Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  The window of my Bloomingdale’s boutique on Fifty-ninth Street.

  Italian food boutique to be called Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen. He sold the idea to Lester Gribetz, a marketing manager, who sold it to Marvin Traub, the president of the store.

  The pasta for my shop was going to be made in-house, and I was determined that it would be the best that New Yorkers had ever been offered. Unfortunately, Bloomingdale’s bought the wrong machine, one made for speed. In their machine, a mass of rapidly kneaded dough was forced through rollers that thinned it in a single step. It produced the same limp, gummy, nerveless pasta found in every pasta shop and Italian restaurant in town. It wasn’t easy to persuade a department store to dump a $10,000 piece of equipment they had just bought. I did it with a sketch. I drew a figure standing on the roof of a six-story building. “There are two ways for that man to get to the sidewalk,” I said. “He can jump off and land on it, breaking his bones. Or he can take the stairs and reach ground level one floor at a time, with his body in good shape.” I explained that pasta must be judged by its body, and it develops a good one when well-kneaded dough is thinned out in as many steps as possible. We didn’t make any pasta at Bloomingdale’s until they replaced the machine they had bought with an Italian one that could do the job I had described.

  We opened the shop with my good Bolognese-style homemade pasta and a few other carefully chosen products. I cashed my chips at Fini, asking them to dip into their reserves to produce a special edition of balsamic vinegar for me. They came through with a beautiful little bottle that could have been designed to contain a small quantity of very expensive perfume, and filled it with twenty-five-year-old vinegar, the first time that balsamico of that quality had been offered for sale in this country. The Martelli family of Lari, in Tuscany, produced some of the finest dried factory pasta in Italy. They were good friends and offered me the exclusive for the United States on their excellent spaghetti, penne, and maccheroncini. Bloomingdale’s was not prepared for that kind of commitment, so when we introduced the bright yellow packages of Martelli pasta to America, we were not alone. We shared that distinction with Dean & DeLuca, the company started by a former student of mine, Giorgio DeLuca. We also sold a superb extra-virgin olive oil produced in Tuscany by the same artisan grower who supplied my school.

  The shop did well, and Bloomingdale’s asked that I stock it with many other products. I had just taken possession of the beautiful kitchen the city of Bologna had built for me, and there I collected scores of honeys, jams, pickles, canned tuna, and other products from high-quality artisans. During a week I didn’t teach, Blooming-dale’s sent Pamela Krausman, one of its food buyers, to Bologna to help me select and assemble a line for my Italian Kitchen. Tasting a score of jams and honeys is a terrible way to spend a morning, and it took a few years before I felt again any desire for either. Bloomingdale’s commissioned a graphic design studio to produce special packaging for my foods, and I was elated when the design they created won an award as the best in its category.

  I was not elated, however, when on my return to New York a year later, I found that my shop had been moved away from street traffic to an underground corner by an escalator, while the storefront on the sidewalk level had been turned over to Michel Guérard and his Cuisine Minceur. I had a fierce discussion with Lester Gribetz:

  “But, Lester,” I cried, “we had an understanding! That was supposed to be my window on the street!”

  “It’s Bloomingdale’s window, not yours, and we decide where to put our merchandise so that it will do us the most good.”

  “I thought you were doing very well with Italian food. Is Michel Guérard doing any better?”

  “It doesn’t matter how much he sells. He’s good for Blooming-dale’s. Even if we lose a million dollars a year on him, he is still good for Bloomingdale’s.”

  Other problems developed. The in-house kitchen had a constant personnel turnover; the people I had trained were no longer there, and the ones who replaced them did not follow my instructions. I had originally allowed them to sell some of my soups and sauces, but they had become unrecognizable and I had them removed from the line. I was also upset to find that they were selling olive oil that had been standing next to a bright fluorescent light, turning rancid. Moreover, complaints about the pasta had begun to reach me. Each time I came back to New York from Italy, I had to retrain the people making the pasta because Bloomingdale’s kept shifting personnel to different departments. When I was back in Italy, I wondered how many people would have taken a turn at the pasta station by the time I returned to New York.

  I was approached by a major food importer who was interested in national distribution of Italian products bearing my name. Together with Pamela Krausman, Victor and I went to their offices in New Jersey, where we discussed the outline of a collaborative venture and reached a tentative agreement. They asked that Pamela serve as the consulting brand manager for the line on a commission basis. I liked and trusted her, and I had no objections. They did not want to proceed, however, while a competitive line with my name was selling at Bloomingdale’s. My contract there was coming up for renewal, and I had had too many disappointments over the way my shop was run, so I opted to exercise the escape clause and ended my relationship with the store. Pamela, Victor, and I took one last ride to New Jersey to put our agreement on paper. The company’s senior executive, with whom we had been negotiating, sat across from the three of us at the conference table.

  “You have to understand,” he said, “that our margins are small and we cannot absorb Pamela’s commission.”

  “You can’t? Then who will?” I asked.

  “You will. We shall deduct it from your percentage of sales.”

  “And how much is it?” The figure was so close to my own percentage that it was hard to tell them apart. We got up and left, possibly without saying good-bye.

  Another project would have put my sauces on the shelves of every good food store, but it never got to be more than a project. Phil Teverow sent a charming letter to me in Venice saying that he had enjoyed cooking from my books and would like to make some of my sauces available commercially. He wrote that he had already done as much for Pino Luongo and other well-known figures, and that he had the technical knowledge necessary to transform homemade food into industrially packaged food.

  We signed reciprocal letters of understanding, and Phil set to work applying his industrial formulas to three or four sauces we had selected from my books. When I was briefly in New York, he brought the results to the Beekman Tower, a hotel near the United Nations where I had taken a housekeeping suite. I tasted them and they were terrible. I made the sauces myself in the suite’s kitchen to demonstrate how they should taste. “They are delicious,” Phil said. “I need to go back and figure out how to develop an industrial approach to making them.”

  He tried one more time, bringing the samples to Longboat Key, Florida, where Victor and I had just acquired an apartment. They didn’t work; they were not my sauces, and I could never let them go out into the world with my name on them, even if I were to sell a million jars.

  “Look, Phil, I am going to make a basic tomato sauce from scratch,” I said. “Follow me carefully and tell me why you can’t make yours to taste like mine.”

  When I was done, he said, “I can make it like yours, with the same ingredients, in small, hand-cooked batches. But I wouldn’t be able to sell it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I would have to charge twenty-five dollars a jar.”

  Phil Teverow was a gentlemanly, intelligent, soft-spoken young man with excellent manners. He was good company. We had a very pleasant lunch before he caught the late afternoon plane for New York. I have never heard from him again.

  I have worked with restaurants often, contributing what I know about producing good Italian food. In each case, I have hoped that I was taking the first step with my client on a profitable road that we could continue to travel together. But that
first step always seemed to be as much propulsion as my clients needed from me. From then on, they moved forward on their own. Finally, it was one of my former students who came to see me in New York bringing a proposal that held the promise of long-term involvement and reward.

  Susie Hurwitt and Mary Murray were friends and neighbors from Darien, Connecticut, who took my class in Bologna. Mary owned The Complete Kitchen, a cookware store and cooking school in Darien and Nantucket. Susie had long since answered the call of the entrepreneurial spirit. What she liked to do best was to buy, restore, and sell houses. I had a good relationship with her that soon became friendship. We still stay in touch, and from time to time, Susie and her husband, David, come to visit us in Longboat Key. When she came to see me in New York, she had been working with Mary’s husband, Ian, on a project for a gelato shop, but her thoughts then moved on to something else.

  “Marcella,” she said, “what we don’t have here yet is a restaurant that serves the simple, flavorful, light-handed food we had in Italy and that you taught us how to make. Don’t you think we could do that, have a restaurant that is authentically Italian and set it in a spare, cleanly designed, modern space as they do in Italy? I don’t want a restaurant with trendy food and a trendy look. What do you think?”

  “Why not, Susie? I know how to produce true Italian food in America, but everyone involved has to believe in it very strongly.”

  “I believe, I believe! If I can get the funding, would you like to come in with us? You can do it as a consultant or, if you prefer, as a general partner.”

  Victor broke into the conversation. “Basta with consulting, enough of working on someone else’s restaurant,” he said. “We want a partnership.”

  Susie came back much sooner than I had expected. I had been disappointed enough times not to expect her back at all. Ian, who had moved to Toronto to take an executive position with Nestlé, was coming in as an investor, and two Canadian attorneys, John Kime and Bill Macdonald, were chipping in too. Kime’s wife and Bill Macdonald had both attended my classes in Italy.

  We agreed to offer a partnership to the designer, who was to be Emily Summers. Emily has since acquired a major reputation in her profession and was named in January 2007 as one of Architectural Digest’s one hundred best designers in the world. She had a longstanding connection to Susie. Her mom and Susie’s had been best friends, and her sister and Susie had been best friends when they were kids. Emily was from Dallas and she suggested that a friend of hers from Dallas, Janet Colgin, be brought in to help plan and to manage the restaurant. We gave Janet a partnership too.

  Research pointed to Atlanta as the most promising place for our launch, which we optimistically envisioned as the first of several. A large, open space in a new building in midtown Atlanta would house the restaurant. There was a broad lawn beside it that was turned into a bocce court. More research turned up a chef, a young man named Joey Venezia. We had established our lives in Venice by then, and I thought his name was a good omen.

  Joey came to Venice and stayed two weeks with me, marketing, cooking, tasting, talking Italian food. He was a nice-looking young man with a ready smile, attentive and respectful. He amused me with his Italian-American habit of dropping the last vowel from Italian nouns, “prosciut” for prosciutto, “mozzarel” for mozzarella, “Trevis” for Treviso (the radicchio). When he left me, he spent two weeks in restaurants I had selected for him to try in other regions. He gave me huge encouragement, because he demonstrated a natural flair for producing dishes with genuine, light-handed Italian flavor.

  In the spring of 1990, when the construction of the restaurant was completed, Victor and I went to Atlanta. We stayed for a month, until after the opening, in an apartment that we had been provided in a suburb called Smyrna. In another intriguing coincidence, Smyrna was the name of the city in Turkey where Victor’s father and mother had been born. We weren’t always so happily surprised by names, however. We had our first disagreement with some of the partners over the name of the restaurant. We had submitted many Italian ones, but they were rejected in favor of Veni Vidi Vici, which was not even Italian and did not appeal to us.

  My son, Giuliano, who had been studying drama in Providence, Rhode Island, at the Trinity Square Repertory Theater, had become persuaded that he would be more likely to eat pursuing a culinary career rather than a theatrical one. He joined the kitchen staff in Atlanta, where he was put in charge of the pasta station, a tidy little room with a window that passersby could look into.

  We tested and retested the dishes that Joey and I had agreed upon, and I was completely satisfied that they were going to work. We had a magnificent opening. Emily had done well by us; the restaurant looked serene, uncluttered, and inviting. Susie’s husband,

  Enjoying a few after-dinner puffs with Chef Joey

  David, an accomplished amateur photographer, gave us many fine black-and-white photographs of Italy for the walls. They are still hanging there, I understand. We opened on the week that the American Institute of Wine and Food was meeting in Atlanta. Julia Child and Robert Mondavi came to a private lunch we gave for the institute and addressed us with extremely warm and heartening words. The mayor of Atlanta was there and presented me with an honorary citizenship in the city of Atlanta.

  The restaurant was an immediate and clamorous success. It was filled for every lunch and dinner. Customers played bocce on our lawn. John Kime wrote joyfully to all the partners: “Veni Vidi Vici is successful beyond our wildest dreams.” Esquire magazine listed it as one of the ten best new restaurants of the year. Even dishes that had been viewed with skepticism when I proposed them, such as an artichoke and calamari soup, became popular. I left for Venice deeply gratified at having demonstrated the broad appeal of the food and the flavors that I believed in.

  A month later, I was informed that Joey had been fired and summarily removed from the premises. I never learned what had gone wrong with Joey. Neither Joey nor Janet told me. The end of our partnership came two years later. Although Veni Vidi Vici was doing excellent business, we heard that vendors would deliver goods only for cash. We also learned that the landlord, who had advanced funds for construction and was owed more than half a million dollars, was not being repaid. Janet wanted to open a branch in Dallas. The investors felt it was too soon and that it might imperil the operation in Atlanta. Janet, however, did open her own restaurant in Dallas, and Ian and Mary Murray moved from Toronto to Atlanta to take charge of Veni Vidi Vici. It was too late. The landlord was not paid, and he foreclosed, selling our restaurant to an Atlanta group. Veni Vidi Vici is still in place, and doing well, I am told.

  Of all these missed opportunities and fruitless ventures, the collapse of the Atlanta restaurant is the one I most regret. It is not about the money, although I would not have objected if it had brought in some. I was drawn to the project as one may be drawn to compete in some sporting event. I was weary of hearing that Italian cooking, as it is practiced in Italy, would not be successful in a mainstream American city. I was as weary of the clichés of so-called northern Italian as I was of the garlicky, over-sauced, overflowing portions of presumed southern-style Italian. I was eager to prove that judiciously balanced classic dishes, based on genuine regional traditions, could win the game. I had the satisfaction, which I shall carry with me always, of knowing that they would have. I was ahead when the game was called.

  Venice

  1978-1995

  THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT put me in Venice during the latter decades of my teaching and writing life were probably set in motion one summer weekend in 1936. When Victor was eight years old, and his parents lived in Bologna, the family rose early on a Sunday morning and took the train to Venice, to have lunch there and spend the day. It is a two-hour trip now, even less with a super-express train, but in the 1930s it may have taken slightly longer. As Victor told it in a story he wrote for a magazine a few years ago, he came down the steps of the Venice railway station with his parents to board the vaporetto, the Ven
etian water bus, and as the vaporetto pushed off from its landing and churned up the Grand Canal, he knew that this was a place where he would have to live one day.

  Tom Margittai, our friend from the Four Seasons restaurant, was on the telephone. We had just finished the final course of the inaugural spring-to-summer term in our brand-new kitchen in Bologna.

  “Where are you, Tom?”

  “In Venice, at the Cipriani hotel. Are you still teaching?” he asked.

  “No, thank heaven! We are all finished with school until September,” I said. “We are leaving for Cesenatico, and I am going straight to the beach to lie on the hot sand.”

  “There is no sand here, Marcella, but there is a world-class pool and a terrific buffet lunch. The new general manager, Natale Rusconi, is an old friend. I told him about your school and he would like to meet you and talk to you about it. Why don’t you come up for a few days? He has a room for you.”

  When Victor hears a piece of good news, his green eyes widen and look even greener, and his cheeks become flushed. A trip to Venice was very, very good news. It had been more than ten years since we had been to Venice. Our return was in much grander style than on any of our previous visits. Natale sent a launch to meet us at the station and put us up in a room on the top floor with a dormer

  On the Cipriani launch

  window and a view of the Lido in the distance. In the morning, we swam in the huge pool filled with warm seawater and stayed pool-side for the buffet lunch. Tom had not misspoken. The buffet was laid with all the seafood we loved, the shrimplike canoce, scampi, miniature octopus, cuttlefish, and the Venetian classic sarde in saor, fried fresh sardines marinated in vinegar with raisins and pine nuts. The afternoons were for long walks and the evenings for chatty dinners at one of the trattorias favored by Tom and his friends.

  Natale was exceedingly charming. He wore serious suits and serious eyeglasses, but he entertained us with naughty tales from his long career in grand hotels. Before taking charge of the Cipriani he had been the general manager of the Gritti Palace, where he had launched the idea of the cooking vacation, inviting James Beard and other celebrated cooks to give courses. An American, James Sherwood, had bought the Cipriani from its owners, the Guinness sisters, who had built it to showcase the cuisine of Giuseppe Cipriani, the founder of the restaurant family that bears his name. Sherwood plucked Natale from the Gritti and set him down on the Giudecca to run his new hotel.