Your mouth begins to water. Suddenly, your appetite knows no bounds. They called it Torrisi Italian Specialties , and it launched their careers. That time has come. An elaborately stocked deli case will conceptually define the space — which accommodates a long bar and a seat back room — and as in Rome, dinner tables will be set up alongside it.
Lunch and dinner menus will be distinct, with dinner launching first. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. By night, the space transformed into a seat restaurant. Then came dishes like a heritage pork chop slathered in bright-red vinegar peppers, or perhaps a skate wing in lemony Francese sauce: rigorous rewrites of red-sauce-joint classics, prepared using every tool and technique in a modern chef's arsenal to bring out the flavor.
Given the restaurant's location on Mulberry Street—a Little Italy thoroughfare that has gentrified into Soho East—the food was not only clever and wonderful but also an act of cultural repatriation. Now, as a result of success and the chefs' restless imaginations, things have changed. The sandwich shop and explicitly Italian-American items have been off-loaded to a new restaurant next door, called Parm.
Meanwhile, Torrisi Italian Specialties, its name notwithstanding, has morphed into a full-time prix fixe restaurant where the food isn't particularly Italian. The pew-like wooden benches remain, as do the shelf displays of Stella D'oro cookies, Progresso bread crumbs and Polly-O ricotta containers. The 1. But the bare tables are now covered in cloth, paper napkins have given way to linen and diners are presented with Tiffany oyster forks and Delmonico's crockery that Carbone snapped up on eBay.
These enhancements have come in the service of the 2. Torrisi and Carbone have been building up to this feat of audacity since autumn of last year. At that point, the food on the 1. So why not take this New York City mash-up idea all the way? In preparation for 2. And there were many visits by both men to the Astor Reading Room, though the dishes these visits yielded are like nothing that the room's namesake, society grande dame Brooke Astor, would have experienced at her clubby Upper East Side haunts.
Among the opening bites is a cigar-shaped gnocco fritto —an Italian fried-dough pocket—wrapped in smoked black cod and then dipped in the cod's bright-orange roe to simulate a cigar's glow and poppy seeds to simulate ashes. And the gnocco is plated on a vintage Stork Club ashtray—"so when you're done," he says, "you're left with a dirty ashtray on the table. Another bite is an oyster pierced by a Tiffany fork, but it's a chicken oyster: that nugget of dark meat that comes off either side of the bird's lower backbone.
Torrisi says, "We poach it in beurre blanc and dip it in a Chinese oyster sauce we make, then roll it in crushed cashews—".
Carbone cuts in: "—so it's like street-cart cashews, but it's also like chicken with cashews in a Chinese restaurant. And there's a Delmonico's reference, too, because Tiffany made flatware for Delmonico's. That's two New York institutions. Torrisi and Carbone, 32 and 31 years old, respectively, are like a songwriting team at their collaborative peak: in full flower, not yet sick of each other.
They met while students at The Culinary Institute of America , lived as roommates for a spell and still reside in the same Greenwich Village apartment building. Spend a little time with them and you see how their dynamic works. Torrisi, muscular and intense, comes off like a poet-prizefighter, wrapped up in the intricacies of technique.
Carbone, serene and bearded like Caravaggio's Saint Francis, is more expansive, adept at contextualizing his partner's torrents of thought. Here's the two of them discussing the 2. Torrisi: "In Rome, they do lamb chops scottadito, grilled with a marinade, right? So I thought of a glaze with 'house Manischewitz,' because I like the flavor of Concord grapes—". Carbone: "—which are grown in New York state. And Manischewitz is based right over the river in New Jersey. Torrisi: "But it's my own Concord-grape reduction for the glaze, and then we spice a Pat LaFrieda shoulder chop with celery seed and coriander, coat it with crushed matzo from Streit's and grill it hard and fast.
Carbone: "And combine it with one of the most popular dishes from the old Jewish Ghetto in Rome, artichokes fried in extra-virgin olive oil with mint.
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