It is easy enough to come to the conclusion that the truest expression of the American restaurant’s largess—one I would tell a foreign visitor not to miss—is the Italian steakhouse. The reasons should be obvious. The menus, which differ little by region, are sure to include the most representative dishes in the American culinary canon, from crabcakes and a wedge salad to bone-in ribeyes and cheesecake, accompanied by wine lists rich in U.S. bottlings. Add in the Italian part of the quotient, there will also be fried calamari, a few pastas, a form of chicken alla parmigiana and tiramisù for dessert.
     Steak-and-chop houses date back to the 19th century, and a few, like Keens in New York and the Buckhorn Exchange in Denver, haven’t veered much away from the model set before the Civil War. The Italian steakhouse emerged in New York during Prohibition, when places like the Palm and Christ Cella added Italian specialties to the menu. This model has since become the paragon for nearly all steakhouses in the U.S., as surely as Paris set the mold for the French bistro.
     That said, the influence of established places like Peter Lüger in Brooklyn and Wolfgang’s in Manhattan is evident, and many of the new owners once worked for those restaurants. I am always delighted when the genre is carried on by new immigrants, many who began as waiters and rose to ownership of big, gregarious Italian steakhouses like Macelleria, which has branches in Armonk and Pelham, NY, and Greenwich, CT.
      Key to them all is a commitment to first-rate ingredients, large portions, personalized service, solid wine lists and the expectation that you’ll take food home. Owner Anthony Lala and  chef Joe Fusco (right) wouldn’t have it any other way.
      Macelleria  Armonk, in the beautiful lake country of northern Westchester County, is a big place, with 200 seats, but so divided to seem more intimate, with widely spaced tables, wooden floors and a stone fireplace now in operation as the cold weather takes hold. The finer details are the smaller ones: The tables are spacious, the linens of good quality, the stemware thin, the knives by Laguiole. All portions are large, and sharing or taking food home is a high probability. The wine list has real substance, and, by the glass, you get a very generous pour.
      You could certainly share a seafood salad, abundant with shrimp, scallops, crab meat, octopus, calamari and arugula in lemon vinaigrette ($24). But anyone ordering the generous crab meat cocktail ($26), made with colossal jumbo lump crab—which I’ve priced in seafood stores at $55 a pound—will greedily want to keep it all to himself. The Maryland crab cake ($24) is also a fine size, although the crab itself is closer to basic lump, not jumbo. It comes with a herb mustard sauce.
       The Italian steakhouse must get its pastas just as right as its steaks and chops, and Macelleria most certainly succeeds with dishes like spaghetti alla carbonara ($24), which begins with good pasta mixed with Italian bacon, onion, egg yolks and parmesan cheese. So, too, cavatelli ($24) have real bite when tossed with broccoli rabe, sausage and garlic and oil, while the heftiest I tried was the short rib pappardelle ($28). Each would make a main course or starter for two.
     There are no surprises among the entrees, for all are made with integrity and the same first-rate ingredients as everything else, including a gigantic portion of branzino with seasonal vegetables, lemon, rosemary and extra virgin olive oil ($42); fine chicken Martini of tender chicken breast, crusted parmesan, lemon, white wine and seasonal vegetables ($34). There are several cuts of meat, including a New York strip bone-in ($49), a ribeye ($56), lamb chops ($48), a porterhouse for one or two ($120) and a tomahawk steak for two ($156).
    You shouldn’t deny yourself dessert ($12) when they are as good as Macelleria’s, all meant to be shared, like the chocolate semi-freddo and crème brûlée.
     It’s likely you will find whatever your favorite wine is on Macelleria’s list, which is well chosen and decently tariffed.
     So, if you have friends coming in from out of town, especially from abroad, a trip to Macelleria in Armonk should be revelatory, and they’ll find that taking food home is a consequence of American generosity.

Open for lunch and dinner Tues.-Sun.

         The division of labor was the first order of business for Katie and David. Who was going to do what? Katie had been a history and art major at Fordham University, and enjoyed doing scholarly investigations. She had a fine ability to go through reams of material and find the wheat among the plenitude of chaff.  Plus, she learned to speak Italian at home and French from the nuns at Villa Maria Academy in the Bronx.
         David once dreamed of going to West Point, but he never got the invitation, so he joined the police force and took some college courses along the way to improve his pay scale. His was street knowledge, both from growing up in a tough south Bronx neighborhood and from later dealing with the mob’s wiseguys as he rose through the ranks to become First Detective. His strengths, not to mention instincts, were to piece together a semblance of the truth from a whole lot of people telling him lies.
         Knowing each other as well as Katie and David did, the avenues they would go down became immediately apparent. Katie would bone up on Vermeer and the art world, while David would use his contacts to find out the names and connections of those who had figured in some global art sales and frauds. That meant they would not always be working together but would join up whenever they needed to pool resources and information.
         Katie had already begun reading about Vermeer, only to find that, despite hundreds of articles on the artist’s works, there was precious little on the man’s life—for the simple reason that next to nothing was known about him. Indeed, his entire life could be summed up in a few bullets: 

         • Baptized October 31, 1632, in the New Church in Delft, Holland (left).

         • Married Catharina Bolenes of Gouda on April1, 1653.  They had eleven children.

         • Admitted to the artists' Guild of St. Luke as a “master” on December 29, 1653. Elected a member of the governing body of the Guild in 1663 and elected president twice.

         • Called in to give his expert opinion on a collection of Italian paintings at The Hague in 1672.

         • Buried December 15, 1675, in the Old Church in Delft.

         •  His widow petitioned the court for bankruptcy protection and died in 1688.

         • On May 16, 1696, twenty-one of Vermeer’s paintings were sold at an auction in Amsterdam.

         And that was everything that could be documented. Having lived and painted during the so-called Golden Age of Dutch art—with Rembrandt (right) as the towering figure—Vermeer seemed a respected but marginal figure in his time. And his residence in Delft, which had none of the wealth or prestige of Amsterdam or Rotterdam, meant that few important commissions would come his way at a time when the city was becoming more and more a haven for old people.
         Scholars had pieced together shards of information about Vermeer’s background. His father, Janszoon Reynier Vermeer, did well enough as a tavern keeper and silk merchant, while also achieving the title of “Master Art Dealer” in the local guild. The young Jan Vermeer entered the guild as an apprentice around 1647, probably for six or seven years, achieving a master’s title in 1653, after paying all his fees. He had already joined his father as an art dealer, though Janszoon died in 1655. 
         There was an undocumented story that a French collector named Balthasar de Moncoys (left) sought out Vermeer in order to purchase some paintings, but found the artist had none in his shop and only one available, which was hanging in the local butcher shop.  As banal as the story was, it didn’t even have a good ending. Vermeer asked for 300 guilders for the work, but Moncoys offered no more than fifty. The sale did not go through.    
         Nothing else was known about the artist, only surmised or postulated. Was Vermeer a Catholic or Calvinist? What artists did he study with? Who influenced his style? Why was his work so ignored? 
          Indeed, Katie found, Vermeer was wholly underrated as an artist until 1860, when an influential French collector and art critic named Thoré began writing essays on neglected Dutch masters like Franz Hals and Vermeer, insisting they were “artists of the people,” as opposed to the flamboyant painters of the Baroque and the dark, moody Rembrandt. Vermeer came to be called the “Sphinx of Delft.”
         Thirteen Vermeers came to the United States in the late 19th century, yet interest in his work was scant until the early 20th century, when the very lack of verifiable facts about Vermeer or his paintings lent them a mysterious aura.
        Vermeer’s work showed a simplicity hiding levels of meaning, a treatment of light and color that suddenly appeared wholly modern.  He never painted a crucifixion, a Madonna and Child, or a battle scene, and his reputation soared not among academicians but among French poets who saw both beauty and psychological depth behind his simple subjects and settings—a woman with a pitcher, an artist and his model, a girl with a pearl earring—most of them painted in the same sunlit room. Vermeer never painted a self-portrait.        
       After that, Vermeer’s fame only grew, and the irony was that it was all based on just 35 paintings, most of them not even dated or signed, each one seemingly connected but with invisible threads of meaning.  His was the smallest body of work by an artist who came to be ranked among the greatest, and the fever among museums and collectors to own even one Vermeer was fueled by larger and larger sums paid for any that came on the market.
         Most of Vermeer’s paintings, Katie found, were owned by museums and other institutions—four in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (right) and three in the Frick Collection in New York, three in the National Gallery in Washington, four in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and one each in a number of highly prestigious museums in America and Europe. Buckingham Palace owned one. The rest were in private hands.
         So, if there were any other Vermeers anywhere in the world, they were owned by collectors who for their own reasons had no intention of letting the art world know of it. None had come on the market for more than eight decades, so no one actually knew what price one would bring at auction.
         Katie opened her research on several fronts, but was focused on finding out which auction house might be in the running for the sale.  Sotheby’s and Christie’s, as the largest and most active houses dealing in Old Masters, said they were hoping to be chosen but had heard nothing thus far. Smaller houses usually specialized in lesser known or contemporary artists, along with furniture, tapestries, and books. 
         She decided that competing houses probably would not cite any figure for so large a sale, so she contacted several first-rank Manhattan galleries that would not have the clout to compete. After coming up dry with the first three, the head of the Jonathan H. Mannion Gallery on Madison Avenue at 75th Street, the owner, a man named Kevin O’Keeffe, agreed to speak with her in person.