FORK PLAY May 29, 2008
In the Dark at Bianca. Sugar Blizzards. Napa Valley Ambassador, Chocolate Immersion
Dear Friends and Family.
Parts of Manhattan were so deserted over Memorial Day weekend, it was possible to imagine the entire population off to the beach or whooping it up in the  Berkshires. The usual Friday traffic jam on West End had vanished. As we zoomed down 11th Avenue I expected to see Will Smith marching uptown with his gun and his dog looking for another human being. How happy he'd be to see the two of us and Mr. Singh.
But that whole I Am Legend fantasy faded as we hit the Village. Streets were jammed. Obviously every bridge and borough had been crossed and all roads led directly here. It took forever for the cab to creep along Bleecker Street to Bianca, at #5, where clots of youngish twos and threes paced the sidewalk and blocked the door defiantly, waiting for the non-reservable tables to turn.
I didn't remember Bianca as quite so antic, so riotously noisy. Tables seemed closer, or surely, fuller. There were several parties of six or eight and one that kept expanding and contracting to a dozen and everyone was shouting to be heard.
It was dark too. Seriously dark. That's the Road Food Warrior in the photo using his flashlight to see his pasta. "I like to see what I'm eating," he kept muttering.
But it's Bianca after all, the beloved, homey, welcoming, crazily cheap (entrees $15 or less) Bianca that brings the cash-strapped back again and again and stars in their heartfelt blogs. So why shouldn't we shout at each other, power up our keychain spotlights and enjoy? Gnocco fritto from owner Giancarlo Qualteri's home turf, Emilia Romagna, to start, feathery light balloons of fried dough to stuff with stracchino cheese or top with salami -- or to sandwich a little of each, one gnocco leading inexorably to the need for a second. Perhaps the kitchen was stretched by the holiday weekend demand. "Our chicken livers are rare," the manager had assured us when I asked. But they were not. He offered to send a second batch but we demurred.
And while the calamari of the seafood spiedini was fine, the shrimp emerged tough little carbonized critters. It was sad to see four little quarters of a small fried artichoke around a tangled forest of fried parsley oozing fat even at such gentle prices. What was great - and maybe worth the trek, the dim and the din - were the pastas, priced at a prewar (any war) $9.50 to $11.50. Huge portions, steaming hot: Luscious lasagna. First-rate seafood tagliolini. And marvelous gramigna - little elbow macaroni - in a tomatoey toss of sausage and pepperoni. Half way through I ran out of steam, passed it on, tasting my friend Andrew's chicken, pleasantly stewed in balsamic (because That's My Job), and Karen's cotechino on potato puree that would be perfect after skiing all day.
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Confectionary Sugar Attack
Did you, like me, think blizzards of confectioner's sugar on desserts, doilies, bottoms of sherbet glasses and your sleeve were history? Alas, this pastry style edict has not filtered through to whoever mans or womans the powdered sugar shaker in home-style Italian restaurants. I persuaded Fiore in Williamsburg to give up the addiction. The intense chocolate of the caprese and the freshness of the polenta cake now comes through untortured. But Luca, Bianca, Cacio e Vino, are you listening? For so many years it was accepted that Italian desserts were uninspired: store bought cassata slices in the colors of the Italian flag, chocolate-coated ice cream truffles, ricotta cheese cake if you were lucky and maybe a cannoli. Or was that later on? Boring. I wrote it myself in my early reviews. I guess some saw powdered sugar as the only way to go. But two decades of great Italian restaurants - the Tony May and Lidia Bastianich years, the reign of Mario Batali - the homey apple and walnut cakes, the torte de nonna, the exploitation of tiramisu (I deeply regret my role in the epidemic, but tiramisu didn't start out to be a cliché), the endless possibilities of semi-freddo, gelato and sorbetto in the hands of inspired cooks. The splendor of Italian dolce now and yet to be discovered is fact. No sugar flurries needed, please.
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Loveable Italians
If you go to my site and scroll down towards the bottom of the home page to "Loveable Italians," you'll see I have dared commit myself to a roundup of favorite Italian restaurants. I won't be shocked or offended if you  disagree. There are times when I quite clearly feel that my preferences are more than just personal taste. I have been so rash as to suggest there is a kind of Aristotelian standard on what is good in food and my mouth knows it. But I do think what you or I love in Italian restaurants is highly personal. You may treasure the genius and complexity of Fabio Trabocchi at Fiamma and the complexity and exuberance of Michael White at l'Impero and Alto more than the simplicity and perfection of the sea creatures coming out of David Pasternak's kitchen at Esca that thrills me. I happen to like Lupa more than Del Posto, which I also like, and both more than Babbo. Celeste never ceases to please me (even with its "cash-only-no-reservations policy") for the crispness of its pizzas and that astonishing cheese plate. I love the fried dishes too but I try not to order them in my perverse priority of artery cloggers. See Kiss Me, I'm Italian. A first tasting at Scarpetta is in BITE this week. I love having Scott Conant back in town with his all time favorites. Email me what you love about your favorite Italians. Your blog may show up in our new feature: Reader Noodles (see bottom right hand column on home page). Check out what our Insatiable Reporter Sylvie Bigar tasted at the revised Tutto Il Giorno in Sag Harbor
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Ambassador from Napa Valley
The death of a rare and powerful figure who touched your life is always doubly sad. Robert Mondavi was 94, silent in a wheelchair, his last years full of loss. That was saddening too. But as Eric Azimov observed in his Times celebration of Mondavi's legacy, he was an irrepressible showman who reinvented himself several times and was the reinventor of Napa Valley and the American Wine industry as well. Feisty and unabashedly promotional, I remember him from the days when he surrounded himself with fun. It was during the late Seventies that I spent several weeks basking in the indulgance of his hospitality. He was secretly courting his public relations director, Margaret Biever, who would become his second wife, and he had given the bankrupt High Tree Farms Cooking School of Michael James and Billy Cross a new home at the Mondavi Winery.
I flew out from New York with Jean Troisgros who was the magnetic star of the first session. I recall the dim hours after a magical lunch reading aloud from my novel Blue Skies, No Candy, to a circle of gasping but encouraging blue-haired ladies, when Jean ran off to play tennis. Mondavi announced he was getting closer these days to a really good Pinot Noir. He pulled out a bottle of a vintage Echezeaux from the Romanee Conti - a great Burgundian - and poured it to taste against his own Pinot Noir. How rash, I thought, blind believer in the eternal superiority of the French and the accepted judgment that Napa would never produce a worthy Pinot Noir. It was 1976. How daring. Even though the Echezeaux was still not yet at its prime drinkability, it tasted like a Pinot Noir and Mondavi's had a way to go, as he himself observed, not the least bit flustered by the upshot of his spontaneity. "But we're getting closer."
Many years later we met Bob and Margaret for dinner at the French Laundry. "It's our local," the Mondavis told us. "We go all the time because we live in Yountville." Bob said he had fully recovered from the surgery for his two artificial knee implants. "I'm not only taller," he said with a triumphant gesture, "but my sex life is better."
Margaret smiled not at all demurely.
He had brought a bottle of his own Chardonnay that had just won some competition in France. "It's very rare and they don't have it on the list here," he said. He then proceeded to order Mondavi Cabernet and later a bottle of his Opus One from the Laundry cellar. At retail. Tightwad that I am, I was definitely impressed. I saw the two of them occasionally afterward at ceremonial evenings. The Mondavi family often supported Citymeals-on-Wheels at fund-raising events. But it was the intimacy and the playful, irrepressible Bob Mondavi trading tastes of Thomas Keller soups in demitasse cups that I will remember.
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Total Immersion in Chocolate
The Road Food Warrior and I dropped into Serendipity last night to taste the first prototype of the sundae I dreamed up to celebrate their new cookbook, Serendipity Parties, and benefit Citymeals-on-Wheels. Yes, my fantasy  sundae was chocolate-on-chocolate - don't faint from shock -- maybe even a bit too chocolate if that is possible. I was especially thrilled by the 24K gold leaf sprinkled on top, flown in fresh daily from Switzerland, I want to believe. The full price of my sundae, arriving June 10, will go to deliver meals to our homebound neighbors.
Meanwhile we bonded with Glenn, a proud Serendipity veteran of 11 years who confided that President Bill comes in from time to time - so far without Hillary (I am not surprised -- surely she would be no fun nagging him to eat healthy and smugly sipping her ice tea.). Bill likes the chicken nachos and the apricot smush, according to Glenn, who says he invented the Strawberry Fields sundae (and Yoko, also a regular, didn't mind at all). He pronounced it schmoosh and pointed one out to us as it was trundled by. Huge. Four straws.
By the way Serendipity may be the last place in town to buy the hard cover of my memoir Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess. I'm shelved right near Wonder Woman, the cookie jar.
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Photos of Scarpetta's calamarata pasta, Scott Conant, and my Serendipity chocolate sundae prototype may not be used without permission from Steven Richter. The photo of Steven in the dark is by Karen Page.
Fork Play by Gael Greene, copyright pending 2008
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