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Billy Gray, Lauren Chapin, Robert Young, Jane Wyatt and Elinor Donahue in the TV series "Father Knows Best" (1954-1960)

 

 

    “Not even the Italians know Turin! They only know FIAT! FIAT! FIAT!”

     So said Michele, a spry, elegant, elderly Turinese who took my wife and me for a cup of rich bittersweet coffee and chocolate called a “capriccio” at the historic Caffè Baratti e Milano (below), opened in 1875 on Turin’s broad Piazza Castello.  We’d met him just minutes before on our search for the equally famous café named Bicerin, only to learn from Michele that it was closed on Wednesdays.

    He didn’t seem troubled by his statement that the world outside of Piedmont, including the rest of Italy, did not regard his hometown as worth visiting, unless it was to see the Automobile Museum.  “It is not a bad thing not to have so many tourists,” said Michele, who had a salt-and-pepper beard and wore an artfully thrown scarf around his shoulders. He never gave us his last name and who seemed to have retired to the life of a boulevardier known to every bartender and barrista in Turin.

    “Look around you,” he said, smiling. “Turin is never noisy, never crowded, except”—his eyes rolled back—“during those Winter Olympics! So we Torinesi have our restaurants and cafés all to ourselves most of the time.  Our mercato sells every kind of food and wine you could possibly want, and that new place EATaly is just a few kilometers that way.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the gargantuan food market and restaurant complex established in 2007 in the out-of-the-way Lingotto district. He shrugged. “Maybe I visit someday.” And then he was off, saying he was meeting friends at a trattoria whose name he neglected to share with us.

    I must admit that I, too, had little knowledge or interest in Turin, having only paid brief visits to the city in the past while attending a food conference or simply passing through to tour the beauty of the Piedmontese countryside and wine country, where some of the region’s most noted restaurants, like Combal Zero in Rivoli, Locanda del Pilone in Alba, and Delle Antiche Contrade in Cuneo, are located.  My earlier visits had, however, disabused me of any thought that Turin was a drab, self-absorbed northern industrial city.  It is worth noting that director Michelangelo Antonioni used Milan in “La Notte” (1961), Rome in “L’Eclisse” (1962), and Ravenna in “Il Deserto Rosso” (1964)—not Turin—to depict the deadening effect of industrialization on the soul of modern Italy.

    On a recent extended visit, I found the heart of the city among the most beautiful in Europe, justly famous for its long, graceful series of arcades, the grandeur of its vast piazzas, and its stately and highly efficient grid pattern.  The Po River flows as majestically through Turin as the Arno does through Florence and the Tiber through Rome.

    FIAT has, of course, dominated and buoyed Turin’s fortunes since 1899 (it still produces 37 percent of Italy’s GNP) and had an enormous hand in the post-war Italian Economic Miracle called Il Boom, when it released the two cylinder Fiat 500 (Cinquecento) in 1957 (left), which was both very efficient and affordable for upwardly mobile Italians.  Still, the Torinesi are quick to remind people that their city was in fact the first capital of an Italy unified in 1861 under Victor Emmanuel II, whose Royal Palace, set in the huge square entered from the broad Via Roma, is a spectacular example of a baroque opulence intended to reflect the proud independence of Piedmont, which only 50 years earlier had been annexed by Napoleon Bonaparte.  Upon invading Italy in 1800, the young Corsican general faced 20,000 Piedmontese and 11,500 Austrians, but his tactical genius divided his enemies and, in embarrassment, King Victor Amadeus II ceded Piedmont to the Corsican, who immediately demolished Turin’s city gates and bastions and renamed the Royal Palace as the Imperial Palace—a decree that horrified and humiliated the Torinesi.  Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 freed Piedmont, whose power increased in the decades leading up to 1861, when it became the capital of the new Italy.

    As an imperial city, Turin’s artistic treasures are exceptionally fine, all in baroque wrappings. Although there is no museum the equivalent of Florence’s Uffizi or the Brera in Milan, the Royal Palace itself (below)—once residence of the powerful Savoy dynasty, taken over by the Italian government in 1946--is crammed with notable works.  My wife and I were amazed at room after room of imperial salons, including Queen Maria Theresa’s quarters, in every color of marble, each with trompe l’oeuil painted ceilings, and we were particularly impressed with the palace’s collections of exquisite tapestries and Chinese porcelain. 

    We toured the city’s Egyptian Museum at the Academy of Science, considered one of the finest of its kind in the world, on top of which sits the admirable Sabauda Gallery, with works by Bronzino, Veronese, Jan Van Eyck, and Van Dyck. And to gain a sense of the unique way that Piedmontese royalty could actually welcome the red-shirted rebels of Garibaldi’s army, the Museum of the Risorgimento in the Palazzo Carignano, where the first parliament of 1861 met, depicts the region’s history from the 19^th century through Unification, and on through two world wars.

    The splendid Duomo of St. John the Baptist, still home to the now wholly discredited Shroud of Turin, is the city’s only true example of pre-baroque Renaissance architecture. And, as everywhere else in Italy, there seems a church or chapel on every block. 

         Uniquely Turin, however, is its National Museum of Cinema, set inside a landmark 500-foot tower originally designed as a synagogue in 1863 by Alessandro Antonelli.  We wound from hall to hall and room to room over five floors, flanked with flickering images of early shadow cartoons and the first primitive, silent efforts of Thomas Edison; within the play of chiaroscuro and expressionist lighting that evoked “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” there are mini-theaters, and long corridors lined with huge movie posters from every era.  There is also a futuristic café-restaurant (left) on the ground floor whose starkness, color and light could be a setting for a bar in “Star Wars” or “Bladerunner” that fits perfectly into the ambiance of the museum.

         But if you ask a Torinese where his city’s true artistic achievements lie, he might well say they are in those beautiful arched walkways that line miles of streets and plazas throughout the city center.  Of even height, woven throughout the city along the city center so as to connect with one another, the arcades were built over the course of two centuries, principally as shelter from Piedmontese winters but also as showcases of banks and boutiques, antique pharmacies and food shops, and, more than anything else, cafés and candy emporiums.  Look above their doorways and you see stencils and carvings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  Their façades are done in black marble or richly varnished mahogany, usually in the baroque style but also in more “modern” styles of Art Nouveau or Art Déco, and they act very much like picture frames for paintings.

    One of the most famous is The Baratti & Milano (1875), which bears the imperial crest given it by the Vittorio II.  The King and Garibaldi toasted the Reunification at Caffé Mulussano, later relocated in 1907 and done in the sleek art déco style of that period. Litterateurs have long made Caffé Fiori (1873) their second home, and in his day FIAT founder Gianni Agnelli passed his few idle hours at Caffé Piatti (1875). And while each has its secrets of coffee making, it is likely that the locally produced Lavazza coffee is the starting point for the artfulness.  While café culture vitalized every large city in Italy during the 19^th century, none but Turin brought it to an art form in and of itself, where the cafés were extravagant testimony to the luxurious pleasures of taking time to sit, drink and talk.  Indeed, it is the arcades that allow for such an extravagance of cafes barely imitated in Venice’s Piazza San Marco.

    Through the spotless windows we saw countless displays of the most beautifully crafted chocolates, marzipan, and sugared fritters in pastel colors, pink paper, gold foil, arrayed in painted tin boxes or set on lace doilies.  The soft lighting inside is never harsh, never low, imparting a Christmas ornament’s appeal to the confections every day of the year.

         And then there is the aroma of the chocolate itself, almost always commingled with coffee set on the zinc or marble counters, where white-coated barristas grind, pack, adjust, steam, fizz, and present their handiwork in a manifestation of Turin’s deeply ingrained coffee culture, richer here than anywhere else in coffee-obsessed Italy. The thunder of the shuddering coffee machine, the clink of the cups and saucers hitting the bar and the tinkle of the little spoons in the saucer never lets up.  The barristas pour a glass of Asti spumante for some, a tipple of vermouth—created in Turin by Antonio Benedetto Carpano in 1786—or a dark, bittersweet amaro digestiva for others. A waiter delivers a slice of sugar-dusted cake, covered with satiny dark chocolate, with a filling of the chocolate-and-hazelnut cream gianduja that is also an invention of Turin. 

         There are many stories as to how gianduja got its name, sometime in the 19th century, when chocolate and coffee shops had become the rage throughout Europe.  Turin tradition has it that the name derives from “Giovanni della doja” or “Gion d’la duja”  (John with a pint of wine in his hands), a popular commedia dell arte marionette created by Gioacchino Bellone di Raccongi and first exhibited in the city as of 1808.  Others contend it was named after di Oja, a hamlet near Bellone’s hometown, and that the name is really Giovanni di Oja.

         Whatever the origin of its name, gianduja made a tremendous contribution to European chocolate candy as we know it, and in Turin, hazelnuts seem inseparable from chocolate in any form.  Indeed, Turin is chocolate mad, and yet another of its finest sweet ideas was bicerin, a small rounded glass with a metal handle (from which it gets its name) of hot espresso, chocolate, and milk.  Various aficionados debate the origins of this totemic Turinese concoction, though the most widely accepted was that it was first made at Caffè al Bicerin (above and left), which opened on the Piazza della Consolata in 1763.  (Incidentally, the church across the piazza has one of the most extraordinary interiors in Turin.)

         Like the equally famous though not nearly so old Caffé Sant’ Eustachio in Rome, Caffè al Bicerin is a revered monument to coffee and chocolate, a dim, fifteen-by-twenty-five foot room with tiny marble tables, candles that seem votive, antique mirrors, dark red banquettes, wall sconces, and old wooden chairs. The cramped counter holds jars of bon bons and chocolates, and the old Faema coffee machine rumbles and roars like a FIAT assembly line when the glasses of thick, semi-sweet bicerins are made.  
    My wife and I entered feeling like acolytes, privileged to sit at the tiny tables among an array of Torinesi, many of them old men and women for whom a morning bicerin is like receiving Holy Communion, as a restorative against the Piedmontese fog and drizzle.

    

This article is expanded from the original that appeared in the magazine La Cucina Italiana.

by John Mariani

JONES WOOD FOUNDRY
401 East 76^th Street (between First  & York Avenues)
212-249-2700

www.joneswoodfoundry.com

     Are you as tired as I am of new restaurants popping up in every American city as "gastro-pubs"?  It's not that the idea of a small bar serving above-average food is a bad one, as evidenced by superior examples like The Spotted Pig in NYC and Longman & Eagle in Chicago, but, as always, those restaurateurs who simply jump on the  next faddish bandwagon have nothing new to offer, except their huge size, and soon roll off into the gastro-dustbin.
    As in any good restaurant it is the chef who is going to drive the quality of food, not a mere conceptualizer who thinks bigger and louder is better and that a few pub favorites like fish and chips will give them credibility.  In the case of the new Jones Wood Foundry on the Upper East Side, the driving force is a consummate pro and, for once, a true Brit who knows as much about haute cuisine as he does traditional English fare.  Jason Hicks first made his mark in NYC at the very La Goulue and Orsay, where he occasionally veered away from the rigid French bistro menus to add his own style and sensibility.  No one in NYC cooks better game in season.
    So when Hicks took over as chef and partner, with Yves Jadot,  at Jones Wood Foundry, housed in an 1860s building that once made manhole covers and later became a school in a neighborhood once known as Jones Wood, I was curious what kind of menu he would craft.  He has the space for largess--three rooms and an inner garden courtyard with French doors, a long bar up front, and a communal table (above).  Exposed brickwork and antique mirrors carry through the idea of an old pub and eatery, as does a high-backed leather Chesterfield banquette in the dining room. The place is already doing banner business since opening a few weeks ago, especially with deck shoe-loafered locals from the UES.
    Sadly, the absurd blue laws of NYC that prohibit a restaurant from serving booze if too close to a school allow JWF to serve only wine and beer; the selection of the former is a tad weak but the latter is a good and unusual selection.
    One of the unique things at JWF is its "toasts," a range of scrumptious Anglo-appetizers and lunch items that include a fine citrus potted crab with tomato powder; a silky textured, very rich chicken liver and foie gras mousse; marinated sardines with a chickpea spread; and--quite unusual anywhere these days--Scotch egg with tartar sauce.  When asked about the preparation, our charming waitress said, "Well, it's an egg crusted with bacon and deep-fried. What's not to love?" and she was right.
    At dinner the traditional dishes are all in array, along with some seasonal ones like Hicks's beautiful cream of corn soup with shrimp, chard and tomato, a silky, cold rendering that was perfect for a roasting hot NYC evening.  The salmon gravlax with beet tartare and mâche was one of the best I've had west of the Irish Sea.  Hicks also offers three crusted savory pies, and the flaky crusts are extraordinary.  There's a hearty steak and kidney pie (left), maybe a little heavy for hot weather, and a cottage pie that was supposed to be full of shortrib meat and mushrooms, but I fished around for the meat and found next to none.
    The main courses contain textbook versions of Anglo cookery, starting off with impeccably crisp, sweet beer-battered cod (right) with positively addictive "chips" (fat, fried potatoes).  There is a plate of faggots and onion gravy, which the late English food writer Jane Grigson called "a good-tempered dish" once popular to use up odd cuts and leftovers like hearts, liver, and kidneys.  An "old-fashioned roast chicken" could use some updating. Then there's a hefty platter of Myers of Keswick bangers and mash with caramelized onion gravy.  Myers of Keswick, on Hudson Street, is that rare NYC grocery selling British goods, and their bangers (sausages) are delicious and go splendidly with the rich, sweet gravy, to be sopped up with very buttery mashed potatoes.  (I was, by the way, surprised to find, while reading Keith Richards' new autobiography, that the gnarled old guitarist's favorite dish was bangers and mash, which he himself would often cook up and eat before going onstage.)
    And so on to sticky toffee pudding with treacle sauce, as sweet and lovable a dessert as there ever will be. But I'm afraid I may never find a sherry trifle I like, and did not find it here.

    It would, then, be a misnomer if not a downright insult, to lump Jones Wood Foundry with all the other clichés of the  gastropub genre downtown and in Brooklyn these days, for Hicks is such a superior, knowledgeable chef about this kind of food that you will want to come here to taste the Real McCoy and do so within a very charming, well-run establishment.

                                       

   

MAN ABOUT TOWN
by Christopher Mariani

Gazala's
380 Columbus Avenue (at 78th Street)
212-873-8880
gazalaplace.com

   Food and restaurants have never been so all-consuming to New Yorkers as over the past five years.  I remember friends of mine who rarely tasted anything beyond their mother’s cooking who are now out twice a week ordering exotic sushi and spending every last dollar they earn to be one of the first to try out the city’s hottest new restaurants. The food craze has hit NYC hard, so that cuisines that were once almost impossible to find are popping up around every corner like Starbucks. (Indeed, there's a newly coined word for restaurants that are intended to come and go--pop-ups.) Were you to ask the average New Yorker where is a good place to grab some Thai or Indian food, you better have a pen and a long sheet of paper handy.

            In 2007, chef Gazala Halabi, who was born and raised in Daliat el-Carmel, Israel, opened her first restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen named Gazala Place. She was serving Druze cuisine, a fare that shares the essence of many Eastern Mediterranean dishes from Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. NYC residents embraced Halabi’s cooking at Gazala Place, and just three years later she opened her second location, Gazala’s, on the Upper West Side where I dined  last week.  According to Halabi, hers are the only two restaurants serving this kind of cuisine.

            The restaurant is in the process of receiving its liquor license and claim they will have it soon, but call ahead and make sure before you show up empty handed. The night I dined it was still BYOB, so I brought a nice bottle of red wine.

            The interior is unfussy, surrounded by brick walls with arched windows, dark-wood chairs and tables, and that is all. On the right side of the dining room you can look inside the small kitchen as Halabi and cast stir up small appetizers and tasty lamb dishes.  If the heat of the summer is not too intense, try and grab one of the four outside tables; they are among the best seats in the house.

            After being greeted by our amiable waitress, we started with a selection of cold and hot appetizers. Ground, tender meat came packed with thick rice and rolled up inside delicate green grape leaves, served with a side of room temperature cucumber yogurt; they come six to an order, none of which were left behind. The chickpea hummus was silky and resembled the texture of a yogurt, blended with a hint of tahini and a noticeable amount of lemon juice that added a wonderful citrus element to the usually subtle and soft dish. The warm pitas used to lap up just about everything in front of us were very thin and had a pleasant chewy consistency that was not your typical pita. There is also a delicious babaganoush appetizer and a dish called “meat cigars,” fried pita stuffed with onions, meat and tahini, the one and only boring dish we were served all evening.

            For main courses, we were very pleased with the halabi, chopped oval-shapped meat patties placed over a plate of fresh tomato sauce seasoned with parsley, onion and pine nuts. Ground meat was flattened thin and covered with cheese in the kafta tahini, a very lush dish packed with flavor.

            The dessert menu is small, and I highly recommend the kenafi, which is made to order, filled with sweet cheese, pistachio and syrupy honey that gets absorbed into the crispy shredded dough, easily enough for two people. If you have room also try the traditional baklava, a flaky pastry filled with pistachio nuts and a honey-lemon mixture.

            From start to finish Gazala stays true to its Druze culture and doesn’t offer anything outside of the cuisine, except for a diner-sized order of blueberry cake. The wait staff is warm and although could use a bit of refinement, they still leave you walking out with a gracious smile and tamed appetite.               

             

 

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