Dirty Dishes Read online

  Once Pino and I were alone, it was immediately clear that something was very much amiss in his professional life: he seemed never to stop sucking down cigarettes, and there were aluminum take-out containers with half-eaten cheeseburgers on his desk, a far cry from the porcelain plates streaked with tomato and olive oil and the drained wine glasses I had seen on earlier visits. And yet, when we sat down to work, he was able to compartmentalize whatever it was that was going on and give me his complete attention. We’d meet in the conference room and interview for hours, often wandering off on a tangent, never to return to the work at hand. The picture he painted of Tuscany was pure magic: a dreamscape of sunflowers and vineyards in the summer; a darkly romantic hill country hugged by rolling fog in the autumn. He spoke of food, especially his mother’s, in a way that I had never heard anybody speak about food, describing everything from after-school snacks to New Year’s Eve feasts with a passion that made me feel diminished to have been raised anywhere else.

  At some point in every evening, Pino would call down to the restaurant and minutes later we’d hear the elevator bell ding and a runner, dressed in black pants with a white shirt and black vest, would arrive in the conference room holding a dinner tray aloft: two orders of spaghetti AOPP (shorthand for aglio, olio, pomodoro, e peperoncino or garlic, oil, tomato, and pepper flakes—it’s one of Pino’s signature dishes, a simple pasta that can be made, start to finish, in the time it takes for the spaghetti to cook), and vodka martinis, which the waiter would pour into chilled glasses, leaving each of us another martini and a half, milkshake-style, in the shaker.

  It was about this time that David did have a problem with Pino, who had begun falling months behind on his public relations bill. I would later learn that in order to finance his dream project—a combination restaurant, retail store, and marketplace in Rockefeller Center—he had folded his handful of successful restaurants into a larger venture that was failing before the ink on the paperwork had dried. This was no small development: his restaurants—Le Madri in Manhattan, Sapore di Mare in East Hampton, and Coco Pazzo in both New York and Chicago—were trend-setting goldmines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and putting them on the line was a perilous roll of the dice. As we shot the breeze over martinis and pasta, and he painted his big, broad brushstrokes of Tuscany, he was holding an astonishing amount of heartbreak and fear at bay. It wouldn’t be until much later that I would learn the full extent of the dark seas he was navigating in those days, of how close he came to losing his entire empire.

  What follows is the story of Pino Luongo, from his childhood in Tuscany through his days as an actor in Rome, emigration to the United States, and rise and near-total fall as a restaurateur in New York City. For the record, it was his idea to pull his collaborator out from between the lines of the text and have his story told in the way it’s laid out here, with snippets of the meal we shared as he first told me his story. Maybe it’s because he recognizes that he’s larger than life and, like paintings of a certain size, can only be fully absorbed from a distance. Or maybe it’s that, like the novelists of whom Fitzgerald wrote, Pino understands that, for better or worse, he isn’t a single person but many, and that any attempt to neatly package him, or to tell his story strictly from the inside out, was doomed to fail.

  Or perhaps it’s simply that he best expresses himself in the kitchen or at the dinner table—settings that, as you are about learn, have been the two constants in his life and are the only places where he truly feels at home.

  Andrew Friedman

  New York City

  September 2008

  ONE

  The Fugitive

  FOR ME THE journey was always about food.

  Whenever I made the drive from Rome, where I lived and worked as an actor in my twenties, to Grosseto, a sleepy Tuscan town about one hundred kilometers southwest of Florence, in the flatlands of Maremma, my mother’s cooking came to mind, which was nothing unusual; I thought often of her food because I had yet to discover a restaurant in the Big City whose offerings compared to what Má turned out in her modest home kitchen.

  Zooming back there in early October 1980, in my four-door 1968 Lancia Fulvia sedan, I would have loved nothing more than to be headed for a routine family dinner, but that was far from the case. I didn’t know quite how this visit would end, but I was certain that there would be pain, and that it was the last time I’d be able to see my hometown for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever.

  Nevertheless, as I drove, I kept my fondest memories in mind for as long as possible, most of them centered on my mother and her love of food.

  MY MOTHER, MAFALDA, was and remains a brilliant and intuitive cook. A strong and striking redhead (friends likened her to Rita Hay-worth), she came from a large family: legend had it that my grandmother, who married at sixteen, gave birth to twenty-one children. Piecing together the family’s oral history, I can only come up with a dozen, but her number may be right: some of her kids died heartbreakingly young, while others were killed or assassinated by Mussolini’s soldiers during World War II. In any event, by the time I was born, my mother had six surviving siblings. As they tell the story, when they were younger, the only two girls were my mother and her sister, Marcella. As the boys matured and took up the family fishing business, Mafalda and Marcella were educated in the kitchen so they could help their mother prepare dinner every night. They received fish dripping wet from the family nets, and the lone means of preventing perishables from spoiling was keeping them on ice, so the teachings were thorough: they learned how to butcher and clean just about every variety of fish, as well as how to preserve, cure, and smoke it. Because they ate a lot of eels and bluefish, my mother developed an un-shy palate, and because the kitchen was comically small—four burners were clustered tightly together on the stovetop, the oven was narrow, and the counter space was limited—she learned how to be ruthlessly efficient, whittling recipes down to their essence and producing the most flavor with the fewest possible ingredients and steps.

  Má never worked in a professional kitchen, but by the time she became a parent, cooking was such an extension and reflection of her life, it became a natural means of self-expression, right down to how she demonstrated her love for her children. One of my first memories is of sitting at the kitchen table in the early mornings. I suffered from colitis as a toddler, and she served me the home remedy of the day, barley coffee. I remember sitting there, dwarfed by the adult-size chair, letting the smell of coffee and toast wash over me, and watching her strut her stuff, readying breakfast and lunch for everyone, and sometimes prepping dinner as well. Two of my earliest memories are those smells and the cool, creamy ricotta cheese that I spread on the warm toast before eating it. I’d dip the bread in the coffee, and when I drained the last sip from the cup, there would be a pile of bloated crumbs resting there. There was a kind of simple perfection down in the bottom of that cup, and it never failed to enthrall me.

  My given name was Giuseppe, but from earliest memory I was called Pino, a shortening of the common nickname for kids with my name, Giuseppino. Mothers rule in Italy, so once my mom took Pino as a term of endearment, everybody else quickly fell into line and adopted it. My father was a medic in the Italian air force, so we moved every few years. When I was born, we lived in Florence. In 1961, when I was eight, we moved near Lago di Garda, another small town, this one in the north of Italy, then returned briefly to Florence in the mid-sixties, and then in 1965 we moved to Grosseto. My favorite room in each of the four apartments we lived in was the kitchen. Come to think of it, we never used the dining rooms, which became dusty and neglected spaces to do homework or the family bookkeeping. I guess we all wanted to be as close as possible to where my mother did her cooking, maintaining a kind of umbilical relationship. Má always told us that she cooked because having family around the table twice a day was the most important thing in life. The kitchen was her domain, and she wanted everything to be perfect, so much so that if we got into a protracted argu
ment, or began punching each other or throwing food as little kids are wont to do, she’d slap us. But that rarely happened; we all respected her table because . . . well, how can I explain the sound of people laughing and making noise and being together and eating?

  Most Italians passionately love our native cuisine. It’s a source of personal passion and communal pride. I say “native” rather than “national” cuisine because Italy is only truly understood as a collection of twenty regions, each with its own dialect, legends, and culinary customs. For example, generally speaking, Piedmont is the home of truffles and relatively rich food (translation: lots of dairy), and of little ravioli called plin; Naples is the place for pizza and for pasta sciue’ sciue’ (a quick dish in which partially cooked pasta is finished in a mixture of pureed tomatoes and olive oil) and zuppa maritata, the famous “marriage soup” with escarole and tiny meatballs; Sicilian food is infused with the flavors of North Africa and Spain, reflecting the genealogy of the people who live there; and so on.

  Our region was Tuscany, and Tuscan cuisine is known for its use of beans, vegetables, and mushrooms, its soups and fish stews, its game in the inland areas, and its shellfish along the coast. Thanks to Má, I revered Tuscan food even more than most kids my age did, even more than my siblings did.

  I never questioned my attraction to food; it was just part of who I was. I could watch my mother do anything related to cooking, even mundane prep work, all day long. There was nothing my mother couldn’t make. She was a great broth and stew maker, whether it was capon broth or the fish stew called cacciucco, which was a window into her upbringing: she’d procure fresh fish from the local monger and clean it herself, first cutting off the tail and head and then reaching inside and jerking out the guts before filleting the fish and portioning it out. She sautéed the head and tail with olive oil and garlic, added tomato and basil, then water, and let the mixture simmer. She processed this aromatic concoction through a food mill, and it became the base for the stew. To complete the dish, she wiped out the pan, heated some olive oil and sliced garlic, then lay slices of bread in the oil and toasted them on both sides until crisp and golden. She topped the bread with the filleted fish, then with the milled sauce, and set it to simmer until the fish was cooked and the flavors had mingled.

  My favorite seasons were fall and winter, when the windows were closed, trapping the aromas in our home. The dishes of those seasons require a longer preparation and she would begin early in the morning. I’d see her braising cavolo nero (black cabbage) or making ribollita, a twice-boiled soup that you cooked the day before, refrigerated in the pot, and reheated the next day, when the vegetables would all have broken down and integrated. Ribollita demonstrated my mother’s love of individual ingredients and attention to detail. Most cooks would simply simmer the vegetables together in the broth, but she sautéed each one on its own to coax out its full flavor before adding it to the pot.

  The winter also brought the holidays, when it seemed my mother had no life outside the kitchen; she was there when we woke up and there when we went to sleep. The night before Christmas, she’d make a sweet dough called cenci and a semolina dough for pasta. After dinner, my father would go to bed, and the rest of us would stay up late watching television, but we’d still hear her rustling about in the kitchen. When I arose on Christmas morning, the air would already be dense with the sugary scent of the cenci, which she fried in strips then drained on towels and kept on hand to serve visitors along with glasses of syrupy, sweet vin santo (“holy wine”). Next came the scents of meat, wine, and herbs as she began making lamb stew. I’d scamper into the kitchen and find her sautéing lamb in an enormous roasting pan that she rented every December and that covered all four burners of the stove. It didn’t fit in the oven, so once we were all awake, my father and I bundled up in our coats, scarves, and hats and carried it a few blocks to the local bakery, where they’d cook it in their oven for her. Then we’d drape a towel over it to keep it hot, lug it back home, and serve it with the rest of the meal, a classic Tuscan affair that combined regal and rustic: brodo di cappone (capon broth) with stracciatella (ribbons of egg that cook in the broth) served alongside a crostino of chicken liver paté spread over warm bread; spinach and ricotta ravioli sauced with a meat ragù; the lamb stew, with bitter broccoli rabe and roasted potatoes alongside. For dessert, there was panettone, a classic Christmas sweet bread stuffed with raisins and candied fruits, or panforte, a very hard, thick, fruit-and-nut cake of the Siena area, depending on what struck Má’s fancy that year.

  I was my parents’ first son after three daughters, so my mother had a soft spot for me. When I became interested in cooking, she was happy to teach me, and some of my first lessons came during New Year’s Eve, when she prepared dinner for about thirty people in her little kitchen. She’d show me how to hand-roll pasta, flouring the rolling pin and work surface to keep the dough from sticking and rolling in tight, short strokes followed by longer, looser ones to ensure a uniform thickness. We’d roll one sheet like this, top it with little mounds of filling—usually ricotta cheese flavored with a sweet liqueur—then lay another sheet on top, letting the pasta conform to the mounds. We’d then cut the ravioli using the lumps as a guide and seal the edges with a fork. When we’d add them to hot oil, she’d say, “When you put them in, they are floating like little boats about to sink. When they just begin to bob, they are ready.” She also let me help her stuff pork chops, slicing a pocket into one side and filling them with lentils, then showing me how to pan-sear the chop on the stovetop and finish it in the oven.

  Spring and summer brought their own touchstones. With the annual thaw came fava beans (the quintessential way to eat them in Tuscany is raw, right from the pod, with a loaf of bread and a chunk of fresh, soft pecorino Toscano cheese on the table for slicing as accompaniments), peas, asparagus, and of course baby lamb, which was always the centerpiece of Easter dinner. Early summer brought zucchini blossoms, which Má lightly battered and panfried, and late summer of course meant tomatoes, which had endless applications: you could make them into a bruschetta (diced tomatoes and garlic served on a toasted crouton), fashion a quick salad with red onion and blue cheese, toss them cold with hot pasta as a salsa cruda (uncooked sauce), and can them for cooking in the winter. My mother also had a trademark use for tomatoes that spoke to her independence and creativity: she would cut them open and rub them on slices of country bread until the juice dampened it. Then she’d refrigerate the bread slices and have them waiting for us as an afternoon snack. I don’t know whether or not she was inspired by the components of gazpacho, but once the tomato-tinged bread was in your mouth, the flavor and textures were similar.

  That’s the way in our home: we never knew what Má would serve next, and every day brought a family classic or a whimsical surprise that deepened my appreciation of food and cooking.

  AS WAS THE case in just about every city and town in Italy until the 1970s, there was a farmers’ market twice a week in each of the places we lived, and my mother took full advantage of it. My favorite one was in Grosseto. Even to this day, Grosseto remains a fairly medieval town with walls around it. Back then, on Wednesday and Friday, there was a produce and fish market in the square just inside the enormous old city gates, where farmers, each specializing in one or two items or types of items, set up carts and tents. Fish was displayed on ice, vegetables were piled high on long tables or in crates or baskets. On Fridays, just outside the gates, there was another, larger market like a bazaar where you could buy glassware, chinaware, and kitchen gadgets. It was so big and drew so many people that the roads in and out of the square were closed for the day.

  I usually accompanied my mother on Friday, especially in the summer when school was out. We walked to the market because the bus was sporadic, and if you missed one it was just as quick, about twenty minutes, to get there by foot. Má taught me that you have to touch and smell everything you buy. With peaches, you had to ensure the skin was velvety and deeply hued, and
that they were firm but with a little give. She also warned me to never buy the big ones because they could look ripe on the outside, but be rotten at the pit. Pears were about the stem: if it was firmly embedded, that was a sign of freshness. She had advice like this for everything: Always choose the skinnier zucchini because “the fatter they are, the more water there is” (same for eggplant). Buy tomatoes when they are light red or orange-green, unless making soup, in which case you want them bright red and cracking open from ripeness.

  Her ability to evaluate fish had been so well imparted by her mother that she needed do little more than look at one to know how fresh it was. She’d haul a sea bass out of its ice by the gills and look it in the eyes like a police interrogator. If the eyes were clear and bright, the fish was good. With shellfish, such as clams, she showed me how to check that they were sealed tight and were heavy with captured liquid, both of which indicated the mollusk inside was alive.

  My parents had relationships with many of the farmers that dated back to the end of World War II. In our tight-knit community, if one of the farmers or his family was sick, my father would discreetly take them some of the medicine he had access to as a medic. In return, they’d point my mother to the best fruits and vegetables: zucchini, green beans, and tomatoes were her favorites. She often took me along on trips to the actual farms, where we’d load up a plastic bag from home with anything we wanted and they never charged us. My mother loved that no money changed hands, not because she was cheap or expected anything in return for my father’s kindness, but because she felt it kept her relationship with the ingredients pure.

  BACK HOME, IN the kitchen and at the table, my mother educated my palate, explaining what made each dish work, and also taught me the basics, even how to butcher everything from chicken to rabbit, which she had picked up as a young housewife in Orbetello. But perhaps the most valuable gift Má passed on was the ability to wrest great flavor from a handful of basic ingredients. In many ways, the seemingly more complicated French cuisine is more easily mastered than ours because Tuscan cooking depends less on techniques and formulas than on muscle memory and intuition. You can’t truly appreciate this until you try to make a salad from nothing but shaved baby artichokes, lemon juice, olive oil, and parmesan shards; fegato alla salvia, thinly sliced calf’s liver with brown butter and sage; or pappa al pomodoro, a dense tomato-and-bread soup made from late-summer tomatoes and stale bread—it’s a Tuscan staple, with the tomatoes, bread, garlic, and olive oil fused into a savory porridge. Another of my favorites was uova all’occhio di bue, which translates directly to “eggs, cow-eyes style,” our way of referring to sunny-side up, which Má made by heating a cast-iron pan over a high flame, then swirling two drops of olive oil in the pan to keep the eggs from sticking. She’d then turn off the gas, crack two eggs in the middle of the pan, making sure the yolks were centered, then sprinkle a scant pinch of sea salt over them. She’d let them cook on the pan, over the turned-off burner, which was a neat trick for making sure they didn’t overcook and that the yolks stayed runny. Once in a while, my mother would combine those last two dishes, poaching the eggs gently in the pappa al pomodoro—a dish she called uova alla francesina. Francesina is a popular expression that Tus-cans toss around, but that nobody can actually define; the application made perfect sense, however, because her instincts for naming were as sharp as her palate. It just worked.