Mangia!

Two chefs collaborate to show that when everything comes together, Italian-American cooking is fine cuisine

by Naomi R. Kooker

They are in the same heated kitchen. The steam billows off the boiling pasta water like a special effect. But it's authentic, right down to the shiny sweat beading the brow of chef Ralph Conte.

Conte has GQ good looks. At 43, he still appears much too young to have been in the restaurant business for more than 20 years. He moves through his spic-and-span kitchen with confidence, but also with the eagerness of a child trying to please his parents. Here at Providence's Raphael Bar-Risto ("Raphael" is Conte's first name in Italian), he and his staff have taken all day to prepare a dinner for about 75 people to promote John Mariani's latest book, The Italian-American Cookbook: A Feast of Food from a Great American Cooking Tradition (Harvard Common Press, 2000; $16.95).

Author John Mariani has a picky palate. He has made his living as Esquire magazine's food and travel correspondent for the past 20 years, and has also written numerous food-related books. He and his wife, Galina, spent months testing and refining his new cookbook's recipes. With his debonair platinum hair and boyish looks, Mariani, at 55, could also grace the cover of, well, Esquire.

He's in the kitchen with Conte, who is giving him a preview of the evening's meal. Dressed in a suit and tie, the author displays keen interest as he follows the chef. He peers into pots and leans in for a look when Conte pulls away some aluminum foil to reveal tubes of sim- mering beef -- the braciola, pronounced

MANGIA!, continued from cover

"brah-j'YOH-lah," according to Mariani's book. "Good," he says of the brown meat snugly rolled in the pan. (Mariani writes: "In Italy, the term braciola refers to a slice or chop of any kind of meat, whereas in America the word has taken on a meaning of a slice of meat that has been wrapped around other ingredients.") The food writer has eaten more braciola stateside than in Italy, where, he says, it is less likely to be fussed with or overstuffed.

"Use up all the sauce you can," he instructs Conte.

"It's going to be very sloppy," the chef says, almost as a warning, then quickly adds: "It's going to be rustic, okay?" He slides the pan back in the oven to join the others. Mariani gives an absent-minded "Aya," and they move on to the next thing.

Both men specialize in Italian food, but their personal tastes and philosophies put a wedge the size of a fine pecorino romano between them. Conte likes to throw oregano cream on his tagliatelle and a candied-ginger reduction on his honey-orange-mustard roast pork loin. Mariani would rather keep it simple and do without the fancy sauces or multiple garnishes that can mask a dish's basic ingredients.

Tonight, it's Mariani's show. The menu is not chef Conte's "progressive Italian" cuisine, which focuses on modern presentation of the classics. Rather, it comes directly from the more traditional Italian-American Cookbook (which just won first prize in Forward magazine's cookbook category and has been nominated for the International Association of Cooking Professionals awards).

And so, in his own kitchen, Conte is biting his tongue -- sort of. He is complying with Mariani's wishes, although asking a chef not to prepare food in his own style is like asking Michelangelo to paint by numbers. But Conte, wearing his starched chef's coat and a white napkin tied at his Adam's apple, is doing everything in his power to please his guest.

While Conte explains exactly how the dishes will be executed, Mariani nods with thoughtful approval, saying little. What Mariani wanted for tonight's dinner is what you and I might find if we sat down to Sunday dinner at the ancestral table of the Contes or the Marianis: simple Americanized Italian food.

This Italian-American cuisine, says Mariani, is a legitimate genre worthy of attention -- and veneration -- on its own merits. The question is: what exactly is Italian-American cuisine, and how is it different from, well, Italian? For starters, there will be no fancy garnishes, nor will there be any "progressive" presentations.

In other words, tonight's menu reads like that of a typical Italian-American restaurant: clams casino, fried calamari, beef braciola with polenta. And at the end, pears in red Chianti, with cinnamon, clove, vanilla, lemon, and ginger.

In the kitchen, the fragile collaboration continues. The most significant communication occurs in what remains tacit between the two gourmets. The halibut is just in today, says Conte. It is a pearly-white flat fish with some of its flesh cut away. Mariani says the portions are "perfect." The fish will be sautéed and served with puréed potatoes and wilted arugula. Nearby, the freshly cleaned calamari drains in a colander. It will be lightly dusted with flour and cornmeal, then fried. Green asparagus spears slumber in their prosciutto blankets, ready to be lightly breaded, fried, and served to guests who will swoon and coo over such simplicity.

The kitchen is caught in the quiet before the storm: later, everything will be cooked à la minute. The steam gathers over the pasta water, awaiting the penne that will be cooked al dente, drained, and then, according to Mariani's recipe, slightly buttered before saucing.

Politely, the chef and the author trade techniques. "Why do you sauce the penne with butter?" Conte asks Mariani.

"It just gives a little gloss to it," Mariani responds. "And it helps pick up the sauce. " In the United States, he says, "they foolishly rinse the pasta, which gets rid of the starch that holds the sauce." The Italian chefs drain the pasta, then put it back in the pan with a little butter. It gives the pasta a nice flavor, and it helps make the sauce stick.

Conte delves deeper: "Is there a term for that?"

"Mantecato," says Mariani, in an accent that reflects his frequent travels to the Boot. "It's the term they use when you put it back in the pan and bring it all together."

The steam from the pasta water rises like thick smoke and then evaporates into the air.

`That's amóre' -- and it's also economics

Ralph Conte is a Cranston man, born and raised. John Mariani is a New York boy from the Bronx. Both remember sitting down to Sunday dinners featuring the platters of food that are the cornerstone of Italian-American cooking.

Conte's family is from a little town outside Naples, in the Campania region. But he says he grew up on "exactly" the dishes Mariani has in his cookbook. "A lot of vegetables," says Conte. "Meat was very rare because of money."

At 12, Conte started washing dishes in restaurants. He attended Johnson & Wales University in Providence, but on June 17, 1978, his life changed. He had a motorcycle accident that was so severe it mangled his right arm. At 20 years old, he was told he would never cook again.

Conte didn't accept it. After a stint cooped up in the hospital squeezing tennis balls for physical therapy, he decided to try his own method of recovery: he headed to a friend's restaurant in Miami Beach to cook one-handed by night and bask in "youth and life" on the beach by day. Soon after, he headed to Italy, where he cooked his way through restaurants on the outskirts of Florence and around Naples. (Eventually, his own form of physical therapy, coupled with a series of surgeries, would restore about 70 percent of his right arm's function.)

He returned to the United States a year later, in 1979, and opened his first restaurant, a 30-seater in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Shortly after, the mayor of Providence, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, approached Conte about opening a restaurant there. Conte obliged, and in 1984 opened Raphael Bar-Risto. He moved its location within Providence twice before ending up at One Union Station, where the cosmopolitan restaurant currently seats 100.

John Mariani's family also hails from Campania. His maternal great-grandmother came from a town just south of Naples. His father's father was from a small east-coast fishing village, Vasto, in Abruzzo. He recalls going to his aunt's house for Sunday supper; there was always pasta, his mother's homemade gnocchi, and the usual breadsticks wrapped in prosciutto. And there would always be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or a roast chicken as well. "Somewhere along the line she got a recipe for Yorkshire pudding," Mariani says. His ties to Italian food are passionate. He travels to Italy twice a year and in 1998 published The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway Books).

But when Mariani was asked by Harvard Common Press publisher Bruce Shaw to write The Italian-American Cookbook, he hesitated. Wasn't there so much on Italian food already? What more could be said about it? And then he realized that bookstore shelves might be overflowing with Italian cookbooks, but there was nothing that explained the oversize portions one gets at Vinny Testa's or how spaghetti and meatballs found its way onto nearly every American diner menu. "Nobody really treated it as 100 years of Italian food culture, which has changed radically since World War II, and changed radically with the availability of new ingredients," says Mariani. "We never had extra-virgin olive oil. You could never get fresh halibut. You never saw polenta, and look at these wines!" He gestures to a table where slim bottles of Brezza Barolo and barbera d'Alba are lined up like soldiers. "These wines were never available 15 or 20 years ago!"

In essence, says Mariani, Italian-American cuisine came from the hearts of those who left their country because they were poor, and wanted to find the riches of the new land. For example, "pizza was a food enjoyed exclusively by the poor people of Naples, who folded over the dough and ate it as a kind of sandwich," he writes.

Mariani and Conte might never have broken crostini together had their families remained in their ancestral homeland. But tonight, in Conte's small kitchen, they work together. Their mission is to reintroduce guests to what they think of as Italian food, but which is truly Italian-American.

Allegria e braciola

Raphael, the restaurant itself, is a modern masterpiece of minimalist comfort and open space. There are no checkered cloths, dark wood, or carafes of Chianti. It is all white birch and white tablecloths. Andy Warhol reproductions and portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra are placed just so on the walls. A Picasso-esque mural by Anthony Russo pushes the envelope to a modern, museum-like feel. I am looking for a headset and curator's tape.

As the guests arrive -- men in suit jackets and ties, women in pearls and leopard prints -- they check their ethnicity at the door. Tonight, everyone's Italian: the Majors, O'Briens, and Sullivans fit right in among the Lombardis and Vincis. They sip a crisp, cold Frascati and graze on the asparagus appetizers. Two veteran musicians, Joe Pescatore, with his 1940s Gibson arch-top, and Dick Salzillo on his Excelsiola accordion, work the crowd, filling the room with "Volare!"

Providence's mayor, Buddy Cianci, comes in with his assistant, Michael, whose biceps are big enough to right the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The mayor nurses a glass of Chianti and talks to Mariani, gesticulating toward the world outside: Providence's rebirth, for which he's been godfather, if not midwife.

Before guests are seated, Cianci hands Mariani a jar of his own red sauce and olive oil, his mug on the labels. "That's from 30-year-old trees," he tells Mariani, who promptly holds up the olive oil to what sun is left at seven o'clock in the evening.

The local culture dominates the crowd. Many of the folks are Raphael regulars used to seeing the proprietor dressed in a suit, greeting them at the door.

Janis Cappello (formerly Madden), freckled and blond-haired, remembers her grandmother laying out ravioli on the bed to dry, because where else could she put them? Her Italian mother married an Irish man. "Always had to have potatoes," she says.

Ed Major, of English, Irish, and French descent, is Italian "by association." His wife Susan, née Feuti, recalls that her grandfather, from the Roma region, used to make his own wine. "Do you know how long [Conte] cooked this?" Ed asks rhetorically, gesturing to the plate of beef braciola finally in front of us. "Six hours. If you have to cut braciola with a knife, you don't want to eat it."

This one Ed eats with the side of his fork.

Finale e dolce -- ciao!

There is nothing accidental about Italian cooking -- except for Conte's bar snack. One day, he accidentally dropped dried capellini on the stove. They crisped up. He bit into one and had a brainstorm. He added some romano cheese, a little salt and pepper, and fried them in olive oil. "It was a great hit," he says of the long, edible straw.

Aside from such innovations, however, preparing good Italian-American food doesn't involve much serendipity. And this is where Mariani and Conte see eye to eye.

"Simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve," Conte says. "It's all technique."

Mariani agrees that every step, from preparing the pasta al dente to the handling of each ingredient, matters very much. He has seen tonight's display and has to admit he's impressed. "Most of the dishes are very simple and based on common ingredients, and that is what Italian cooking is all about," he says. When pressed, he admits that the common perception of Italian-American cooking has been tainted by bad chefs. In the right hands, Italian-American cuisine is not Chef Boyardee, but rather an amalgam of Old World and New that crosses class lines and brings people together.

In the end, both Mariani and Conte are happy with the results of their collaboration. Mariani proclaims that the meal was "done to perfection by the whole staff."

Conte later says that he "had a ball" cooking the classics. "Cooking with my tongue instead of my eyes gave me a great relief of pressure," he says. "It's like playing folk guitar." The evening is, after all, a kind of "mantecato" -- the word Mariani used for "when you put it back in the pan and bring it all together."

At the end of the meal, Conte comes out of the kitchen and stands at the front of the restaurant. A few guests find their feet. "Bravo, bravo," they call out. Everyone applauds.

In front of the assembled audience in his restaurant, he says a few words about Ellis Island, and about being grateful for having the opportunity to prepare recipes from Mariani's cookbook. "I can remember Sundays when I wanted to go to the beach and was told, `No, you have to go over there and sit and eat braciola,' " Conte says, pronouncing it not according to Mariani's book, but his own way: "bra-JOLE."

"What it is to be Italian . . . " he adds. "This book is about it."