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 sautéed 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.