SETTEPANI

196 Malcolm X Boulevard

917-492-4806

         For a quarter century now Settepani has been on the corner of Malcolm X (formerly Lenox) Boulevard and 120th Street, yet to pass it you would think it just opened weeks ago as part of the ongoing gentrification of this part of Harlem.
     Settepani was founded by Ethiopian-Eritrean immigrant Leah Abraham and her Sicilian husband chef Nino Settepani, who also run the Settepani Italian bakery in Williamsburg. With their effervescent daughter Bilena and son Seyoum, they have become beloved neighbors with a faithful clientele that come for the pastries displayed up front in the brightly lighted storefront as well as the wonderfully personalized Italian and Mediterranean food served in the adjacent dining area. These days you can also dine on the sidewalk and watch and hear all of the vibrant color and music of the locals.
      Nino, born in Sicily, came to America as a teenager and worked in a bakery, then attended NYU and the French Culinary Institute, opening his own bakery in Greenwich Village. Leah’s family came from Eritrea and she grew up amidst Harlem’s broad streets and Lenox Avenue’s varied architecture of stately brownstones and denominational churches.
      Bilena is herself a pastry chef, though she sought a career in fashion. When the pandemic hit, she dropped everything to help her parents, and would attend the Institute of Culinary Education. Seyoum, with an M.A. from the University of Richmond, is the restaurant’s general manager.
      Settepani’s menu is ambitious for a small space, much of it devoted to the well-lighted pastry counter. Panini are offered only at lunch, but at dinner there are ten antipasti, ten pastas, six pizzas and seven main courses.  Opting for pizza is a good idea, and I thoroughly enjoyed the one with prosciutto, arugula, mozzarella and basil ($25). It is thin crusted  and light, so you can also share dishes like crisp calamari fritti ($22), a plum, cream-rich burrata with fresh tomatoes ($22) or a mix of prosciutto, crostini, cheese, olives and fruits ($28), enough for at least two people.
      As you’d expect, the housemade pastas are outstanding, especially the bucatini alla Trapanese ($24), a Sicilian pasta with a tomato and almond pesto. Lasagna ($26) was a special one night and had all the right textures and leveling of flavors, while the risotto ($28), a little overcooked one evening, was creamy with fresh peas and sweet shrimp. Most interesting was a pasta made from teff, a plant whose seeds are used to make a flour in Eritrea and Ethiopia, here made into gnocchi alla sorrentina ($25) in a tomato, mozzarella and basil sauce.
      The ubiquitous branzino (35) was nice and fleshy, pan-seared with a sprightly lemon sauce, vegetables and roasted potatoes. The pollo alla milanese ($26) of breaded chicken breast had the right crispness to it without losing the flavor of the meat.
      You should certainly be tempted by those beautiful pastries in the counter, but to stay within the traditional, there is tiramisu ($12) and cassata, sponge cake lavished with ricotta and candied fruit ($12).
     On the summer’s night when we dined at Settepani most guests were outside enjoying the al fresco coolness, and, since the avenue is so broad, the outdoor tables make Settepani seem much closer to European cafes than most in New York. While the interior dining room was near empty, it was hard to judge the service, except to say that the family all pitches in along with the enchanting and ebullient waiter LaToya Clark, whose smile and street smart bling lights up every inch of the restaurant as the epitome of Harlem cool right now.
      There are restaurants for serious dining and restaurants for trendy noshing, but restaurants like Settepani manifest, yet again, the importance of being a tight family in the service of people who can feel their sincerity and their desire to please and make their guests very happy and satisfied.  

Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily.

“A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.”—Graham Greene, Ministry of Fear (1943).

       Katie and David’s task was now to get that appointment with Toth without spooking a man who might well have been a black marketer back in Vienna.  They again turned to Boyer and Spollen for advice.  Boyer said the Times had a stringer in Budapest, a Hungarian fellow who filed stories on a regular basis and could quickly be assigned to cover anything that broke in Eastern Europe.  Spollen said he’d check if there was anyone at The Guardian who covered the pharmaceutical industry in Europe; he found none.
         Katie felt that Professor Passmore had provided her with all he knew but put in a call to him anyway and was provided with a colleague’s name at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (above).
         “I think we should pack so we can hop on a plane as soon as we hear from Toth,” said Katie.
         “And what if he doesn’t respond at all?” asked David.
         “Then we’re screwed. Or we go to Budapest on our own and try to flush him out.”
         “Meanwhile let me see if I can get in touch with that Times stringer to see if he has any information on how to get to Toth.”   
         The reporter’s name was János Frankel.  Boyer said he was a veteran journalist and, at least since Hungary left the USSR, could be counted on for solid investigative work.  He had studied and learned English in England and was fluent in several languages.
         Katie reached him at his home in the Buda part of the city, and she was flattered when he said he knew her name from both the Al Capone and Vermeer stories in McClure’s.
         “Boyer called me on your behalf,” said Frankel, with only a mild Hungarian accent. “He said you were interested in interviewing Gorgo Toth? You picked a very controversial figure in Hungary.  Toth has always had a shadowy past and you probably heard the rumors he was actually British.”
         “Does he speak Hungarian with a British accent?” asked David on speakerphone.
         “Yes, though he’s very guarded and rarely speaks in public.”
         "When you say has a shadowy past, what do you mean?”
         “The word is that he was an entrepreneur who worked closely with the Soviets to achieve where he is now.  His company is probably owned, at least most of it, by the Soviets, and I’m sure he’s stayed at the top after the fall of the Soviet Union by having decades’ old contacts in Moscow, with the KGB and now FSS.  You know, I actually interviewed him once a few years ago, not for the Times but for a German business magazine called Manager.”
         “You got in to see him?” asked Katie. “How tough was that?”
         “Not very. He knew the article would be a puff piece, a straight question-and-answer he had the right to approve before publication.”
         Katie knew that the Times would never have made that promise.
         “He was guarded in all his answers,” said Frankel. “Said very little beyond how well his company was doing and then ticked off the philanthropies he donates to. He’s a principal behind the Heim Pái Children’s Hospital (below) here in Budapest.  He is not immune to flattery.”
         “Did you do the interview in English or Hungarian?” asked David.
         “A little of both. He’s wholly fluent in Hungarian but tended to use English expressions.”
         Katie asked if she could get hold of Frankel’s article, and he said he’d be happy to fax a copy to her hotel.
         “So, any advice on how to get in to see Toth?” asked David.
         “Again, he takes to flattery, so if you say you’re doing a story on illustrious business tycoons he may well allow you to see him.  Or maybe ask you to send him questions. He will not do so if he thinks your story will put him in a bad light. Oh, and he has a beloved collection of antique cars—European and American.  Mention that in your letter of introduction.  I didn’t see them but I hear it’s a pretty spectacular collection.  He keeps it at his estate outside of Budapest. I really haven’t kept close tabs on him but the local financial media seem to suggest he’s been in a struggle to stay at the top of Hungary Pharm.”
         Katie and David asked for any other suggestions, and Frankel said he’d be happy to call Toth’s right–hand man "to tell him you were interested in seeing his boss.”
         “That would be so terrific of you,” said Katie.
         “By the way, why is an American magazine like McClure’s so interested in a Hungarian millionaire—I don’t know, maybe he is a billionaire by now—whose name wouldn’t be known to your readers?”
         “Janós,” said Katie, “I’m going to have to keep that from you for now. I mean, I assume they don’t bug journalists’ phones anymore in Hungary.”
         “Who knows or cares? I keep a low profile.”
         “All I can say is that we do have a more serious reason to interview Toth and it has to do with his past.  I can swear that after we see him, I’ll tell you everything I can about what happened, but for now, all I can do is thank you profusely for your help.  And you’ll get back to me with that right-hand man’s contact?”
         “Yes, I’ll put it in the fax.”
         Frankel wished them good luck and made them promise they’d take him out to dinner in Budapest when they got there.  Katie and David eagerly agreed.
         “I promise you the best Hungarian food and wine you’ve ever tasted,” said Frankel. David said to himself, it would be the first Hungarian food and wine he’d ever tasted.
         Within an hour Katie and David had Frankel’s fax with the article and Toth contact.  As Frankel had said, there wasn’t anything particularly revealing about Toth in the Q&A, mostly just boastings about his managerial skills and future plans for Hungary Pharm.  And there was mention of his car collection and his charitable donations.
         “I find it a little ironic that Toth seems so involved in that Children’s Hospital,” said David. “If he had been selling bad drugs back in Vienna to polio victims, the way Harry Lime did, maybe he’s trying to atone for his sins.”
         “Wonder if he’s Catholic,” said Katie. “Atonement is certainly good for the soul for a man who wants to change his image and pave a path to heaven through shelling out a lot of money.”
         “Y’know, Katie, it always amazed me how many gangsters I went after who considered themselves nothing but businessmen.  The killing, the drugs, the extortion—they never saw it as criminal or even immoral. Then there was that other side to them—the ideal family man who kept his business out of his own household.  The women in the family were given everything—even when their husbands were banging girlfriends on the side—the children were spoiled, sent to Catholic schools, Catholic colleges. These vicious killers would cry at their daughter’s First Communion, and they always, always gave money to the Church.  Sometimes they had to funnel it through someone else if the Church refused to take it from a known mobster. A lot of the time they didn’t want it known where the money was coming from.  They certainly weren’t claiming it as a tax deduction.”
         Katie shook her head and said, “Y’know it’s not all that different from the creeps in politics I cover.  They take gobs of money from lobbyists and drug companies and the N.R.A. then boast their votes are a noble defense of the Constitution.  They act holier-than-thou, and the more Right Wing Christian they are, the more hypocritical they are.”
         David smirked and asked, “Who said, ‘The rich are very different from you and me?’”
         “F. Scott Fitzgerald was supposed to have said that to Hemingway, and Hemingway was supposed to say, ‘Yeah, they have more money.’ Which I always thought was a pretty inane retort.”
         “What he should’ve said was, ‘Yeah, they’re all a bunch of freaking thieves.’”
         “Someone else said, ‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime.’”
         “Who said that?”
         “Balzac (right).”
         “Balzac?”
         Katie never wanted to sound condescending towards David, and said, “Oh, an obscure French writer back in the 19^th century. I had to read him in college.”
         “Well, Balzac was right on the money. Off with their heads!”
         “Who did say that?” asked Katie, laughing.
         “I think it was the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. I saw the Disney cartoon in grammar school.”

         Katie sent Frankel’s fax info on to Alan Dobell, who wrote back an email saying it was encouraging and that the letter had gone out to Toth, explaining that McClure’s reporters were only going to be in Budapest for a day or two, so making a date and time to meet would be appreciated as soon as possible.
         Later that day Dobell received a request from Toth’s secretary asking for samples of Katie’s work to be sent to Hungary Pharm for evaluation. Dobell was certainly not going to send Katie’s two prize-winning stories, both investigations into criminal activities. Instead he sent a profile of a New York philanthropist she’d done a few years back, along with a Q&A interview she’d done with the head of a TV network. They were candid interviews but nothing that would cause Toth anxiety over the kind of access McClure’s was seeking. Dobell also sent a personal note saying he, too, was an aficionado of vintage automobiles and had read about Toth’s collection. Anything to butter the man up.
         Later that night—it was nine a.m. in Budapest, after midnight in New York—Dobell received an email reading, “If your reporter can be in Budapest this Friday, arrangements may be made to have a short interview with Mr. Toth. Please reply immediately if this is acceptable, and we shall provide details of the location and time of the meeting.”
         Dobell called Katie—it was already early Wednesday morning in London—and told her the news, saying he would be following up with some questions she should try to ask Toth, including some flattering ones about his auto collection. He told her Toth’s assistant would be sending the information regarding their meeting, which came as a fax to the hotel. They would meet Toth at nine o’clock on Friday morning at Hungary Pharm’s headquarters on Andrássy út in the Central Business District. They would be allowed thirty minutes for the interview.
         “That’s not enough time,” Katie said to David.
         “Probably not if you want to soften him up. Thank God we don’t have to translate back and forth.”
         “Maybe you should do the interview.”
         “I doubt Dobell would want that, but I’m willing to participate.”
         “I always wanted to ask you,” said Katie, “do the police really use that good cop-bad cop routine interrogating a guy, like in The Wild One where they beat up Marlon Brando?”
         “Well, we had to stop burning the perpetrators with cigarettes after they posted ‘No Smoking’ signs in the interrogation rooms.”
         Katie winced. “Are you bullshitting me?”
      "Yes, I am, and no, we did not play a stupid game like good cop-bad cop, although there was sometimes one cop in the room who wanted to go rough on a particularly unsavory character. We’d pull him off and send him out of the room. It probably had the same effect as a game of good cop-bad cop, but it wasn’t intentional. I like to think we were a lot more sophisticated than that in our interrogation techniques. Plus, we want a conviction, not a forced confession that might be thrown out in court.
         “The problem here,” David went on, “is that Toth doesn’t know the real reason we’re coming to see him and what we want to ask him. Flattery takes time to be absorbed by guys like him. We need to get under his skin, make him anxious, and that takes time.”
         “Can’t just launch right in with, ‘So, Mr. Toth, could you please tell us if you were a black marketer who killed babies in Vienna and the inspiration for Harry Lime?’”
            David shook his head and sdai, ""This ain't going to be says, Katie.. I’ll help all I can though. On the way over we can write down our questions and follow-ups, short and concise.”
             David had already checked flights from London to Budapest, and there was one on the Hungarian airline Malév that flew into Budapest Ferihegy International Airport, a two-hour flight getting in around seven. David called down and had the concierge book the tickets, then went to his room to finish packing. He met Katie in the lobby and they took a taxi to Heathrow, arriving two hours before their flight.
         “Think we should contact Frankel before we get there?” asked David.
         “Yeah, I do. Let’s take him out to dinner, if he’s available. I’ll call.”
         Katie dialed Frankel’s number, got a recording in Hungarian and English, and left a message that they were coming to town, hoping to be through customs and in Budapest by nine.  They were booked in the Intercontinental Hotel.
         On the plane, a Boeing 737, Katie and David were astonished to find that the non-smoking section was separated from the smoking section only by the center aisle and that almost everyone in the smoking section lit up as soon as they plane leveled out at cruising altitude. Having had a quick pub lunch, the Americans refused the trays of food, which looked like all the other airline food in the world, three gray or brown clumps of protein and vegetables together with a cube of plastic-wrapped cheese and an ice cold bread roll. David asked for a beer and got a Hungarian light lager called Borsodi Sörgyári, which wasn’t half bad.
         “Hungarian is one tough language,” said Katie, who was trying to memorize some words from a travel guide she’d bought. “You know how they say ‘thank you?’” She tried to sound it out: “‘koz-o-nom.’ ‘Goodbye is ‘viss-ont-latash-rah.’ I have a feeling I’m not even close to the right pronunciation. I hope enough people speak English.”
         David shrugged. “All we need is a taxi driver to the hotel, then maybe we can meet Frankel. Friday we go see Toth, and we know he and his people speak English.”
         “I guess we won’t starve if we can say ‘goulash.’”
         “And I just learned from this bottle that ‘beer’ is ‘sör.’ ‘Beer’ is always a very simple word in every language. So we’re good for forty-eight hours.”