Eating Italy: A Chef's Culinary Adventure (7 page)

Put the vinegar in a blender and slowly add the remaining 3 cups (750 ml) of oil until blended and emulsified, 1 to 2 minutes. Season generously with salt and pepper. Pour the vinaigrette into a medium saucepan and add the onions.

For the lamb racks:
Heat a grill (preferably with oak wood) to medium heat with both high- and low-heat areas.

Season the lamb racks with salt and pepper. Scrape the grill grate clean, coat it with oil, and grill the racks over a high-heat area of the grill until nicely grill-marked, 5 to 7 minutes per side. Move the meat to a low-heat area of the grill, cover, and cook to medium rare (135°F/57°C internal temperature), about 10 minutes more.

Warm the onions and vinaigrette over medium heat.

Use two large dinnerware tablespoons to scoop up and shape the
favetta
into football shapes (quenelles). Place a quenelle on each plate just a little left of center. Remove the butcher’s twine from the lamb racks and cut into portions between each bone. Place two portions on each plate. Mix the mint into the onions and spoon the onions on top of the lamb, reserving some of the liquid to drizzle around the plates.

WHEN I PICTURE ITALY IN MY MIND, I SEE ALME.

The town is only the size of a football field. It has a church, a movie theater, one good bar, and an awesome
gelateria
(ice-cream shop) called Paradiso. But that’s about it. Frosio Ristorante is what makes the place famous. The restaurant sits inside an eighteenth-century villa that has an ancient look with a modern touch. It’s like a yellow-painted ice cube dropped in the middle of a classic Italian village.

When I started working there as a stage (an unpaid kitchen apprentice), I’d been in Italy for nine months or so. I had finished up at Mangili butcher shop and then cooked at Loro, which recently earned its first Michelin star. The chef at Loro was Antonio Rochetti, who has since become a good friend of mine. Antonio taught me so much. It was only the two of us in the kitchen, and we did everything from butchering animals to making bread, pasta, and desserts. I couldn’t imagine a better introduction to cooking in Italy. But after a few months, it was time to move on. I really wanted to cook at Frosio. The food there totally blew me away. Antonio had worked there years ago, and he and the chef were friends, so Antonio set me up to work with him.

Paolo Frosio, a thoughtful, sensitive chef, was one of the first to put the province of Bergamo on the culinary map. After culinary school, Paolo trained in France and Los Angeles, and then came back home brimming with experience. He opened his restaurant in 1990 at the age of twenty-three and he earned a Michelin star just over a year later, making him Italy’s youngest-ever Michelin-starred chef. With his training and background, he created magnificent plates of food, staying true to what the locals grew up eating but going way beyond what a typical
osteria
or trattoria could do.

The Frosio family has been in the food business for more than one hundred years, so it was easy for Paolo to blend the local and global at his restaurant. His aunt raises full-breasted duck and guinea hens on her farm, and his sister provides him with Taleggio cheese that she ages in caves until it gets firm and pungent. He would make a creamy
fonduta
(fondue) with the Taleggio and spoon it over two poached eggs from his aunt’s birds, all on toasted brioche. Then he shaved fresh black truffles over the top. Simple, but mind-blowing. The truffles were usually dug out of the ground the day before in Val Brembana, not too far away.

Just about everything we cooked at Frosio was tied to the food and culture of Bergamo. Our meat came from one of the area’s best butchers, Franco Cazzamali, who is considered a master of beef the way a sushi chef is a master of fish. Cazzamali uses Fassone, the local white cattle that everyone calls
la granda
(most-prized beef). It has a dark red color, lots of marbling, and big flavor that really shines when shaved for carpaccio.

The cheeses that didn’t come from Paolo’s sister came once a week from Vecchio Larry (Old Larry), a big, burly guy who owned a rustic restaurant outside Milan. As a side business, he sold local cheeses, such as stracchino, strachitunt, robiola, and formagella. Vecchio Larry was a huge Celtics fan and loved Larry Bird. When he found out there was an American in the Frosio kitchen, we started talking sports. Every week, he’d come into the kitchen, joking, laughing, and talking trash.

Vecchio Larry is a character, or a
personaggio
, as they say in Italy. Camillo, Paolo’s older brother, is another
personaggio.
Camillo runs the front of the house and wine service at Frosio Ristorante. He’s thin, walks slightly hunched over, and loves to drink sparkling wine and crack jokes about Americans. He’s a big football fan. The Super Bowl came around while I was working there, and Camillo organized a Super Bowl party for the staff. That February, he bought
hamburgers and Budweisers, and we stayed up until three in the morning to watch the game.

The biggest thing I learned from Paolo Frosio is that nothing goes to waste. He used the stems and leaves from every plant and the skin and bones from every animal that came into that kitchen. He was a master at opening up the walk-in, pulling out a bunch of scraps, and making a meal that would blow you away. We’d come to the end of the workweek, and the last party of six would come into the restaurant and ask for a tasting menu. “Shit!” Paolo would say to the cooks. “We don’t have anything left!” Then he’d open up the walk-in, grab a piece of mullet, some pork trimmings, some vegetables, and make an incredible five-course tasting menu. I learned how to do that from him. When you get in a whole pig, you use the whole thing, nose to tail. When you get fennel, you use the fronds; you chop the stems. You make pesto from celery leaves. That’s how you save money: you use everything.

By late winter of that year, I started feeling more comfortable in Italy. I’d picked up a few more words since working at Mangili. Just enough to get by. When April rolled around, the weather started getting warmer, and we opened the kitchen windows to let in some air. I had been working the apps and pastry stations but also did entrées with Paolo. One night, Matteo, one of the cooks who used to work there, came in for a birthday dinner with an old friend of his. They both got the
degustazione di carne
, the meat-tasting menu. For an appetizer, I shaved raw Fassone beef and plated it with blanched, pencil-thin asparagus and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano. I also made Paolo’s poached eggs with Taleggio
fonduta
and black truffle on brioche. I served them crispy sweetbreads with Parmigiano
fonduta
and grilled Treviso radicchio, then pork shank osso buco with saffron rice
crema.
And for dessert, molten chocolate flan. I also served them chestnut cannoli,
torrone semifreddo
, and one of my specialties,
piccola pasticceria
(petit fours).

Around midnight, we finished up in the kitchen. I went into the dining room to say hi to Matteo, and he introduced me to the birthday girl, Claudia. I said literally three words to her: “
Ciao. Sono
Jeff.” (Hi. I’m Jeff.) I was still learning the language, and my already-small vocabulary deserted me. Matteo and I talked for a few minutes before they got up to leave. I couldn’t help noticing Claudia’s tight jeans as they walked out the door.

The next morning, I called Matteo because we had dinner plans. It was restaurant week and Bergamo’s top restaurants were running dinner specials: thirty-three euros for anyone age thirty-three or under. We set a time and place to meet, and then I asked Matteo, “Do you think Claudia would like to come with us?”