SILVANO MARCHETTO FROM DA SILVANO
Anyone who loves Italy knows Italians are famous for their proverbi, or their sayings. When contemplating what makes Da Silvano—the trattoria with the bright yellow awning on the cusp of Greenwich Village and Soho in New York—an unparalleled success, one adage in particular comes to mind: Cambiano i suonatori ma la musica e sempre quella (The players change but the music remains the same). Owner Silvano Marchetto's signature dish—homemade gnocchi with lobster—echoes this sentiment.
"Gnocchi was my mother's specialty. I came up with the idea of making it with lobster, and it has changed my life," says the ebullient, blue-eyed Marchetto. "Everybody else makes lobster with pasta, but I found that, with Yukon Gold potato gnocchi, it blends very well. The essence and tradition of the dish remains, but the taste is much better."
In a city with no shortage of Italian restaurants, Da Silvano is a standout not only because of its age-old music (hearty Tuscan specialties with an haute twist) but because of who is conducting. Marchetto is a throwback to the proprietors in Treviso, his father's hometown, who make it their business to know every name in the neighborhood. It's just so happens that the names in Da Silvano's neighborhood are De Niro, Lohan and Didion.
Marchetto's career, like his discovery of the unorthodox lobster-gnocchi combination, has been built on a series of happy accidents. As a teenager in Florence, he got his first restaurant job when the college in which he was enrolled to study drawing was over-registered. ("I started from the bottom," he says. "I'm not one of those guys who at forty suddenly decides to become a chef.") After nearly two decades of casual friendship, he discovered a romantic connection with the woman who would become his wife. And then, of course, inspiration presented itself in the form of the aforementioned carbohydrate. In cooking, as in life, sometimes even the slightest adjustment can take things from ordinary to extraordinary. As Marchetto says, "It's the sauce you add that makes it interesting."
His sense of style is certainly that. It's evident in everything from the waiters' crisp pink shirts to the pale pink color the lobster sauce turns when a tablespoon of finely chopped tomato is folded in.
"I have a very good palate and an eye for design, for presentation," says the man who pairs kelly green pants with a periwinkle button-down shirt—and pulls it off.
Perhaps it is Marchetto's style that has made his relatively small operation command central for Manhattan's media, literary and celebrity elite since it opened thirty-one years ago. The gnocchi has gained a fan in Da Silvano regular Gwyneth Paltrow. "They all come here all the time, the famous people. It's hard to remember what they all order," he shrugs.
When a scene from Sex and the City was filmed on the restaurant's patio, Marchetto was vacationing in Italy and did not plan the menu (hence no gnocchi). "I know they had an artichoke because I saw it on TV," he says.
But the most notable woman his cooking has charmed is his wife. Although she'd been dining at Da Silvano with her parents since she was seventeen years old (the same age Marchetto was when he stumbled into cooking school), New Yorker cartoonist and writer Marisa Acocella had no inclination to become Marisa Acocella Marchetto until one night when she shared an impromptu drink with the owner. "She's a person who takes life with happiness," Marchetto says proudly. "One night we had a drink together, and the very next day, we started going out." Acocella Marchetto recently penned a triumphant graphic novel, Cancer Vixen, about her victory over that disease. Like her husband's beloved crustaceans, these two appear mated for life.
CELESTINO DRAGO FROM DRAGO
When Celestino Drago first arrived in Los Angeles twenty-seven years ago, diners there were not known for their Italian food sophistication. Only twenty-two years old, Drago was working in the kitchen of the now defunct Orlando Orsini, a restaurant that catered to what its customers thought was Italian. "They loved heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs," recalls the Sicilian-born chef. "We Italians don't eat huge plates of pasta, and I had never heard of a meatball. Then there was the pesto, which had so much cream, the pasta would be swimming in it."
On the head chef's day off, Drago would quietly cook dishes truer to his native cuisine, but they were not always a resounding success. One day he prepared cunigghiu a la stimpirata (sweet and sour rabbit), a specialty from his region. When a waiter explained the dish to a woman lunching with her young daughter, the little girl burst into tears and the pair promptly left the restaurant.
On another day, a customer ordered veal piccata, which Drago lightly floured and cooked to perfection with white wine, capers and fresh parsley. To his surprise, the diner sent it back. "He wanted bell peppers and cheese and I don't even know what else. I explained to him that was not piccata. He was sure he was right: 'Listen to me, you little kid,' he said. 'I've been eating veal piccata since before you were born, and I sure as hell know what goes in it.'"
At that moment, Drago knew he had to open his own restaurant. He believed that if he served the dishes he loved from childhood, his customers would learn to love them too. Still, he faced yet another problem: Americans in those days considered only Northern Italian cuisine worth eating; they had not yet discovered the joys of the sun-drenched Southern regions. Drago had to slowly introduce the dishes he most wanted to cook.
One of his favorites was vegetable timbale. "This dish defines my palate, my birthplace," says Drago, who was raised on a farm that produced all the family's food. "The only things my family bought in the store were sugar and salt," he remembers. "I had never cooked in a Sicilian restaurant—or even eaten in a fancy one." His father used to regularly prepare a stewlike vegetable dish, which the family loved. Years later, at his restaurant, Drago combined the recipe with eggs, breadcrumbs, tomato sauce and a bit of cheese. The result stands on its own as a simple yet flavorful ode to his childhood: "For me, this dish is my father."
Drago's story is, in the end, as sunny as Sicily's climate. Los Angeles diners grew to adore his regional cooking and he was surprised by how easily he achieved success there. After twenty-five years, he is an icon who introduced the pleasures of southern Italy to American palates. Drago now sits atop a mini empire; his restaurants include Drago Ristorante, Celestino, L'Arancino, il Pastaio, Enoteca Drago, a bakery in Culver City and a catering company. Drago has consistently been ranked one of the top Italian restaurants in Los Angeles since opening Drago in 1991. And it all came about by being true to himself, his country and, of course, his father's timbale.
TONY MANTUANO FROM SPIAGGIA
As the head chef and partner at Spiaggia—widely heralded as Chicago's best Italian restaurant—Tony Mantuano has dined with the likes of President Clinton and Princess Diana. He is a veteran of guest spots on PBS, CNN and the Food Network. And last year, the James Beard Foundation named him Best Chef Midwest. So naturally, we asked Mantuano which dish he would make if stranded on a desert island, with only enough resources for one meal. It seemed the best way of cutting through the fanfare, to get to the essence of his cooking style.
"Cappellacci di zucca," the master chef says immediately, explaining that it means pasta hats with pumpkin. "The filling—pumpkin, Parmigiano-Reggiano, amaretti cookies, breadcrumbs and mostarda di Cremona—walks the tightrope between sweet and savory very well." But it's not just the taste of this stuffed pasta that Mantuano adores. It's what the dish represents: authentic Italian food, perfected over hundreds of years.
Mantuano grew eating his grandparents' Italian cooking in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They tended a vegetable garden, ran a small grocery and cooked dishes from their native Calabria. Back then, his grandparents didn't know they were inspiring a future chef. But it didn't take long for Mantuano to begin his ascent.
After college, he trained at Milwaukee's Nantucket Shores and, after five years, left to become head chef at Pronto in Chicago. It was around this time, in the early eighties, that Chicago restaurateur Larry Levy was looking for a chef to take the reins of his newest and most ambitious venture, Spiaggia. One of his employees, Cathy Roeske, suggested that Mantuano might fit the part. (It just so happened that she was also Mantuano's fiancé.) Levy asked Mantuano to cook a dinner for him—and was so impressed that he sent the happy couple to Italy for a year to study under some of the country's most esteemed chefs. They were to bring the new knowledge to Spiaggia upon their return.
Soon, the newly wed Mantuanos found themselves in Lombardy, in chef Nadia Santini's kitchen at dal Pescatore. When Mantuano tasted her dish of pasta hats with pumpkin, he realized that simple cooking could be sublime. "Cappellacci di zucca had been served in Lombardy for hundreds of years," he says, "yet that day, in 1983, it still tasted very modern."
As Mantuano spent the year training at notable kitchens throughout Italy, a doctrine began to take shape: "History and tradition became very important to my cooking," he says. "I will never forget the late Franco Colombani at Albergo del Sole in Maleo. He had an incredible collection of very old cookbooks bound in sheepskin; he'd look to them for inspiration when creating a new menu."
Indeed, Mantuano was discovering that even though he was about to pilot a highly anticipated new restaurant—the centerpiece of a new $100-million-dollar building on the famed Magnificent Mile—he would not have to reinvent the wheel. He brought traditional regional Italian recipes refined with modern eating habits in mind back to Spiaggia. Although he innovates, he relies on tradition to guide him, and he knows what happens when it doesn't.
"The time we made cappellacci di zucca back in the States, we omitted the mostarda, because it was 1984 and that ingredient was not commonly found here," Mantuano recalls. Mostarda is fruit, such as apples, peaches and apricots, which is candied in syrup, white wine and mustard seed. "But it's impossible to achieve the complexity of the dish without it," Mantuano recalls.
This is not to say that variations on capellacci di zucca can't be good. "I've seen some American chefs use a Gorgonzola sauce or add toasted walnuts or pine nuts," he says. "That's fine for them, but I knew a perfect dish when I tasted it."
Restaurant critics from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Magazine seem to agree: Spiaggia is the only Italian restaurant to receive four stars from both. He left Spiaggia in 1990 to cultivate his own group of restaurants but he returned to the helm in 2000. ("It was like reuniting with a lost love," he says.) Needless to say, cappellacci di zucca remained in his rotation through it all.
"It's funny—this dish is even a staple at our family's Thanksgiving meal," he says today. "It's the pumpkin ingredient, I suppose."
Now a seasoned veteran, with two restaurants currently under his leadership and a third—Enoteca Spiaggia in South Beach—on the way, Mantuano sticks to what has worked for generations. "The flavors must reflect the culture of Italy; the ingredients must be sourced in Italy," Mantuano says. And, as always, no flashiness or over-the-top experimentation, Mantuano maintains: "In the words of cookbook writer Marcella Hazan, 'In Italian cooking the most important ingredient is the one you leave out.'"
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