Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [73]
I never really knew how to cook pasta before. Here, dried pasta was blanched in small, undercooked batches and laid out unrinsed and still warm on lightly oiled sheet pans before being finished in sauce a few minutes later. Fresh pasta and thin-cut pasta was cooked to order.
Pasta was cooked the right way. Meaning, the penne, for instance, after saucing, stood up on the plate in a mound, rather than sliding around on the plate or being left to drown in a bowl.
'You want to taste the pasta,' explained Gianni, 'not just the sauce.' It was, I must admit, a revelation. A simple pasta pomodoro - just about the simplest thing I could think of, pasta in red sauce - suddenly became a thing of real beauty and excitement.
All the food was simple. And I don't mean easy, or dumb. I mean that for the first time, I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product. Homey, peasant dishes like Tuscan bread soup, white bean salad, grilled calamari, baby octopus, tender baby artichokes in olive oil and garlic, a simple sauteed calves' liver with caramelized onions, immediately became inspiring and new. The clean, simple, unassuming integrity of it all was a whole new approach, very different from the sauces and squeeze bottles and exotic ingredients of my recent past.
The fear level was not too bad, possibly because Rob was there. He'd call up on speaker phone at odd times and make hideous groaning and slurping and choking sounds over the PA system. And Gianni seemed comfortably expert in navigating the canals and vias of Pino's empire; he was apparently a centurion in good standing, so I felt comfortably under his protection.
I was set to meet the man himself in a few days, so he could take a sniff of the new chef candidate with the French-sounding name. Wisely, I decided to do my homework. I read Pino's two excellent books: A Tuscan in the Kitchen - much of which was about the opening of Le Madri - and Fish Talking, an ode to the tiny, oily little fishes and now neglected seafood items of his childhood in Italy. I read them with real interest, particularly Fish Talking, which shared in its appreciation of 'garbage fish' an attitude with my earlier mentor, Howard Mitcham. Pino, whatever you might say about the man, clearly adored food, and it came through in his books as well as in his restaurants. At one point in one of his books, Pino discusses his near heartbreak when standing by the antipasti bar at Coco Pazzo, when he used to ask some of his regular guests to sample some fresh anchovies or sardines only to have them decline. His frustration with the difficulty of trying to get his guests to even try something he found so wonderful made an endearing impression on me.
I knew, when given an opportunity to cook for the man, what I was going to do.
We met at Le Madri and went over my resume - thankfully without too much scrutiny. Pino is one of those guys who puts a lot of stock, I think, in his first-hand impressions of character when interviewing a candidate. The meeting went well.