The people under the stairs – Part Three!!

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 / Eric Brown / 3 Comments

So there we were the other night, watching Gigli dubbed into Italian, when Janine turned to me. “Do you hear that?” It was voices, coming from below us. I went to investigate. Sure enough. We have people living under the stairs.

I kid you not. The place we’re renting has a bedroom and a kitchen upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. In the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs is a pair of strangely arranged rugs.

Hey, what are those rugs doing there?

I pulled back the rugs to reveal a trapdoor that leads to an apartment downstairs.

Hiding the bizarre trap door, that’s what!

There was a party going on, at which half the cigarettes in Italy were presently being smoked. Seriously? I did some reconnaissance and discovered that there is an apartment down there. It has a separate entrance at the front of the building, but our apartments connect. In addition to the trap door downstairs, there is a flimsy melamine board that can separate the top floor of our place with our two bedrooms downstairs. Janine could lock me in the basement if she wanted to – kind of a low-rent Cask of Amontillado. To their credit, apart from that one little party and the smoking, which we mitigate by tucking in the rug, closing our melamine board and keeping the door to the rest of our place closed, the people downstairs are just fine – nothing like that other downstairs neighbor you might remember.

Our next door neighbors are another interesting case. Every day, sometime between 9:30 and noon, they start their engine by cranking up Enrique Iglesias’s song Bailando. When the song is over, they make it a bit louder, and play it again. And again. The other day I think they got through it four times, at which point the stucco was flaking off the side of the buildings. And then, just like that, the music stops and Forza d’Agro becomes a sleepy medieval village again.

Our other regular musical treat occurs daily at 12:05, when the main church broadcasts Ave Maria from its speakers. Perhaps that’s when mass begins, or perhaps the parish priest is attempting to cleanse the air of Enrique Iglesias.

I take this moment to digress slightly to respond to the very thoughtful comment from my friend Hubert, who noted after my entry about the many churches in this small village that Catholics usually have lots of churches, including a church for baptisms, a church for Sunday mass, and a church for funerals, which sounds like a lot of church-building for sixteenth century peasants, but perhaps they have extra time on their hands. I should point out that there are at least two more churches in Forza that are not in use at the moment, which seems to support Hubert’s analysis. My mind immediately began to apply this approach to other religions. I hope these places have good signage. Imagine walking mistakenly into the synagogue that just does the circumcisions, especially if you’ve been drinking.

Forza d’Agro doesn’t just have churches. It also has Giuseppe Carullo, the most cheerful, hardest-working man in the pizza business. Peppe (as his father calls him), looks to be in his mid-forties, and wears a short-billed cyclist’s hat at a jaunty angle on his head and a sunny, earnest expression on his face. I admit I wasn’t crazy about his pizza the first time I tried it, but we went in the other day searching for a sandwich to take with us to Mt. Etna and he whipped out a pizza dough, baked the bread in his wood burning pizza oven, stuffed it with prosciutto, mozzarella, and fresh tomato, packed it up, and sent us on our way with a great big smile. It was crazy good.

We then headed off to Mt. Etna, the tallest active volcano in Europe at 10,000 feet. The mountain had its last big eruption just three months ago, spewing lava and otherwise putting on a show.

To get up to the top of Etna, you arrive at what looks like a truck stop with a hodgepodge of souvenir stands and schlocky restaurants, and have to trace the tram to the building where you can buy tickets to the top. Do you have to pay for parking or is it free? Who knows! It’s all just a bit haphazard, but perhaps that a bit of its charm. On the other hand, it can be a pain in the butt.

(We’ve often had to guess about how things are done. One day, we snuck through a hole in a fence by the side of the road to get down to the beach. (Until yesterday it was sunny and warm, with temperatures regularly hitting the eighties. Today, not so much.) We reached another absolutely fabulous beach area only after having driven past the entrance a half dozen times and concluding that there must be something down there. Indeed, there was parking, as well as beach chairs, umbrellas, bathrooms, a restaurant, and a bar that served a very nice Sicilian white in stemware that you could bring to your cozy little spot in the sand. Who knew?)

At Mt. Etna, if you’re cheap or crazy, or both, you get to the top by doing a 5 kilometer hike with a 3,000 foot elevation gain, which takes about four hours. The rest of us take a very comfortable cable car and then a four-wheel drive bus that looks like something out of Star Wars.

Kooky Etna Bus

We made it up to the top too late to be able to hike close to the rim (as if!), but being up that high and wandering about was a treat in itself.

The tippy top of Mt. Etna.

Yes, it’s cold up there.

As kitschy as it can be (although it’s quite charming later in the evening when the tourists are back on the boat), we found ourselves back in Taormina for one more really fantastic meal, at Osteria Nero d’Avola. We knew we were in for a treat when we arrived to the restaurant to find the chef owner, a very gracious and passionate fellow named Turi Siligato, working the room, introducing himself to the various tables, and showing off the scrapes on his arms that he acquired foraging for mushrooms that day. We started with fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with anchovies and caciocavallo cheese, those lovely mushrooms sautéed with a little bit of butter, and amazing mussels that are topped with pine nuts, fennel fronds, and bread crumbs and browned under the broiler.

For our mains, we had dorado that was topped with more bread crumbs, crumbled pistachio, and lemon zest, and we had a simply grilled red snapper that walked through the door shortly after we did (well, it was carried by the fisherman). However it arrived, our server paraded the fish around the room and we just couldn’t pass it up.

Parading the fish.

It’s a real pleasure to have a meal that trusts the ingredients. I think I heard it from Mario Batali, but I’ve been telling my daughter all her life that the key to good cooking is perfect ingredients simply prepared. She rolls her eyes, but gosh darn it, I’m right! Chef Siligato delivered on this promise, for sure. I could eat like this every day.

With Turi Siligato at Osteria Nero D’Avola

Back in Forza yesterday, we wandered into Giuseppi’s place for a salad and another sandwich when the skies opened up and began dumping rain. A busful of tourists sought shelter and Giuseppe managed the room with astonishing aplomb all by his lonesome and with unmanufactured good cheer. He was host, waiter, busboy, and cook. He answered every question with a jaunty “Si!” that was a combination of “of course!” “you betcha!” and “thanks for asking!” At one point, he got on the phone to call for reinforcements, and an older fellow who was clearly his dad (a comparison of their memorable noses proved this) appeared. By the look of it, it was more for moral support than anything else. His dad, who was probably in his seventies, took a few orders, but Giuseppe seemed to have things well under control.

It rained and rained, and Janine and I, who had nothing better to do, sat there for most of the day and had drinks, then lunch, then more drinks, then coffee, then cannoli, then some more drinks. By the time we were ready to leave it was still pouring, so Giuseppi sent us away with his umbrella. Once we got back to our place (where we had conveniently left our own umbrellas) I tromped back to return the one we had been lent. When I arrived, Giuseppi seemed a little annoyed. His response sounded something like, “Now what did you go and do that for?”

Tomorrow, we push off for Siracusa, which rivaled Athens in size and importance when it was part of the Greek empire. I have a feeling that we’ll see some old stuff.

Praise the lord and pass the statins – our pilgrimage to the mecca of meat, Peter Luger.

September 29, 2014October 16, 2014 / Eric Brown / 1 Comment

Oh, I sing a song of meat.

Not just any meat, mind you, but the meat of the gods. Peter Luger meat.

If you are a vegetarian, or heaven forbid a vegan, I beg you to turn away. This will not be pretty, and I don’t want you to hate me. Come back some other day, when I write an essay about the glories of carrots or yeast, or somesuch. I have deep respect for your excellent choices, but as my beloved former boss Paul Brest used to say, if god had meant us to be vegetarians, he wouldn’t have made animals out of meat.

I can’t tell you how many times I have made my way across the Williamsburg Bridge and been tantalized by the glimpse of what may be the world’s greatest steakhouse, Peter Luger. There it sat, lurking beneath the bridge, beckoning to the hungry, the gluttonous, or to the seekers of meaty self-actualization. Someday, I would often think, I’ll have a Peter Luger steak. And yet nearly a half century went by and I failed to keep my promise.

Why didn’t I just go, you may ask? There were any number of reasons. For many years I would have had to sell my baseball card collection and a few quarts of blood just to make it past the shrimp cocktail. And for heaven’s sake, it was in BROOKLYN, and in Williamsburg, no less. But times have changed in oh so many ways. I’m all grown up with gainful employment (sort of) and Williamsburg is the BOMB. And if you have been following my recent journey, you will know that I am finding any opportunity I can to go back and either perfect the past or fine tune the future. I recommend it, by the way. When we decided to spend part of our trip in New York, I swore to myself that we would at long last make it to Peter Luger.

What’s so special about this place? Certainly not the décor. It’s a room. It has wood floors, it’s nice, it’s old, but if they didn’t make steaks that made you want to weep, you wouldn’t think twice. The waiters wear long aprons, which bring to mind a Bemelmans sketch, so that’s nice, but still.

Nothing fancy. A little too bright, a little plain, but just right.

No, what’s special is the meat. They buy these fancy, shmancy USDA Prime cuts of beef and then hang them in some special room for a month until they get good and funky and covered in mold (good mold, they say). They say that this concentrates the flavors. Then they hack off the mold (I assume) and cut up the hunks of beef into steaks on the day they’re going to serve them. The cut of choice at Peter Luger is the porterhouse, or what you and I know as the t-bone. The t-bone has a piece of filet mignon on one side of the bone and the strip steak on the other. Then they take your t-bone and throw it in an 800 degree broiler that creates a crust that you could stand on, but which leaves the inside a very comfortable medium rare. Don’t be afraid. The steak looks really rare, but with all that aging and tenderizing and whatever else they do to it, you won’t die. On the other hand, if you were to order your steak well done I suspect that the rotting corpse of Herr Luger himself would rise up out of the floor and strangle you with his moldy hands, and good for him I say.

So they take this crazy good meat and blast it with a krillion degrees of heat and then they start improving on it. When it comes out of the oven, they slice for you, which coaxes the juices onto the platter, at which time they drown the whole operation in a stick of butter, which somehow never undermines the structural integrity of that magical crust. The salty, fatty, buttery sauce seems to wick its way back into the steak through some kind of magical capillary action. The filet mignon becomes the foie gras of meat – livery and tender and spectacular. When I took my first bite I groaned. The strip is marbled and fatty and ridiculous.

Quite simply, the world’s greatest steak.

By this point, every cardiologist in the tri-state region orders a new Mercedes. They serve your steak with a boat of Luger’s famous steak sauce and a defibrillator. For dessert, you can order the carrot cake or a bowl of Lipitor.

I might add that the sleeper of the evening was the creamed spinach. Mercifully, they seemed to go easy on the cream, but somehow found a way to make the spinach even spinachier. I think they put spinach on the menu at steakhouses as a joke, but Lugar’s doesn’t mess around. If they’re going to serve spinach it will be the best damn steakhouse spinach of the plant. We order the mysterious bottle of private label Peter Luger Napa Cab that was, as everything else was, right on the money.

And how do I describe the steak? It’s easy. It was the best damn piece of meat I’ve ever eaten. I went back and read some reviews and some of the jaded restaurant critics crapped and moaned about indifferent service or the fact that they don’t take credit cards (although they take debit cards and who doesn’t have one of those?) or their location or some other cranky pants minor infraction. But my good god people, this is one of those instances in which somebody has perfected a task that requires time, money, and skill, and for that I am eternally grateful.

The happy couple, right before the paramedics came.

And for the record our waiter Ivan was funny and sassy and we wanted to take him home with us. Like our friend Larry from Russ and Daughters, he knew that what he was feeding us was poetry and he was damn proud of it.

On the other hand, there are any number of fussy, expensive, self-important places that send the gastronorati into a frothy frenzy but which then close before we can remember what we ate. Don’t get me wrong, I like hipster food as much as the next guy, but if you gave me twelve hours to live and made me pick a last meal, it might just be a Luger steak, the mystery cab, and that crazy spinach.

There once was an aunt from Nantucket…

September 9, 2014March 24, 2015 / Eric Brown / 3 Comments

I really have an aunt on Nantucket. She’s not actually from Nantucket (she’s from New Jersey – it could happen to anybody) but she has lived there for twenty years. Given that we are on the east coast, and that we seriously owed her a visit, we endeavored to travel to Nantucket to see Aunt Valerie. Thus, we fled the melty humidity of New York and arrived in breezy, lovely, Nantucket. This place is so rich and famous that it makes Robin Leach feel out of place. If you sneeze, a dozen millionaires catch cold. Scions, heirs, and oligarchs swoop in on their private jets and yachts to take in the charm of the only quaint whaling village where you will find a Louis Vuitton bag at the thrift store.

With all that, it’s really very charming and it’s always fun to go to Nantucket.

Now, a word about my aunt and how I came to have an aunt on Nantucket.

My Aunt Valerie married my beloved Uncle Joel several years ago. Uncle Joel was a terrific guy. At my wedding, he stood in for my father (who died when I was eleven), and I’ve always had a particular fondness for him. He passed away from cancer three years ago, but we’ve stayed in touch with Valerie. I’m not sure exactly what to call her, though. Aunt doesn’t quite fit. We may need a ruling from the relative-naming officials, but I think maybe she’s my Aunt Emeritus. Anyway, Joel retired from his job running one of the two banks on the island at a very young 60. He traveled with his new wife, spent time working on his very cool house, and lived his life. It was cut short, but I can’t imagine that he regretted his choices for a moment. I really don’t want to become maudlin, but it’s in that spirit that we are taking this journey. You only live once, as the kids today are fond of saying, although for them that’s more or less an excuse to hook up and sniff glue.

Back to Nantucket. Apart from being the inspiration for limerick writers the world over, it is a rather fancy place where people like Jack Welsh and John Kerry and Steve Forbes all stumble over each other at the private jet terminal at Nantucket Memorial Airport, known by its call letters, ACK, which is the sound my cat makes when she’s horking up a hairball, but whatever.

It is also a place where grown men wear shorts in the inexplicably popular island color, a red that approximates a Brandywine tomato or pasta alla vodka. If you wear socks with your topsiders you will be hauled in for questioning.

The Famous Tomato Pants of Nantucket

Okay, enough joshing on the gentry. Just as there is a lockjawed landed upper crust that yacht-hops in the harbor, there is a year-round community for whom this neat little piece of real estate is actually home. My uncle (and my father) came from very rugged stock – Uncle Joel was the only one in his family to graduate from college. His father was a plumber. Aunt Emeritus Valerie is a social worker and clinical therapist. So there are real people out there, and we had the chance to meet a few this weekend.

For example, if you are in the neighborhood in Siasconset (called ‘Sconset by the locals) on the eastern edge of the island, you will likely see Tom Mulholland sitting in front of his house with a falcon named Houdini and a red-tailed Hawk named Shaka Zulu. With his long, white beard, Tom might stand out at the Angler’s Club.

Tom Mulholland and Shaka Zulu.

But just go up to him and ask him about his birds and you will be invited to sit down and talk about hawking and falconry, and you may just learn a bit about Tom’s views on the government (intrusive, mostly) the release of feral cats on the island (very bad – they’re wiping out the native pheasant and grouse population) and ISIS (very, very bad). If it’s hunting season (it isn’t, which is bumming Tom and his birds out at the moment) you will have the rare opportunity to see nature at its most basic. But go – Tom is generous with his time, giving lectures to schoolchildren on falconry (but not politics, which he reserves for the adults), and he’ll stop whatever he’s doing to talk to you about his birds if you are curious enough to ask. The sight of them just sitting on their perches is impressive. They are simply spectacular creatures.

Shaka Zulu

We experienced another uncommon pleasure of Nantucket – free clams. Valerie has a small motorboat that she uses to tool around the harbor, and she took us to one of her favorite clam spots, which coughed up an astonishing bounty.

Our clammy beach

And this was not hard work. There was a little raking involved, but we also found tons of clams that were just lying around and we more or less picked them off the beach.

Janine and Aunt Emeritus Valerie Clamming

We hauled in about twenty five pounds of clams the first day and nearly forty pounds two days later. The Fresh Lobster Company of Gloucester, Massachusetts will happily ship you a pound of clams for $10.25. At that price, we raked in (har!) over $600 worth of clams. Subtract the price of the clam permit and you are still way ahead of the game. We ate clams for days and still had a bunch left over. And my good jesus they were delicious. Sweet and salty – the peanut butter and jelly of the sea.

Our haul of clams

We also took in a play at the local theater company, the White Heron Theatre. Whenever we travel, we try to see some local theater. Since there are always talented actors hanging about on the island, you’re likely to see something pretty good. We saw a new play called Small World, by Frederick Stroppel, which explored what the meeting between Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky might have been like as they prepared to make Fantasia. It was a little Saving Mr. Banks-y, but it was well-acted and well-directed and we had an exceedingly good time. If Stroppel was first with the idea about a story about Walt Disney talking a cranky foreigner into working on a Disney picture, I bet he’s pissed. Oh well, at least he’s pissed in Nantucket.

The next time you visit Nantucket, go pay Tom Mulholland a visit. Here’s his website.

Or go clamming, or go to the theatre. Definitely go to the thrift store.

Or buy yourself a pair of tomato pants and just walk around without socks on. Nobody will notice.

Eat, Bicker, Love

A loving couple travels the world

around the world

The people under the stairs – Part Three!!

Praise the lord and pass the statins – our pilgrimage to the mecca of meat, Peter Luger.

There once was an aunt from Nantucket…