive oil

3 tablespoons (42 g) unsalted butter, melted

Juice and zest of ½ lemon

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

6 large eggs

2 ounces (57 g) pancetta, cut into ⅛-inch (3-mm) cubes

1 tablespoon sherry vinegar

2 small heads frisée (about 3 ounces/85 g total), cleaned and torn into bite-size pieces

Maldon sea salt for garnish

Set up a smoker by putting 1 cup (50 g) of wood shavings or small chips, preferably oak or apple, in the bottom of a roasting pan and setting the pan on the stovetop so that the chips sit directly over the heat of the burner but the rest of the pan is not over the heat. Put a rack in the pan and line the rack with parchment paper. Heat the wood shavings over medium heat until they start to smoke. Set the fish on the paper away from the heat, cover the pan tightly with foil, and smoke until no longer translucent in the center, 15 to 20 minutes, making sure the wood shavings emit smoke the entire time.

Transfer the cod and its juices to a mixing bowl and add the chives, oil, butter, and lemon juice and zest. Season with salt and pepper and mix gently, adding more oil, if necessary, to make the mixture moist and glistening.

Bring 2 quarts (2 L) of water to a boil in a medium saucepan and fill a large bowl with ice water. Carefully add the eggs to the boiling water and boil for exactly 5 minutes. Immediately transfer with a slotted spoon to the ice water and let stand until cooled, about 3 minutes. When cooled, carefully remove the shell from each egg. Using a paring knife, lightly score the white around the more narrowly pointed end of the egg, and carefully peel off the white with your fingers just enough to expose the top one-quarter of the yolk without breaking it.

Cook the pancetta in a sauté pan over medium heat until lightly browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Pour the rendered fat into a measuring cup and measure out 3 tablespoons (45 ml). Discard the rest. Put the vinegar in a medium bowl and whisk in the rendered fat in a slow, steady steam until incorporated and thickened. Season with salt and pepper and then add the frisée and pancetta, reserving a few pancetta bits for garnish. Toss to coat.

For each serving, put a 6-inch (15 cm) ring mold on a small salad plate. Fill half of the ring mold with the cod mixture, forming a semicircle. Fill the other half of the mold with the frisée salad. Unmold the mixtures and place an egg directly on top. Sprinkle with the remaining pancetta bits, black pepper, and Maldon sea salt. For a more casual presentation, divide the salad and cod among plates and top each serving with an egg.

RIBOLLITA RAVIOLI
with
BORLOTTI BEANS
and
TUSCAN KALE

At La Brughiera, I noticed that Paolo Begnini would do the unexpected, riffing on classic preparations with a little twist of his own. I did the same thing here.
Ribollita
is a classic Tuscan soup made from scraps of meat, “reboiled” the next day with vegetables, and served in ceramic bowls. I simply made pasta out of the same ingredients. The beans are simmered, mashed, and simply seasoned for the pasta filling. Vegetables are stewed in their own broth, with some extra olive oil to thicken the broth. I didn’t introduce any new flavors. This is just ribollita in a different form. The ravioli freeze well, so you can enjoy them again, or just cut the recipe in half to make less.