THE ED BURKE BLOG

You must see La Didone by The Wooster Group, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo.  The Wooster Group is god.  We staggered out of St. Ann’s after the opening night of La Didone last Sunday night, at about a quarter till nine, jumped in our car that we had parked right in front of the theater, and with barely a crank of the steering wheel and no more than ten minutes, a straight shot south, we were parked in front of The Good Fork restaurant on Van Brunt Street, just a block or two from the Red Hook Fairway on the shore of Buttermilk Channel in Brooklyn.  You will have a superb meal there, as have we on numerous occasions.  After you have dined, it is a joy to take a moonlit stroll along the waterfront.  What a great city.

Since we last spoke, all of the great olive oils from the glorious 2008 pressing have found their way back to a shelf near you.  Well, “near you” as long as you’re in a Fairway, because they sure as hell aren’t sold in any other food shop in New York or any place else in North America.  Heck, my oils are so rare, they don’t even make it to the nearest big city to their own groves.  Not Madrid, or Barcelona, or Seville, or Cordoba; not Milan, or Florence, or Rome, or Palermo; not Avignon, or Lyon, or Paris.  Well, I lie; Manfredi Barbera’s unfiltered biancolillo makes it to Palermo.  But those French and Spanish oils and those other Italians?  Nossir.  You only find them out in the country, or at Fairway in New York (and New Jersey – we just opened in Paramus). 

You must take a look at that sea salt I brought in from Cyprus.  It’s called Sailor Salt, and it’s quite amazing; it’s in flakes.  Huge, paper-thin flakes, and it’s either plain-glaring-white or stark- jet-black having been dissolved with charcoal, or bright yellow having been dissolved with lemon and re-constituted with blasts of air; or brown from smoke, or red from hot chiles, blah, blah, blah, you’ll also be offered rosemary, ten spice and . . . oh, yeah – seaweed.  Green.  Sounds ridiculous, but Michelle and I love it.  At the table.  You pinch it, like it’s fleur de sel.

And those Alain Milliat nectars are life-altering.  A bottle-of-pop-size bottle, and they cost a fortune.  But you only use a tablespoon of any of them, and they rock.  With seltzer.  Or vodka or rum or aguardiente.  Bilberry.  You got to get a load of the bilberry.  Or the strawberry, or the “mara des bois” strawberry, or the raspberry.  The Cox’s Orange apple juice will change the way you think about apple juice.  Yellow tomato juice.  Apple quince juice.  The blackcurrant nectar has that cat pee finish that blackcurrant devotees find alluring.  White peach nectar.  Passion fruit nectar.  Lyonnais Alain Milliat is a complete freak; sources his fruits from farm gardens mostly in the South of France, primitive regions like Ardeche and Aveyron.  Stuff costs a fortune.  I already said that.

If we haven’t sold them out, you have to take some of those soft-dried kumquats, and if you tell anybody I was talking about kumquats I’ll deny it.  But just between us, you know my outfit down in Lot-et-Garonne that grows and dries our terrific pruneaux d’Agen, the famous Agennais prunes.   And those incredible soft-dried apricots and soft-dried figs and strawberries and coconut and all the others.  That little outfit that Whole Foods or Dean & DeLuca would kill for, but that we have an exclusive with.  Them.  Well, they sent me effing KUMQUATS, and they’re amazing, and not just because of the way they smell and taste and chew, but also for the way they have this inner luminescence.  They absolutely GLOW.   On the table, with cheeses and charcuterie (salumi) – stunning. 

ArteOliva’s gazpacho in the Tetra-Pack liters is back.  Stuff tastes better than homemade on a finca outside Seville. 

You saw my rice in the paper, right?  Color photo?  Rice from the Camargue; variously white, brown or red, with flowers from the countryside – lavender, rose petals, poppy petals, jasmine, orange blossoms or violets.  When I fell across the line in Avignon recently, I got all cuddly inside and I had to import it for you.  The rice is superb, and the flowers hold their color through the steam or boil, and it is a lovely presentation.  But only one variety of flower per box of rice.  It’s not all these flowers mixed up.

That killer chocolate from Bovetti in the Perigord region is back.  Artisanal production chocolate in bars, mostly all dark chocolate, with the conceit of a surface decoration of, variously, dried cranberry, pulverized cocoa beans (interesting flavor, a cocoa bean), crystallized ginger, coarse blue mint sugar (pretty trippy-looking), hazelnut, coconut, pistachio (oy, the ass-pain of that pistachio recall – you have no idea!), and a milk chocolate bar with caramel and sea salt.  What you do, is you serve three different Bovetti bars as dessert for four.  You break it up and put it in a favorite dish or on a slab of granite or wood or marble in the center of the table, and let your peeps pick at it with coffee.  What a great dessert that is!  Primitive.  Minimalist.  Striking.  Memorable.  That’s us, right?

Caffe Alberto from Turin is back.  Corrado Alberto is the acknowledged coffee guru of this coffee-mad burg that puts Seattle to shame.  Caffe Alberto is the coffee Grom uses for their coffee sorbet.  Caffe Alberto is ONLY sold at Fairway, and you can buy the beans in bulk two ways according to the percentage of arabica to robusto, OR you can buy it already ground in cans.  And decaf.  Killer coffee.  A little cheaper than Illy, ‘cause I’m the importer, but maybe even better than Illy.  Coffee this good reaches a threshold where “better” doesn’t have much credence.

Hurrah for another load of those waxed “pots” of creamed Provence Chailan honey!  Creamed means  whipped, to make it spreadable rather than runny.  Mille fleur  –  “1,000-flower” –  which means the bees are a bunch of whores, and Garrigues, which means the bees are discriminating whores.  This is the honey Lionel Poilane and I enjoyed together at his apartment on the rue du Cherche Midi four or five years ago, the morning I bade him see yez soon, and he climbed into his helicopter with his wife and his fine dog, and thwokked off to his house on the coast of Brittany, and while making a swoop down to his field got caught in a violent downdraft, the October weather was miserable, and crashed into the sea.

My glorious Escala anchovies are back.  Fairway was written up and photographed for a New York Magazine-like magazine in Girona, which is the capital of Northern Catalonia and is very near the coastal (Brava) village Escala; well, the anchovy shelf here was photographed, because the idiot journalist looked at a jar of Roland anchovies under the l’Escala anchovy sign I have hanging there, and espied that they were, like, a third the price that Escala anchovies sell for in Catalunya, and they were plenty pissed.  Indignant, in fact.  Very funny.  The guy wrote an entire Catalan-language page about it, including the photo.  Local controversy, big-time.  The equally glorious Roque anchovies and anchoiade are back, too.  Roque is the centuries-old company and factory right on the waterfront of Collioure, a few miles up the Costa Brava from Escala, but on the French Catalan side of the international border where so many Americans and Brits slipped across in order to get involved back in the ‘30’s, and proceeded to get their asses shot off.  God bless ‘em.

Four new barrel oils.  Fairway label, small-harvest, specific-family pride-and-joy, un-filtered extra-virgin, barrel-shipped olive oils is the smartest, coolest and BEST VALUE thing we’ve ever done, and probably ever will do.  To the Big Eleven, I have added the medal-winning Oro San Carlos arbequina from our friends in Extremadura, long story; and also the Doukas Family koroneiki from the Doukas farm and groves in Peloponnesus (Greece), long story; and the sumptuous and too-good-to-be-true Olivie Languedoc Roussillon picholine from near Montpellier, long story; and due in next week, the Italian Riviera taggiasca from Rosmarino Farm overlooking the bay at Portofino.

But that’s not why I’m writing.  I have interrupted your reverie, and for that I apologize, in order to offer you the following bit of Fairway lore.  It has been recorded by the great Edward Burke, our fine general manager of the Broadway store.  Ed is one of those people that makes you think it’s just not over yet, this idiot world.  There’s still reason to believe.  He sent me this missive out of the blue, and I simply had to share it with you.  The little bit that follows Edward’s piece is a commentary by my oldest best friend in the world, a fellow who lives in Santa Monica, but that’s neither here nor there, but what is there is a superb idea born out of yet another of David Hinshaw’s rich life experience.  Here you go:

From: Edward Burke
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 4:13 PM

Thought I’d pass along these quick stories from the management side of the fence here.  While holidays tend to bring out the absolute worst in people, these are fairly representative of what goes on here on a daily and weekly basis – holiday or no.  These stories are in no way meant to convince you that customer complaints should not be properly investigated; rather, offer you a perspective:  in the midst of sometimes herculean efforts to provide peerless customer service in a hectic environment, our customers can be a very difficult breed.

As a Floor Manager, I wrote an infrequent piece called, “The View From the Floor” – vignettes of happenings in the day-to-day bustle here that I distributed to a few people here.  While all of our days here are what can only be defined as, busy, yesterday was especially hectic with pre-Passover shopping.  Here is a brief chronology:

Preface:  I arrived at the store at 4:30 am and was the only senior, store management person on-duty from that time until 12:00 p.m. when the first Floor Manager arrived.  I left for the day at 6:30 p.m.

10:00 a.m.:          Store was extremely busy.  I was outside dealing with a Receiving Dept. issue when I noticed a group of eight small children with three adults assembled on the sidewalk at the entrance speaking with a Produce manager.  All of the children had clipboards with crayons.  I was close enough to only hear the manager say, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to make an appointment; maybe next week.”  I approached and asked the woman who seemed to be the coordinator if I could assist her.  She explained that, while she didn’t have an appointment, she was wondering if someone from the store could speak briefly to her kindergarten class about four varieties of fruits and vegetables.   Nothing elaborate she continued, just a brief talk on the varieties on the children’s clipboards – a Show-and-tell.  I obliged.

                                We began with berries on the sidewalk and I then herded the children to the far end of aisle 1 to continue.  Once there, as I began the second part of my talk, a gentleman customer exclaimed, “Couldn’t you do this shit some other day!?!”  As scared looks came across the faces of the youngsters I said, “Sir, please, they’re children.”  The teacher chimed, “No one else seems to mind.”  “That’s because no one else has the balls to say anything!” he retorted and stormed off.  I took the kids around to aisle 2 where I finished the talk with stone fruit.

10:45 a.m.           The store was extremely busy.  I positioned myself directing customers at the Front End to manage the chaos and confusion that can develop quickly if not managed.  An older gentleman customer approached, ignored the line and positioned himself at a register.  Just before the crowd demanded his head, and as the customer only had a few items, I asked him over to the Express Line where he would receive faster service.  He refused.  I reiterated my request; he took several steps, turned around and spit on me.  I removed his basket from his hands and marched him out of the store.

1:00 p.m.             I was approached by a gentleman customer who informed me that he moved here recently from Europe.  He said that never in his entire life (he was about 40 years old) had he encountered so many rude people.  I asked if anyone on the staff was rude.  He said, “No!  The other customers.  It is as if this is an insane asylum where people are free to come-and-go!”

And that is “The View From the Floor” for April 07, 2009.

Best,

Ed

Ed Burke

General Manager

Fairway - Broadway

2127 Broadway (W. 74th St.)

New York, NY 10023

I agree with the reaction to the spitting.  In my world, a spitter is immediately shown a red card and removed from the premises, too.

Your managers should carry the yellow and red cards that soccer referees use, or what would be more subtle:  carry a supply of yellow and red lollypops, which I use with parent spectators for very young kids’ games.  Yellow means caution, you are treading on thin ice; red means stop what you are saying or doing and leave the premises immediately.

The yellow and red cards were invented by Sir Ken Aston, an English world cup referee whom I was privileged to meet.  He related that he was trying to figure out how to communicate with players who did not speak a language he spoke in the 1930’s or ’40’s–and he was doing his thinking as he drove home from a match.  The traffic signals gave him the idea and voila!

I have a set of yellow and red cards signed by Sir Ken.  A prized possession.  He is off to to the Big Pitch now.

Sometimes your personal grocer enjoys a meal so much he just has to tell you about it.  The shocker for me is that it’s rare that Michelle Sims, my wife, wasn’t the cook.  She just got to be there, as did I. 

Informal Saturday night.  Michelle and I are two of the lucky few New Yorkers who apparently have no life as we were in the city as usual on a summer weekend.  I use “lucky” because I choose not to insert “loser”.  I don’t care.  I love summer weekends when the city is so devoid of people and vehicles.  It’s like a big old empty pigeon coop.

Tim and Dagny, who definitely have a life, were in town, too.  So they invited us B-listers out to their glorious place, The Foundry, in Long Island City.  The Foundry is the damnedest thing you ever saw, but that’s another story.  

Tim’s an Aussie, and a master cook; a master of the grill, certainly.  He and Dagny have a stomach-high fireplace (higher than your waist, lower than your chest) in their enormous kitchen that they use when it’s too cold to cook outside on their sprawling rooftop.  They’ve been Plant Specialists for 35 years, or as they refer to themselves, “gardeners”.  But Tim has that Aussie gene responsible for his love for the barbie.  He has a big gas grill outside that he mostly ignores.  One of those big fancy ones.  He only has it for the celebrity chef shoots that seem to be at The Foundry so often, in their kitchen or out on the terrace.  Tim prefers his little barbies, a pair of them sitting side-by-side.  There’s another of those stomach-high fireplaces out there, too, but he usually cooks on one of the little grills.

So he says he intends to grill a whole fish.  Fine by me, and I insist on bringing it.  Tony Maltese, our excellent seafood boss here has the freshest fish imaginable delivered to all four stores seven days a week, so I insisted that the fish be Fairway fish.  I chose two huge red snappers from the Red Hook Brooklyn fish counter, and Ketia, our beloved Ketia from Mali, cleaned them up for me, handed them across the glass, and I was off to the races.  Tim also had me bring Long Island arugula from our farmer who cut and trucked it to the Brooklyn store that morning, some fennel, a navel orange, a Bermuda (red) onion, a liter of my hand-pumped-from-the-barrel Australian picual unfiltered extra-virgin olive oil and a 375 ml bottle of my Fairway label 12-Star balsamic vinegar, special-occasion balsamic at an every-day balsamic price (we import it direct).  I also brought fifteen ears of Long Island corn from our farmer, picked and trucked to the Brooklyn Fairway this very Saturday morning, and a paper-wrapped quarter-kilo of butter churned from the cream skimmed from the milk used to make Parmigiano-Reggiano, the world’s greatest cheese.  I brought another quarter-kilo of sea-salted butter called La Grand Baratte from Frances’s Charente region just in case, plus another half-pound of the sea-salted butter from Vermont Butter & Cheese (my dear friends Allison and Bob) and an emergency half-pound of Ben’s of Houston Street’s sweet butter, THE Fairway butter I’ve been buying for us for 28 years.  After all, there would be five of us, and I surely didn’t want to come up short on butter for the corn.  Two pounds ought to do it.  I’m from The More-Is-Better School of cooking, which is partly why I’m a lousy cook.  I’m a heck of a provider, though.  I definitely give good shop.  I had to tear myself away from at least six other butters, but that’s another story, too.  We have a stunning selection of butters.  Michelle and I don’t use much butter, but when we do, watch out.

Finally, I packed up six of those little Mitchel London cupcakes from the pastry counter out there, and six of those little red velvet cupcakes, all twelve with a crown of icing as thick as the cupcake itself.

Beautiful weather Saturday night even though it rained briefly, rained hard.  Cleared up almost immediately and the stars came out.  Tim fired up one of those little charcoal grills, waited until the chimney device had the charcoal burning hotter than Hades, dumped them into the barbie and proceeded to pull two thin planks of cedar from a tray of water along with several handfuls of sodden hickory chips.  He tossed the hickory chips onto the hot, hot fire, and they began to smoke immediately, deliciously aromatic.  Sometimes woodsmoke makes me happier than just about anything.  Then he laid the two snappers on their appointed planks of cedar.  Each of them had been larded in their cavities with copious slices of lemon and Bermuda onion.  Tim placed the wire grill on the smokey hickory and charcoal fire, and then the red snapper-laden cedar planks.  He then put the dome over the barbie, opened the three-hole vent which began to spew smoke like a house-afire, and said, “That should do it.”, and we headed off to the whiskey bar.

It couldn’t have been much more than fifteen minutes later that we carried one of the fish inside, divvied it up, salted it and drizzled the picual olive oil over each of our plate-loads.  Had at that snapper all by itself.  Went and got the other one, dressed it the same and dispatched the whole creature.  The meat literally fell off the bone.  Tasted like you forgot how fish could taste.  Those two snapper carcasses looked like cartoon renderings of themselves.  Then came the corn and the butter, all by itself.  I ate my three ears and one of Michelle’s.  Thought I’d died and gone to Heaven.  So Tim dressed the arugula salad with the picual and the balsamic and I remembered how much I love summertime.  Thin slices of fennel, thinner slices of navel orange, chunks of red onion with the arugula.  A New Zealand sauvignon blanc and a Piedmont Arneis among four very chilled wines.  Assorted rolls from the Fairway bakery.

Yep, cupcakes.          

Battaglia Este Olive EVOO (formerly Val Di Luce) Matthew Battaglia

November, 2008

Allow me a few words before I give you Matthew’s correspondence to me:   Matthew just sent this to me, and I was so impressed with it I simply had to share it with you.  If you have a passion for olive oil I figure you would hate to miss this, not to mention that it really puts a face on an endeavor that we all take for granted.  This is what the food business is all about, certainly moreso than what I do all day, what I’ve been doing for 33 years.  Which is to say I am humbled by this.  Matthew is thirty-something, pushing forty, I suppose.  Born and raised in Michigan.  He is responding to some correspondence I forwarded to him – me ranting at the outrageous price of the just-pressed Tuscan olive oil produced by a Tuscan named Emilio, whose grove is near Lucca in Eastern Tuscany, a guy about my age whose English is such that he lets a friend, an American woman living in New York speak for him.  (Matthew says to me)  I agree, Steven.  It is a plain and simple fact:  Olive oil, at least in certain regions, CANNOT make money.  There is a lot of very good olive oil, and not that much demand.  I think that even if demand does go up 10% a year, people are still willing to buy (not very good oil) for three or four bucks less per bottle.  And when I say (not very good oil), I mean the junk that is bought here, there and everywhere, refined a bit, and packaged as extra virgin.

Maybe in Sicily or Spain, with lower labor costs and undulating, easier-to-work hills, and a softer climate, it’s possible to make a good living from extra-virgin olive oil.  Sicliy is blessed with one of the perfect ‘terroirs’ to make cheaper great oil.  I don’t know.

But in Tuscany it’s impossible.  But that’s a given.  The market is the market.

Also, you got to be much more competitive in the US.  That’s a given as well.  My prices are:

Steve Jenkins (Fairway):  6.50 euros per 500 ml (half-liters) delivered to Milan

Europe:  8 euros PLUS delivery charge

Italian private clients:  10 euros  PLUS delivery charge

London:  8 euros PLUS delivery charge to English shops

English private clients:  15 euros PLUS delivery (the bull market buys only the expensive (stuff), or should I say “bought”!  But still our private client orders in London this year were 150 half-liter bottles).

That’s the market, charging what we can and what is fair given the market.  Olive oil – and obviously we’re talking about the quality stuff – is a labor of love.

I only get (peeved) at private client Italians who bitch at me when I tell them the price of a 750 ml (24 oz.) bottle:  12 euros, when the upper-level mass produced (stuff) you buy in the supermarkets is 7.50 euros.  I mean, can you believe it?

Plus, my brother reminded me about the other guy that (really peeved) us:  that guy John at Bel Canto Imports (in NY) to whom we told the price, then sent him two bottles ($100 DHL overnight delivery); then he complained about the price (which we had already told him!) and that the chefs don’t like the “hard-to-peel” bottle cap.

I talked to a lot of people in the US, outside of NYC, and everyone said they’d never be able to sell at our price.  Well, what’re you going to do?  That’s the market.

And it almost bristles me thinking that our oil sells for $26-$28 – it still seems so much even though we don’t make money on it. 

My brother works 16 hours a day, 7 days a week between September and the end of December (harvest- and pressing- time).  I am embarrassed at how much he works, and how little he gets paid.  We paid  1400 euros to three Indian brothers for a few weeks work, otherwise he’s done EVERYTHING himself, and we’ve made almost 1500 kilos (1.09 liters) of oil so far this year.  He is  psychotic, paranoid and obsessed with the quality of the oil.  That makes a great farmer, or artisan, or anything.  We had three olive flies in one trap, and he drove ten kilometers every day to inspect  that area for more flies, to treat the trees immediately if necessary.  The flies burrow their eggs in the meat of the olive, and then they grow in the fruit itself, ruining the flavor.  It becomes worse than letting olives sit (already picked) on the net (spread beneath each tree) for three days in the heat, before pressing. 

I think I told you, two years ago, the local farmers said that if you guys can get this entire grove done by Christmas, you are kings among men.  My brother and his posse finished by December the 5th!  In one day, he harvested 1900 kilos of olives with two helpers – the farmers had said that more than 1200 kilos in one day wasn’t possible!

My point being, it’s a labor of love, of intensity, of massive investment in time, and in most cases, money, and there just ain’t going  to be a profitable return on your investment in terms of cash.

We had to buy four hectares (about nine acres) so that my brother could be a farmer, get an azienda agricola (a farmhouse- cum-bed-and-breakfast), get the permits to re-do an old 300-square foot stone hut and put our frantoio (olive press) in it, wait seven years and get permits to expand it another  500- square feet (and deposit about $75,000 cash with the town as a guarantee!), and still we can only get there by tractor.  You can imagine the building costs bringing all the materials up there by tractor.  But . . . if we hadn’t done it that way we couldn’t have the entire operation.

And?  What am I going to do?  Charge YOU for that?  Great.  Then my oil would cost 40 to 50 euros per half-liter bottle, just to give my brother a decent salary, and I don’t even get paid myself, and what about all my investments?

Beauty is beauty, passion is passion, and the market is the market.  We make olive oil, not fine wine or artwork.  And  I don’t think in our lifetimes oil will reach that benchmark.  It’s an everyday thing that makes  for a life of higher quality.  Sorry, but I think with any people that know anything about food, the high costs of making  quality olive oil are known. 

Anyway, getting back to production:  As you know, there is a certain short, temporal window of opportunity for harvesting.  Too early, and you get what the Chianti area growers prefer, their show of machismo, oil that is great on salad, soups, almost burning the back of your throat!  And yields of 9-11% (with traditional Tuscan varieties).  Then, too late, and you get big yields, maturing fruit full of acidity and fatty taste.

To get it just right you need to harvest at the ‘invaiatura’, when the fruit is just changing color, so that the fresh, fruity taste is expressed to its fullest, and the meat has grown so that yields are decent (13-15% in Tuscany).  This year is a great example of the invaiatura:  Drought, then ten days of ideal picking time, then torrential, non-stop rains, now freezing temperatures.  Fortunately, in those ten days we picked a substantial amount.  The rain that made the meat bloated, full of water, and the cold temperatures are good if they remain low but not freezing because they sort of put a stop to maturity allowing another month of ideal picking.  But the freezing temperatures break down the meat and that’s it for them!

As far as the organoleptic qualities, I remember a few years ago, I told some friends in London that it was like a governor on an engine:  If the oil was too spicy and lively, then by leaving your bottle open a few hours you could ‘govern’ the pepperiness to your liking, thereby reducing the overbearing freshness.  Whether that is the organoleptic quality or not, I don’t know.  I guess you are saying it’s like wine:  A bit of air opens up the too-tart-ness of an incredibly low acidity (degree of oxidation) oil and makes the fruit fruitier. 

You will be impressed that this year our oil is pretty full, very artichoky and freshly-cut grass-tasting (love that smell!). 

 That was Matthew.  Terrific person.  Don’t know his brother.  Yet.  I was over there a few weeks ago, and I was south of Matthew, and without the time to drive up to see him.  I had to be in some other Tuscan groves.  I import most of our (Fairway) olive oils (and nut and seed oils and vinegars) direct.  That’s why our selection is such a mind-blower.  The selection of olive oils (and nut and seed oils and vinegars) here at Fairway (the greatest  four stores on the planet) is so far ahead of and beyond any retailer in the world that to compare Fairway to any other shop or store or market is an insult to good sense.  On top of that, the prices we charge are so low, so “Fairway”, so much lower than any other shop or store or market, we really should be given some kind of award or something. 

Before I get started, and I have a lot of literal ground to cover, I want you all to take a look at sweet Bonnie Langer’s new catering menu.  It’s a gem.  Like Bonnie.  Our killer food and our Fairway prices. 

 Okay.  Here we go.

 Eighteen hours door-to-door, Hotel Sant’Andrea (Taormina) to our apartment in Morningside Heights.  Ten days in Italy.  Best trip of my life.  Michelle and I paid for it, too.  Not Fairway.  Well, okay, Fairway paid for my coach class round-trip ticket, but that was nothing.  Not to mention I’ve aged out of coach.  If I ever fly coach again I’m blowing somebody’s brains out.  Maybe I’ll just refuse to go anyplace.  That would certainly not disappoint Michelle.  She can barely stand to travel with me.  I get so irritated at things completely out of my control.  Like coach.  Baggage retrieval.  The tarmac.  Boarding.  Getting off.  JFK.  Immigration officials.  I’m on their Detain and Hassle list, you know, ever since that New York Times Frequent Flyer column where I bragged about making it through customs with suspect but completely legal stuff.  For the record, goddammit, I have never had anything taken away from me at US Customs.  I always declare everything.  Always.  But I must have embarrassed them, so being on their list is payback.  Pure and simple vindictive payback.  

The crux of the trip was the Eleventh Annual Couscous Festival in San Vito Lo Capo (Capo San Vito, or just San Vito) in extreme western Sicily.  Look at San Vito on a map.  It really is a cape, with a real lighthouse and everything, and a breathtaking paradise of a town. The cape sticks straight out in the gorgeous sea toward Sardinia which is a long way away, actually.  Sardinia is as far from Sicily as it is from Rome.  Bet you didn’t know that.  Yeah, and Las Vegas is farther west than Los Angeles.  Bet you didn’t know that either.  This is why you come to this website.  You learn stuff.

 Manfredi’s olive oil factory is around the corner from the cape of San Vito to the left, at Custonaci, the tiny beach town where we stayed, an easy drive or powerboat ride around the looming, imposing, seaside Monte Cofano.  Down the coast to the right, back towards the airport and, beyond, Palermo it is just a stunning vista of grottoes and then the wildlife preserve and national park called Zingaro.  This part of the world, of Europe, of the Mediterranean, is just the most amazing place you could ever imagine, and all I can think about when I’m there, and this the third time I’ve been there, is “Where are all the real estate developers?”  Nothing.  Nobody.  It looks as it has looked for thousands upon thousands of years.  I know what you’re thinking:  Why is he doing this?  Why doesn’t he shut up?  Don’t worry.  Nobody reads this stuff.

 We were at the Tenth Annual Couscous Festival last year.  Remember?  Israel won the all-important and prestigious recipe competition?  This year Cote d’Ivoire won.  Or as olive oil king and King of Palermo Manfredi Barbera, our host, and all the rest of Italy  says, Costa Ivoria.  Manfredi is big and strong and very handsome, pushing fifty, and my kind of man.  His wife Paola is much younger and gorgeous.  Michelle and Dagny are pretty easy on the eyes, too, now that I think of it.  Paola and Michelle and Dagny, and Manfredi and Tim and me, we’re tight, for a lot of years.  Paola and Manfredi have a little boy, Lorenzo, but he was back in Palermo with Paola’s mom.

 Michelle and I started out in the village Fiumicino which is not exactly a tourist haven.  Fiumicino is how Italians refer to the international airport of Rome; it’s the nearest town.  No one bothers to go there except the occasional day-tripping Roman and Romans who want to enjoy a Sunday dinner by the sea.  Like Barcelona people drive down to Sitges. But Manfredi has visited Fiumicino innumerable times, using it as a dropping off point when he travels to and from Palermo.  If he has a few hours to kill between flights, he never sits on his behind at the airport, he jumps a taxi and in ten minutes he’s in one of the coolest, whitest and most inviting restaurants I’ve ever been to, Il Molo (“the pier”).  One whole side of it is open to the sea.  It’s the last building on the long, cement pier that is used for the considerable number of commercial fishing boats that call at Fiumicino and use it as a haven.  The ugly cursive, thirty yards-long graffiti I saw along the pier read in effect that “The fish of Fiumicino is not fresh any longer because there is no fish because the price of gasoline and oil is so high nobody can fish anymore!”, the graffitista obviously mad, but not knowing who to be mad at.

 Manfredi had directed Michelle and me to Il Molo to wait for him and Paola who were flying in from Zurich.  Michelle and I were the first Sunday diners to arrive, and dine we did, and of all the magnificent meals we had on this trip, this one was right up there with the best of them.  First, a marvelous salad featuring quartered tomatoes that were better than any I had had the entire summer here in New York.  A bottle of good balsamic vinegar and one of Manfredi’s (Barbera) Lorenzo V fine cerasuolo- and biancolilla-blended olive oils was brought to our table.  Manfredi’s oils are in most of Italy’s and indeed Europe’s best joints – this one no exception.  Manfredi has emerged as a serious player in the business of high-end olive oil, and as a respected expert in the art and craft of not just pressing the best olives, but of having the acumen to blend them in order to achieve specific felicitous taste profiles, and then articulate them on his many labels, so that the cook can match a Barbera oil with a desired flavor, fragrance and texture.  I don’t put much stock in that fol-de-rol, but then, I’m a Fairway philistine.

 With the salad we had a platter of tiny sautéed seppie (cuttlefish) that were so fresh one remembers that the deal with fish and seafood is that WHEN it was caught is a lot more important than how it was caught, where it was caught and what in hell it is that was caught in the first place.  So as much as I respect my wife, and Mitchel London, and Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin, and Rick Moonen, and Scott at Esca and all the great fish and seafood chefs I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, just you know that freshness means everything.  Cooking fish and seafood is not all that complicated.  It really doesn’t need anything but olive oil, salt and pepper, as far as I’m concerned.  Some herbs, some citrus.

Then came a dish of spaghetti with a sauce of chunks of fresh tomato added right at the end of a soffritto of olive oil and aromatic vegetables imbued with squid ink, and innumerable chunks of some kind of shrimp, squid and probably dentice, a sort-of snapper.  Sounds like no big deal, but it was.  It patently was.  It was as much flesh as starch, and the tomato was there as a vegetable, not as a sauce constituent, you know what I mean?  No bread crumbs, no capers, no chunks of olive.  The chef here at Il Molo is just not your ordinary cook.

 And the bread at the table was superb.  The bread at every table the whole trip was superb, and unless I’ve completely forgotten, that’s a sea change for Italy as far as I’m concerned.

 I’m on the wagon for the last several months because of a couple of heart meds I’m on, but Michelle drank a Sauvignon Blanc from the Veneto that she seemed to enjoy.  All of a sudden I’ve got an irregular heartbeat and three cardiologists.  Hell, I’ve had an irregular heartbeat all my life.  The lead cardio, the famous Dr. Eddie Fisher, insists it’s alcohol that caused it.  I insist it’s Fairway that caused it, and if Fairway hasn’t killed me by now I’m going to outlive your grandchildren.  The heart muscle specialist is the equally famous Dr. Jill Kalman.  If I wasn’t so impressed with her and Eddie I’d say I think I need three different cardios.  I need a drink.

 So Manfredi and Paola show up, and we jump in their rented Ford and blast off north for Monte Argentario, an island off the coast of southern Tuscany, the Maremma, at Orbetello.  Monte Argentario is connected to the mainland by three ganglion-like causeways, two of which can be driven across, the southernmost one of which is where the pretty, ancient-walled town Orbetello is.  Orbetello separates the Tyrrhenian Sea from the lagoon that is as smooth as a lake.  I am told the sea-side hosts a number of oyster beds, but I was unable to ascertain same, nor did I see any oysters in the fish market.  I saw utterly huge oysters being delivered to a table at Il Molo back in Fiumicino, two to the dinner plate, but I was also unable to ascertain their origin.  Sorry.  I was very tired after the flight from New York.  Our party of four was headed for Argentario to visit Tim and Dagny from The Foundry in Long Island City, the home of Plant Specialists, and who have a house and gardens and olive groves there.  I’ve told you about them before and about their place here.

 Manfredi and I inspected Tim and Dagny’s olive trees, at their request, as they are rather new to the role of olive farmer; plus, Tim wanted us to take a look at his new olive press which was a very impressive piece of machinery – modern, involved.  Manfredi and I understand these things, you know.

 We all helped whip up a pesto for dinner – in addition to the fresh basil, we had pounded  pine nuts, together with garlic, and we added a couple of boiled and peeled potatoes and a quantity of painstakingly acquired handfuls of lemon zest.  We served the pesto with spaghetti and freshly grated Parmigiano, and we preceded it with a quantity of salami, a sopressata from Calabria, fruity and peppery, and with a touch of hot chile; and I carved quite a number of thin slices of a Pecorino Toscano from Pienza that was just perfect, and taralli, the addictive rings of baked dough that are Pugliese in origin.  They were drinking several wines from the market down the road at Porto San Stefano, but I don’t know what they were.  I mean, we were in Tuscany.  How bad could they be?  We crashed hard, got up late the next morning, walked down their steep road with olive wood walking sticks, peck, peck, pecking down to the stony beach and had a swim in the glorious sea, with the island of Giannutri off in the distance.  There are the remains of the Villa Romana, built in the 1st C. AD by the emperor Tiberias.  I’ve got a mental picture of that crib.  Wonder what it really looked like.  Later in the day we drove to the top of the island where there is a monastery and church built in the 16th C. that are still active.  From the heights there we could see streaming from doughy clouds sun rays so stark and defined that they looked as if they had substance.  They looked unreal, as if they were part of a painting, and they streamed down before the island Giglio, and off behind it a ways loomed dark Montecristo – yes, THAT Montecristo, and to the right, Elba, where Bonaparte could not be contained, and on a clearer day, Dagny insisted you could see Corsica.  The sunrays were striking the sea off Giglio as if the water were a patio, illuminating the flat surface in oval pools of a different color than the cloud-covered water, sort of a lavender as compared to an indigo.  So we drove back down the mountain like children, thrilled and exhilarated, to Porto San Stefano, in order to shop for the evening meal.  Rough life.

We enjoyed the previous night’s pesto so immensely that we decided to create a similar dish.  This time we made a sauce not unlike the seafood dish Michelle and I had at Il Molo at Fiumicino, but without the seafood and without the basil, but with a lot of parsley and garlic and pine nuts and crushed almonds and chunked cuoro di toro tomatoes, and with a huge mound of olive oil-fried rings of zucchini served separately and meant to be placed atop the pasta and sauce, and it was so fine.  I must give credit to Manfredi for the inspiration. 

So the next day we take two cars down to Naples.  Manfredi, a Palermitano all his life, was not looking forward to driving through Naples to get to the hotel we had reserved.  I have driven all over Palermo with Manfredi in his car, and I have tooled all over Palermo on the back of Manfredi’s motor scooter with him, a near-death experience I hope never to repeat, and I can attest to the fact that of Bangkok, Cairo and Palermo, Palermo beats them all for utter urban internal combustion congested madness.  Manfredi handles it like he’s walking down an empty hallway.  So Manfredi says if I think Palermo is a little nerve-wracking, wait’ll I get a load of Napoli.  He says HE’S NERVOUS ABOUT DRIVING IN NAPOLI!  And Manfredi’s gone!  And we’re left with Grandfather (Tim)!  Grandfather’s not really a grandfather, I just call him that.  He drives sort of sitting low in whatever car he’s in, with both hands on the steering wheel, one at ten o’clock, and one at about two-thirty, and his chin is pointing up, and he drives rather slow.  Tim’s never been to Naples. 

 We could be eaten alive, our carcasses left to rot on some garbage-piled strada in some god-forsaken neighborhood even the carabinieri won’t enter.

We make it to the Hotel Santa Lucia without incident.  Oil Can (I also call him Oil Can) fearlessly steers us right through the center of town, through neighborhoods piled so high with garbage that even the carabinieri won’t enter.  It was fascinating.  His GPS wouldn’t work right, and Gennaro, our host had given me a wrong cell phone number AND the wrong street address for the hotel, and Michelle and I and Tim and Dagny waltz right into a gorgeous old four-star, right on the Bay of Naples, the via Partenope.  Michelle and I walk into a huge, top-floor, high-ceilinged room with a huge, to-the-floor window on one side, and two even huge-er windows on the front, each with a balcony overlooking the Spanish Fort, the entire Bay of Naples, Capri and Vesuvius.  It is literally unreal.  And there’s a solid bone-white yacht anchored all alone, way too big to bob, about a hundred and fifty feet long, it looks like it was built in, oh, about 2080, the god damnedest thing I ever saw, it’s about six in the evening, the sun is going down way off to the right, so the bay and the city and Vesuvio are bathed in this luminousness that is like you can die now, and all along the waterline of this drop-dead yacht like no one ever even imagined could exist except in an exceptionally well-drawn comic book, these lights, like swimming pool lights, begin to pulse on and then off in turn, as I say all along and down toward the stern.  I turn around and do something in the room for a minute, go back to the balcony and the yacht is gone, baby, gone.  Probably making a bee-line for the Billionaire’s Club on the Costa Smeralda, about a hundred miles west.  I bet it anchors there in two hours, max.

Gennaro picked us up the next morning and took us a ways out of town to see the factory that cans our La Valle San Marzano tomatoes.  Gennaro is the US importer of this premium brand of the DOP (name-controlled) tomatoes, and we do a ton of business with him.  Michelle has always had a decided preference for this brand, and for what it’s worth she’s one of those people who just has that undeniable serious cook’s innate sense of all things being equal, which of what is perceptibly better.  I taste all of our canned tomatoes every time we receive a new shipment, because canned tomatoes vary from run to run.  Right out of the can, with a fork.  And not just the Italian DOP San Marzano.  I taste the non-DOP San Marzano brands, the non-San Marzano brands (those canned Italian tomatoes that are simply Italian plum tomatoes), and the American brands, too, like Muir Glen and Red Pack, both of which are often very, very good.  But rarely are they as deeply flavorful as the La Valle brand.  I saw where the fresh San Marzano tomatoes grow, in fields quite near to the factory (at Castel San Giorgio) we were visiting, in the valleys of the formidable hills, mountains, really, behind Salerno, the town capitol and the name of Campania’s largest province.  I saw them delivered right now, on September 23, 2008, with a lot of the black earth still attached to the vines that were still attached to the pretty red oblong, ovoid fruit, hardly a pink or green one in any of the innumerable blue plastic lugs.  I saw where they were mechanically hoisted and dumped into the hopper that would run them up a belt to fall into their rollicking bath, and then I saw them take another belt-ride into a machine that peeled them, and then steamed them, and then ran them up another belt through a hatch leading finally inside the factory to where we climbed a ladder wearing our white sanitary coats and hats to a platform where twenty-seven women — count ‘em — twenty seven, wearing pink sanitary coats and nets over their hair stood in parallel rows, three women by nine long tables where the belt delivered and distributed equally to each table the cooked and peeled tomatoes.  Here, each tomato was relentlessly scrutinized by these women, their hands floating over the ever-moving produce as if they were delivering a benediction.  Only occasionally would a hand pluck a tomato from the rest of them as they passed on to the next machine, the one that would allot them to a can of a certain size, along with a quantity of thick juice acquired from I’m not sure where.  As you might imagine, the fragrance in the factory was a pleasant one, of warm tomato soup. 

 I love to visit facilities that produce the foodstuffs that we all take so for granted.  I think it’s important to do this.  I like knowing that the people who sell the stuff (Fairway) we put inside our bodies have some inkling of what the heck is going on.  Just like you.

So we go talk to the owner in his office as a nicety.  I don’t learn anything, I’m not offered a tremendous deal on a container-load of La Valle DOP San Marzano tomatoes, I don’t solicit one, I beg off the invitation to lunch, and truth be known, I wished we had been invited to dine in the opaque-windowed lunchroom with the twenty-seven ladies and the six others I passed on the floor of the factory doing other things, and eat and drink whatever they were eating and drinking because right now they were content to be laughing and dishing and confessing and damning and predicting and in general living a life not all that unlike any women anywhere else in the entire world.

 We pile in Gennaro’s Fiat and spin off in a cloud of dust having parked on what appeared to be a smallish, hardscrabble soccer field adjacent to the tomato cannery.  He’s taking me, us, to an olive packer’s facility not too far away, still in the province of Salerno, and if there’s one thing you know about me, it’s that I like olives.  A lot. 

 We got some great photos of each of us in our this time blue sanitary coats hoisting big hampers filled with one kind or another of still to be cured olives.  I learned that the descriptor on my olive containers, “alla calce”, does not refer to the olives having been cured with lye, as is the literal meaning of “calce” (KAL-chay), but that it refers to good old benign baking soda.  Alla calce means simply “cured”.  What a relief.  For years and years I have harbored pangs of guilt thinking that some or all of my beloved olives were cured with caustic, toxic lye, traces of which had to be left behind.  But they haven’t been!  Maybe forty years ago they were, so I learned, but not since then.  I also learned that there is a great big world of food olives out there, some of which are even better than the ones I have been importing for you kids all these years.

 Gennaro imported a few things for me lately that are absolutely thrilling.  First of all, Avanelle buys a lot of olives from him, and on the strength of this visit, she’s going to be buying a lot more.  He sells her the best quality Parmigiano Reggiano I have ever tasted, as well as the tons of red, black and green Cerignola olives that famously grow only in next-door Puglia.  He imports for our specialty grocery the aforementioned La Valle tomatoes.  And my beloved burrata and stracciatella, and the costly and magical substance I have lately been championing called colatura that comes only from Campania, right where we are.  The word comes from “colare”, to strain.  A colatura is a straining, in this case, the liquid derived,  that is, strained, from the salted, rotting guts of anchovies.  Yum-O, eh, Rachael?  The ancient Romans called it “garum”.  You’ve read or heard me going on about garum, I would imagine, unless all I am to you is just a ship passing in the night.  The ancients used it as a table condiment, a flavor enhancer for everything.  The original umami.  Colatura evolved in Campania as the secret behind the numerous pasta dishes of the region, such as spaghetti con alici (ah-LEE-chee), the regional word for anchovy, rather than the usual word for them which is acciughe (singularly, acciuga).  I adore anchovies.  I’ve told you this.  A number of times.  Colatura is the equivalent of, say, white truffle oil as a substitute for a fresh white truffle.  Or vanilla extract as a sub for a vanilla bean.  A few drops, literally, of colatura in a pasta all’aglio olio, a simple recipe of olive oil and garlic tossed with pasta, will transform it into one of the most satisfying dishes I can think of.  We sell pretty little bottles of it for seventeen bucks, a great house-warming gift for that foodie you’re going to be visiting.  But for us foodies it is among the most important ingredients in our kitchen.

 Did I say mozzarella di bufala?  The only mozzarella, seeing as how “mozzarella” made from cow’s milk is formally referred to as fior di latte?  Well, Gennaro next drove us out to the oldest and largest water buffalo farm, home to 800 of them, in Italy.  Lupara is the trio of brothers who were the first to turn water buffalo milk into the Campania region’s highest-end commodity, identifying a market and giving the magnificent mozzarella di bufala an identity as well as a premium.  It was they who turned it into a money-maker.  They also are famous for having been the only ranchers in Italy who saved their herd from death at the hands of the Nazis.  In 1944, on horseback, these Italian cowboys in the dead of night led their buffaloes to safety.  Had they been caught they surely would have been shot along with their animals.  The result was that the Lupara cheese is the only brand of mozzarella in Italy that comes from the original Italian Bubalus bubalus.  Every other water buffalo (and cow, sheep and goat) from herds all over southern, central and northern Italy was destroyed by the Nazis, and after the war had to be replaced with Indian breedstock.  What a fascinating time we had.  Gentle and lovely creatures, the milk of these grass-fed animals is much, much richer in butterfat than cow’s milk, and the result is cheese of uncommon flavor and texture.  I brought mozzarella di bufala to New York in 1980.  I was the first.  The great Mimi Sheraton said so in The New York Times.  One cannot over praise the cheese made from this milk.  It is used as the key ingredient to the region’s definitive pizza here at the very origin of pizza, here where pizza is definitive.  Now, if that doesn’t make Naples and Campania a must-visit, I don’t know what will. 

 Maybe the Royal Palace?  Built by the Bourbons in the early part of the 18th C. for Charles III, the King of Naples, it was identical in design, scale and marmoreal opulence toVersailles.  Not to mention the grounds, which are even more vast and dramatic than those of Versailles, and I know because I’ve been there.  Stunning, actually.  I saw species of trees I never knew existed, each of which was planted by the Bourbon’s groundskeepers, hundreds of years old.  Tim and Dagny, gardeners for their entire fruitful careers, were in awe.  Gennaro’s brother-in-law Nicola is the commissioner for tourism in Campania, a very powerful guy.  He got us a personal tour of this staggeringly beautiful piece of history.  Room after gargantuan room.  We were even shown where the king and the queen went to the bathroom.  We were shown their dressing rooms, where the putti on high wore blindfolds.  I never saw so much marble in my life.  I’ve been to Versailles and palaces in Madrid and Escorial, and Seville and elsewhere, and I’ve never seen anything like this.

 To top all this Gennaro drove us out to his sister Elvira and Nicola’s huge home in Ercolano, a fancy suberb of Naples, and she proceeded to serve us a meal she had doubtless been working on for days.  Gennaro had told me before the trip that Elvira “had a reputation” as a serious cook, and that we would be her and Nicola’s guests at their home on Capri.  But our time being what it was we were confined to the mainland.  It was a classic Neapolitan cena, and she started with several kinds of prosciutto, some smoked (speck), some classic, rippling slices of culatello, the ham from the butt of the pig rather than the haunch, and three kinds of local cheese, a scamorza affumicata, a sort of dried and smoked fior di latte, a pecorino whose name escaped me, and a goat’s milk cheese that reminded me of Majorero from the Canary Islands, and all of this antipasto was accompanied by extraordinarily good bread.  She then had her Sri Lankan staff bring out handmade ravioli filled with goat’s milk ricotta, and sauced with a creamy tomato sauce fragrant with lemon and marjoram.  You know, at this point of a feast I’m often finished, and I know I’m in big trouble, because the food is going to keep on coming.  Here came a perfect salad of various greens and tomatoes and, yes, those ARE slivers of an onion that was neither scallion nor green onion, but some local member of the allium family I was unfamiliar with, as was I unfamiliar with the steamed and sautéed green, a broccoli rabe-like vegetable that arrived called friarielli (or frigiarelli).  Its flavor was completely unlike anything I have ever met, and Michelle and Tim and Dagny and Manfredi and Paola loved it.  I couldn’t believe how overpowering it was, and I just didn’t understand it.  And I love greens.  My loss.  Its bite, its kick, is given to it apparently by the incredibly high nitrogen content of the volcanic soil in which it grows.  It is beloved by Napolitani, and if not used as a topping for pizza, it is cooked with olive oil and garlic and usually with anchovy, and is often combined with sausages. There was also sautéed zucchini, much like we had had at Monte Argentario.  The main course was a whole roasted, enormous dentice (den-TEE-cheh), a sort of snapper, a fish that is prized, and that fetches a premium, a very showy fish, and one that speaks volumes of the host’s opinion of his guests.  Much haggling goes on when a customer at the fish market espies and decides to serve a line-caught, fresh-that-very-day dentice.  The fish was roasted with potatoes.  Dessert was two Neapolitan classics, speaking of showy.  One was a huge baba, a sort of sponge cake sodden with rum and topped with whipped cream, and also three flavors of spumoni, the Napolitano uber-ice cream, one of which had bits of candied fruit within.  You can go ahead and heap scorn upon, or get queasy at the mere mention of spumoni, but I was completely smitten by it.  At this point I’m waiting for the gurney service we all would require.  I don’t know how I walked out of that house.

That was Campania.  We were driven to the airport in Naples, a juxtaposition that is so odd; it seems to be right there in town.  You’re driving along in the middle of this teeming city, and suddenly you’re at this urban airport.  Boom.  So we flew to Palermo, jumped in a couple of cars and in a half an hour we were all the way to the extreme northwestern corner of Sicily, Custonaci, where the brand-new, just-built, incredibly impressive, ultra-modern Barbera olive oil operation resides.  Heretofore, Manfredi’s entire factory was in downtown Palermo.  Manfredi’s Oleifici Barbera e Figli has a liaison now, a developing project with the University of Palermo.  They have teamed up to create and present a Sicilian olive oil historical museum.  Very exciting.   

It wasn’t all that late, but we crashed in a hotel beside the sea that crashed on the beach outside our window, the stars as big as salt pellets, the bluffs of Western Sicily as imposing as the wildest part of New Mexico or Arizona.  We slept like Kings and Queens of Sicily and the Two Italys.

 We proceeded to waft through five Sicilian days of home-cooked meals, including a seafood couscous that was staggeringly sumptuous, Manfredi’s incredibly fast outboard powerboat up and down the coast from San Vito, chasing those shiny, black, streaking, magical flying fish, brilliant sunshine, August-like days and September nights, the joys of Palermo which is easily the coolest and most fascinating city in Europe, the best meal I’ve ever had at an Italian restaurant called Pipo’s Ristorantino near the Palermo soccer stadium which is imposingly named for Renzo Barbera, Manfredi’s uncle, the Nebrodi hills of northeastern Sicily, mountains, really, and of Nebrodi all I can say is Google it; I have never seen anything remotely as LSD as Nebrodi in my long life what with the shy wild horses — stallions, mares and long-legged colts — the feral pigs, the barely vehicle-accessible topography, the Angora goats, the massive oak and birch trees, the lakes, the absolute desolate silence and beauty of this sprawling wilderness on top of the world, a place where people should be standing in line to visit, yet we saw maybe one other car with one guy in it.  A ham is created here bearing the name Nebrodi that is exactly like the finest PDO Jamon Iberico Bellota I have ever tasted, and you know how I feel about that.  Last time I was here, I carved perfect pieces from an entire Nebrodi ham at Manfredi’s apartment in Palermo, Villa Bruccia.  Out east here at Nebrodi, we stayed at a handsome and luxurious new hotel, Antica Filanda, within sight of the sea at Galati Mamertino, seven miles from the coast, as the cornacchia flies, in sight of several of the Aeolian Islands (Vulcano, Stromboli, Lipari).  It housed an equally handsome restaurant where the lady chefs, four of them, pulled out all the stops for Manfredi’s friends, and I could write another 3000 words on those two meals.   A sformata ( a sort of soufflé) of local eggplant, wild mushrooms, cinghiale (wild boar), local goat’s milk ricotta, lamb and veal figured prominently.  And four very different local cheeses from obviously talented cheesemakers, one of which was a succulent cow’s milk Montalbano Provola.  Local fresh ricotta was used to fill handmade ravioli.  Terrific bread, baked right there in the wood-fired oven.  Woodsmoke was the evocative fragrance of this Nebrodi experience, one that certainly readied me for fall.  Antica Filanda prides itself on an enormous selection of Sicilian and mainland wines, and it has a huge, separate dining facility, a room looking out north toward the Nebrodi mountains, one whole side completely windowed floor to ceiling, a sprawling veranda outside the dining room where there is the enormous and very deep pool.

 We finished at Taormina, at a killer hotel, the Sant’Andrea, and a remarkable nearby local restaurant called La Capinera, chef Pietro D’Agostino, that has apparently won several European foodie awards and accolades in numerous foodie journals and giornale.  The six of us had a meal there over which New York food writers would have gone into a feeding- and writing-about-it frenzy.   

Salads are my single favorite venue for getting the most out of several of the specific cheeses I often find myself craving. Those cheeses are middle-aged goat cheeses, particularly those famous and traditional and definitive chevres (fromages de chevre) of the Loire Valley; also the youngish sheep’s milk cheese, pecorino, of several Italian regions such as Umbria, Tuscany, Piedmont, Sardinia and Le Marche. These goat cheeses come from the regions along the Loire — Berry, Touraine, Poitou and Charente. Their names are given to them by their closest villages — Selles-sur-Cher, Valencay, Crottin de Chavignol, Pouligny-St.-Pierre and Ste.-Maure. Others are given names that are simply traditional, such as Chabichou or Pyramide, or that describe their shape, or that are proprietal names given to them by their famous makers, such as Le Chevrot by Celles-sur-Belle and Pointe de Bique by Pierre Jacquin. As I state, and indeed as I insist, it is crucial that these chevres be middle-aged, that is, ripened over a number of weeks so that they have dried out and become supple, nutty and peppery, with an edible biege, pebbly, and mold-dusted crust rather than those pristine white crustless cheeses that more resemble ordinary cream cheese than a venerable chevre worthy of your attention. So many Americans just don’t get it with French goat cheeses. They are led to believe by inexperienced cheesemongers and immature retail cheese operations that French chevres are meant to be bland and creamy. They most certainly are not. They are meant to be served on a plate or a piece of wood or marble beside the salad, not in the salad. A sharp, rustic and beloved knife should be laid alongside the chevre. The salad and the chevre must be accompanied by good, crusty bread and a lusty, garlicky, mustardy vinaigrette. This combo, the salad and its sauce, the chevre and its crusty bread, is not just the best flavors imaginable, it is also a textural delight as well as a visual and tactile one, the action of cutting the chevre into bite-size pieces as one progresses with the consumption of forkfuls of salad is as pleasurable as are the flavors.
The pecorino, often called Marzolino, referring to the month of March, when so many Italian regional sheep’s cheeses are in their infancy, having just been made from Spring’s rich issue of ewe’s milk from first-growth-grazing sheep, can be served on the side like the French chevres, but also is joyous diced and tossed with a salad and its vinaigrette, or diced and tossed with twice-peeled fresh fava beans, coarsely cracked peppercorns and a well-chosen olive oil, those three ingredients folded in and blended together by hand. It needn’t strictly be a young pecorino; diced aged pecorino from any of these regions is as exquisite as the soft and creamy Marzolino. It’s just that in the Springtime, young pecorino is highly desirable, unlike fresh chevres from the Springtime pastures along the Loire, which, to my way of thinking, are simply too bland. Let that salad be built on baby greens, a mix of them, and don’t hold back on the quantity of chopped scallion, radish and carrot. Sprouts are great here, as are tiny boiled potatoes, Hass avocado, halved hard-boiled eggs and sliced beets. Olive oil-packed tuna is always welcome, too, but for me the whole experience is bound together not just by virtue of the wonderful chevre or the pecorino, but because of the filets of Catalan or Sicilian anchovy I so adore.
Barcelona and Cocoa Beach

I feel like I’ve lived in Barcelona I’ve been there so many times. I say this not to annoy you, but to warn you that I’m prejudiced.

What a great city.

And it’s even gotten greater over the last five and ten years. Even over the last couple of years. Cleaner. Nicer. Less scary-looking people who came from somewhere godforsaken else. Xenophobe? Me? Nope. I’m a New Yorker. Tolerant. Street-savvy. I’ve been mugged in a few European cities – Marseilles, for one. Until a few years ago getting robbed in Barca was a cinch. Likely. Probable.

Not any more.

My hotel, my favorite hotel in Europe, Le Meridien Barcelona. I’m furious. The lobby, the glorious lobby, all marble and wood. Sweeping counter. Concierge station. Voluptuous lobby furniture. Warm, low light. Bar to the left of the counters. Breakfast room. A home away from home.

All gone.

The lobby now looks like a Sofitel in Prague. Tinkly lights all over the ceiling. Chrome pillars. Hideous furniture, as uncomfortable as it is hideous. Sweeping oak and marble check-in counters ripped out, replaced by black laminate units like at passport control. No bar. Well, there is a new bar. But it’s just not like the old bar.

Voiced my extreme displeasure. Staff and my travel mates look at me like I’m crazy.

Am I crazy?

Breakfast at this hotel is 29 euros. That’s about fifty bucks. I don’t think so.

La Boqueria is just down the slope of Las Ramblas a couple of blocks. La Boq is the public market of Barca (locals refer to the city as “Barca, with an apercu under the C, rendering the pronunciation “barsa”, not Barna, as I was told years ago even before I was deaf), a piece-montee of stand-after-stand winding maze-like through a high-ceilinged, glass-louvred hall open to the weather, entrance and egress on four sides. The grandest assemblage of foodstuffs in the world, or at least the part of the world I know, and I’m no pollyanna. Fruits and vegetables, seafood, poultry, game bird and foie gras specialists. Egg specialists. Salt cod specialists. Candy and dried fruit specialists. Fresh beef and pork, rabbit and goat and lamb specialists. Cured pork specialists, and that means five or six choices of Jamon Iberico Bellota, that is, ham, not smoked, made from the haunches of acorn-fed, feral, black hoofed pigs that live and die in Extremadura, mostly. The single-greatest edible substance on the face of the earth. Can you imagine the joy I feel here?

Also inside La Boqueria are dispersed three separate counter operations, with stools where you can sit down and have breakfast or lunch made from ingredients sitting in bowls and on platters right in front of you behind ten-inches of vertical glass. As long as you can handle your meal hot off a griddle, not a grill, you’re going to be offered sole, branzino, squid, hake, octopus, cockles, a huge platter of six different wild mushrooms. Six different tortas, the ubiquitous egg pies, the size of a two-kilo Brie, but twice as thick. Perfect coffee. Priorat and Penedes wines. So for breakfast, every morning before going to the show (Alimentaria, international, huge, biannual), I would have a platter of griddled fresh sardines, a couple of sunnyside-up eggs griddled with olive oil (fabulous arbequina olive oil in Catalonia), potatoes (fabulous potatoes in Catalonia) and onions (fabulous onions in Catalonia). A couple of cortados (espresso coffee and hot milk in a tall shot glass and a hard roll.

How does that sound?

Hate to bore you. My stay proceeded in similar fashion. Do the show until about four, can’t walk another step what with a lower right leg containing two plates and fourteen screw since Riverside Park 1992; return to hotel, shower and take a luxurious nap for a couple of hours, rise, dress, head down to the erstwhile bar to get “ready” for din.

And din was a different restaurant every night (6). I booked ‘em two months prior. I do know what I’m doing. I’d love to regale in detail each of the six restaurants. Maybe another time. I’d love to. But in the spirit of brevity I will but give you their names. You are responsible for booking them and getting yourself to Barcelona. As for the hotel, I still love the rooms, particularly the Mediterranean Suite, Room 625. These joints are indelibly etched in my mind. I am writing all of this without notes, I assure you.

Here they are, in no particular order: Ciudad Condal, l’Oliana, Can Revell, Cal l’Isidre, Comerc 24, Cal Pep.

But if I had to pick a dish or two that stand(s) out, I’d tell you about the soup bowl of fresh peas at Cal l’Isidre. Turned about with butter in a pan along with tiny cubes of Iberico ham and strips of spring onion. Served with a soup spoon. The grilled calcots at Ciudad Condal, long, green, spring onions, served with the classic calcot-specific sort-of romesco sauce, handmade fresh, pounded in a mortar – arbequina olive oil, garlic, almonds, piquillo pimientos, onion and a bit of roasted tomato – thick and enthralling. The fritturas at Cal Pep – tiny (a half-inch) fishies deep-fried whole in arbequina olive oil (is there a Catalan olive oil thread here?) and served with nothing, unlike in Provence and the Loire where an aioli is de rigueur. Pep acted like he knew me, remembered me from prior visits but I know he didn’t. I would always go there with the late, great Bill Devin, a guy about my age whose specialty and business was Catalan wine; lived out in the country, in the Penedes, not far from Tarragona, south and west of Barca, right on the sea. Our great Fairway stores still import the mesmerizing arbequina oil from the source Bill provided. Bill’s un-filtered Catalan arbequina extra-virgin was the very first barrel oil we bottled here at the facility adjacent to the Harlem store. I miss Bill terribly. We threw a gala fundraiser up in the Café and Steakhouse for Bill’s wife and little girls back in 2000 just after he up and went away for the long time. I mentioned Bill to Pep but he didn’t respond. They were pals, but it’s always so noisy in there I don’t think he really heard me.

On the Friday before Brian and Harold and I came home, Brian and I rented a couple of Vespas down by the shore at Barcelonetta. Tooled all over town. Barcelonetta used to be so rough I was nervous there even in broad daylight; forget about being there at night. It’s a neighborhood of Barca down on the waterfront — yacht-builders, chandlers, bars and brothels, narrow lanes canyoned by six-story, drying laundry-festooned apartment buildings from the early 1800’s. Maybe four lanes. Then the glorious sandy beach. And nightclubs and restaurants. This neighborhood was a beehive of pre-civil war anti-Fascist activity in the ‘30’s, it was strafed and bombed then, and was shelled and snipered-at by Madrid in the 1870’s, too. Now it’s just another of the joys of Barcelona. I used to wait on Robert Hughes at my cheese counter in Soho back in the late ‘70’s. Wonderful guy, florid-faced, profane, blustery, brilliant, fascinating. The famous art critic. Wrote the thick, irreplaceable book Barcelona more than ten years ago. Any of you who are as fascinated and enamored of Catalonia and Barcelona as I am? You must have this book. Wrote Fatal Shore, too, about Australia; another must-have book. He wrote and hosted The Shock of the New, about modern art, a magnificent production, on PBS; you remember him.

Happy New Year to all of you. It seems we’ve all made it through the holidays, and for me at least, I’m ecstatic that they’re over. Yeah, it was fun and festive and all, but enough already. My problem now is that I find it increasingly difficult to adjust to there being nothing to adjust to. The routine is the same; it’s like nothing ever happened. I continue to wake up at two or three in the morning, mind racing, can’t go back to sleep, fretting over Fairway details, worrying about how this is going to turn out, or this other thing I’ve got to get done, and omigod, I forgot to do this, to contact that person, to weigh in about that other thing I’m not happy about, when is the FDA going to release those Quiberonnaise vintage sardines, etc., etc. I pick up one of the six or so books I’m reading in a desperate attempt to turn off my mundane mind so that I can go back to sleep. Book usually is effective, and I often enjoy reading in the wee hours. I will fall back asleep, but then when it’s time to wake up, I feel like it’s the middle of the night. I get up anyway and the brutality of the routine begins. I suppose I should count my blessings and stop whining. Our four Fairway stores are a joy to me. We’ve had an incredibly good year, and the prospects for ’08 look even better.
I have to give a lecture and tasting at the 92nd St. Y this Sunday evening, the 13th. It’s been sold out since early November. My Y lectures got a rave on Chowhound, and what particularly pleased me was how they were contrasted with those cheese programs given by a couple of my competitors. Mine offer ‘way more information and stuff to eat and drink, and the Y ticket costs about half of those others. So that’s cool.
I’ll do another lecture at The National Geographic headquarters in DC this Spring, my fifth year of being invited to stand up. Big room, 350+ people, always sold out. Huge, illuminated maps behind me, a laser pointer so’s I can show exactly where the cheese and stuff comes from. Yo Yo Ma Bach solo cello music before I begin. A very impressive venue. Takes a lot of energy and effort, but what am I going to do? Say no? I don’t think so.
I’ve written another book. Finally. Cheese Primer is what, twelve years old now and is in its eleventh printing. So it’s about time I wrote another book. This one will be out in the Spring, and it’s about Fairway and my personal three decades of Fairway and all I’ve learned about food. It will be called The Food Life, but it is essentially The Fairway Market Cookbook with recipes by Mitchel London. Lots of them. His faves. No finer cook on the face of the earth, you know. It was like pulling teeth to get Mitchel and Carmela (wife figure) get their recipes to the publisher (Ecco/HarperCollins) by various deadlines, and then it was expensive as hell to have every single recipe tested by a pro. But we got it done. And the massive thing is just about ready to go to print. Pretty exciting. Started out I was going to go department-by-department, but that quickly bored the bejeezus out of me, so I just wrote random essays of everything that moved me about my life in the business and my life at Fairway. I got the excellent Tim Blake Nelson (actor, writer, director, Fairway shopper) and the amazing Frances McDormand (actress, wife of director Joel Coen, Fairway shopper) to write forewords (Gastropoda website founder Regina Schrambling tactfully let me know that “foreword” is spelled thus, not “forward”.) So it will be interesting to see how the thing will be regarded. Too late to worry about that now. All I know is that throughout the process I kept saying to myself, “Try not to sound like a jerk.” That, and if I write about this is Howie (Glickberg) going to be furious. And that this is not supposed to be about me, it’s about Fairway and how to shop a Fairway, and everything you need to know about food in order to foodshop like a pro. I think a lot of you will find the book pretty funny as well as enormously informational. I mean, my god, the stuff I’ve learned. My dear wife Michelle Sims did all the photos, and there are a lot of my signs I’ve made over the years in it, too. I SO wanted my partner John Rossi’s incredibly talented wife Andrea Selby to do a ton of line drawings, but I just didn’t get it done, and boy, am I going to regret that. She is SO good.
So. Will anybody buy a book written by a grocer/cheesemonger? We shall see. Hell, it’s worth it for Mitchell’s recipes and Michelle’s photography. My essays are just filler.
My graphics genius here, Armando Gonzales, was key to the project. He’s the guy who designs and creates all of Fairway’s wonderful signage. I write the copy, but Armando makes them look the way they look, not to mention that he’s an awfully good writer as well. Without Armando this book would never have gotten done.
All of the new pressings of my olive oils are trickling in. Chateau Bournissac (Bouches-du-Rhone), Moulin de l’Olivette (AOC Haute-Provence), Moulin Saint-Michel (AOC Baux-de-Provence), Domaine Margier de la Michelle (AOC Aix-en-Provence), La Fare-les-Oliviers (AOC Aix-en-Provence), Barbera Western Sicilian 100% biancolilla (my most-prized barrel oil) are here; all of the others are on the water, my other French, my Italians and my Spanish and Catalan and Australian. I was just down at Williams-Sonoma nosing around, and I noticed that all of their grossly over-priced oils are now two years old. Caveat emptor, baby. Read The Food Life, and you ain’t going to fall for that old stuff anymore. That, and a lot of other stuff.
An exquisite line of sugar-free Belgian chocolate bars, jams and a chocolate spread, the Klingele brand, is in. We found it at the show in Cologne last September.
Finally the Lunor brand French cooked and vacuum-packed beans, lentils and veggies are back. Oy. Peter Romano sure screwed that up. I’ve been catching hell from many of you about Lunor for a month now. Thus the “oy”.
The Catalan l’Escala anchovies are back. I swear to the baby Jesus that my l’Escala anchovies (and my Roque French Catalan anchovies) are the single finest edible substance on the face of the earth, along with pata negra Iberico ham, which I HAVE NOT put in the stores yet because of some duplicitous importing shenanigans. It’s going to cost you almost eighty bucks a pound when I get around to getting my hands on some. But Fairway’s retail price will be far less expensive than any other store, you can be sure of that.
Banyuls vinegar, made from the rare, sweet wine of Banyuls, in the southwest of France (a neighbor, in fact, of Collioures, where my Roque anchovies and anchoiade come from). It’s back, but not much of it. Or you can go to Williams-Sonoma and pay twice as much.
Brilliant vinegars from another vinegar specialist in southwest France, DeNoix; one made with red wine and walnuts, one made with red wine and black truffles and one made with red wine and raspberries.
My dried mirabelle plums from Lorraine will blow your mind. More fragrant than any fresh local summer stone fruit. No sugar, no preservatives. $11.99 per pound, and worth every penny. Michelle is going to slow-cook a shoulder of pork with them. And they are grand with cheese and charcuterie.
France’s finest escargot (snails to you peasants) and empty shells to stuff them back into after you’ve sautéed them. The snails are in cans, the shells, re-usable, are in boxes. Bourgogne Escargot. Snails are like fondue: If you haven’t had one lately you’ve simply forgotten how delicious they are. And don’t shun them because they’re canned. There ain’t a high-end joint in all of France, nor a countryside bistro that is a local wonder, that serves snails out of the wild. They all offer snails, and they’re all from cans. It’s just that mine are the best that exist. Like my Verfeuille chestnuts from Limousin. Period.
A slew of new stuff coming in, but I won’t tell you about it until it’s here. It’s got to get here (Port Elizabeth), it’s got to clear customs, it’s got to be delivered to my warehouse . . . Never a dull moment.
A grocer writing a book about groceries and grocering. Yeah, right. Can’t wait for THAT.