Above: Olga Raffault 2001 Chinon Les Picasses, one of my favorite wines and only $65 (yes!) at NoMad in NYC.

It was the night of two dinners.

“Order any wine you want,” said restaurateur Tony, my friend and client who was treating me to dinner.

We were at NoMad, a newish and very hot NYC restaurant that Tony’s chef Grant had recommended. We were eating our way through New York and Tony, who’s always overly generous with me when it comes to the wine selection, told me that “the sky’s the limit.”

Above: The famous roast chicken at NoMad, as presented before service.

The wine list at NoMad is phenomenal and the European selections are stuff of dreams for me (we started with Alfred Gratien rosé by the glass).

I was tempted to take Tony up on his offer. I believe that both Bartolo Mascarello 1997 Barolo at $375 or Produttori del Barbaresco 1970 Barbaresco (classic) at $400 would have drunk brilliantly (and look, I wasn’t going to do Giacomo Conterno 1971 Barolo Monfortino at $3,200, however much I would LOVE to drink that wine).

But I also knew we were going to be tasting at least half of the menu and so I craved something extremely food friendly that wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the myriad flavors.

Twelve years in its evolution, the 2001 Chinon Les Picasses at $65 (!!!) was ideal (the 1989 at $125 would have been great, too, but I wanted to go with a younger wine that would have the versatility to stand up to the flavors that were heading in my palate’s direction).

Above: The the roast chicken mise-en-place.

Schmuck! I hear you say.

I know, I know… After all, I do a great job for Tony and we’ve become close friends. Back home in Texas, he’s opened more than one bottle of Quintarelli 1990 Bandito and 1990 Recioto for me (among other crazy labels).

But the 2001 Picasses was just right for the speed of the evening and the truly perfect pairing for the restaurant’s famous roast chicken.

Above: Tony (right) uses his phone to take pictures of dishes he likes. Between Doug (left), Tony, and me, we were tweeting up a storm.

We were joined that evening by my new bromance Doug Cook (my fellow Italophile and oenophile and super cool and brilliant dude).

“Bring anyone you like to dinner,” Tony had said, his largesse rivaled only by the amount of fun we were having the two evenings we spent dining our way through the city.

We ended up staying to close the place and I had a blast chatting with the sommeliers about their list (they proudly showed me emptied bottles of old B. Masarello and Soldera that had been brought in by a mutual friend and one of the top Italian collectors in the city and they treated us to 1996 Oddero Barolo by the glass).

The best news is that that bottle of Produttori del Barbaresco 1970 Barbaresco Pora at $450 will probably still be there when I return east in the fall.

Austinites! Please don’t miss my band’s first appearance in the River City, this Saturday, Feb. 9, at the Parish Underground, 9 p.m. sharp. Click this link for details. FREE SHOW!

Above: Marinated skate and escarole.

It was the night of two dinners.

I was the guest of my friend (and client) Tony from Houston, a restaurant maven and culinary legend in Texas. He’s been in the business since 1965 and he had asked me to join him and his wife Donna as they ate their way through New York City (if you work in or around the restaurant business, you know that restaurateurs and chefs often partake in such indulgences otherwise known as “research”).

An ante litteram gastronaut, Tony has been traveling to Italy since the 1970s and he and Donna are huge fans of Rome’s historic Antica Pesa, a restaurant opened the same year that Mussolini marched on the capital and took power from King Victor Emmanuel (it was also the year of Pasolini’s birth in Bologna).

Above: Manager/partner Gabriele Guidoni’s mother is from Vicenza and his father from Rome. This dish was a fusion of baccalà alla vicentina — gently stewed salt cod — and classic Roman semolina gnocchi. Not very photogenic but one of the top dishes of my week in NYC.

Last year, it found its way into the tabloids as the backdrop for some of Madonna’s lavish parties. But as Tony pointed out, he became a fan long before Madonna ever knew it existed.

A U.S. outpost of Antica Pesa opened a few months ago in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it was at the top of the list of Tony’s places to check out.

Above: This version of pasta e fagioli, which I liked very much, was reminiscent of a style found in the Veneto, where tomatoes are omitted.

Not every dish wowed me but I’ve posted photos of my favorites here. Some were outstanding (like the baccalà alla [vicentina] romana).

Predictably, the wine list was Super Tuscan- and modern-Langa-heavy. Manager/partner Gabriele told me that he’s launching an entirely new list soon and I wonder if it will try to cater to a clientele beyond the Ornellaia crowd.

I was impressed however with the restraint and balance of the 2008 Barolo Brunate by Elio Altare. Not really my cup of tea but drinkable nonetheless and an expression of the new generation of misguided Langa progressivists who are beginning to see the light of a world without oakiness, excessive concentration, and high alcohol.

The best part of the evening was watching Gabriele and Tony banter about cooking techniques and favorite dishes.

Above: This classic expression of spaghetti cacio e pepe, however simple, was as close to perfection as you can get. If l’Antica Pesa had a better wine list, I would go back just for this. According to the tabloids, Madonna “adores” the version served at the restaurant in Rome. Who would have ever thought that she and I have something in common? (For the record, I adore her music.)

I couldn’t resist prodding Gabriele to give me a nugget about Madonna.

Recently, he told me, she tasted the 2002 Barolo Dagromis by Gaja over dinner at the restaurant in Rome. The next day, he said, he received a 6 a.m. call from her staff, pleading that he procure and send a case of the wine to her right away. A frantic series of calls to the Gaja winery in Barbaresco followed and by midday, the wine had been shipped.

Where did it go?

Paris!

You can imagine a concierge’s horreur when Italian wine arrived at the gate.

O, and, where was the second dinner of the night, you ask?

Stay tuned for more #NewYorkStories…

For my last 2012 meal in Italy, I was the guest of one of my best friends from my university days there, Stefano (you may remember him from my post on his Milanese “urban botanical” project which he has now aggregated on Pinterest).

Stefano is a member of Milan’s intelligentsia and is well connected in the city’s design, fashion, and publishing cliques. He had invited interior designer Gavino Falchi to join us. Gavino graciously offered to bring dinner with him for our Sunday evening repast.

The pièce de résistance of Gavino’s menu was this sformato, accompanied by vintage Luigi Caccia Dominioni silver serving utensils (when he arrived, Gavino was wearing an overcoat from Ugo Mulas’ personal wardrobe, given to him by Ugo’s widow).

A sformato is an Italian casserole, generally made with grated Parmigiano Reggiano, beaten eggs, and various ingredients that have been cooked in a bain-marie and then turned out from the casserole pan or mold (hence the term sformato, meaning literally “turned out from a mold,” a designation which only began to appear in Italian gastronomic literature in the first decades of the twentieth-century, even though such casseroles were already popular in Italian cooking by the second half of the nineteenth century; the timpani in Cavalcanti’s 1837 Cucina teorica-pratica are a precursor to the twentieth-century sformato).

I imagine that the term sformato didn’t become popular until cooking molds were widely produced  and available in Italy in the country’s era of industrialization.

Gavino had made his with the classic base, using zucchine as the “pasta” and adding finely ground pork to the batter. It was as delicious as it was beautiful.

He also made this excellent rolled and stuffed wild turkey breast with roast potatoes, a dish that you often find in northern Italian homes on Sundays (Gavino is Sardinian by birth, Milanese by osmosis).

My good friend Michele Scicolone doesn’t include any recipes for sformati in her just released recipe book, The Mediterranean Slow Cooker, although many of the entries resemble or evoke the sformato model (the book is the lastest in a series that she has published with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; her Italian Slow Cooker does include a number of sformato recipes).

Tracie P and I just received our copy of the book (which came out last week) and we’re geeked to dive in (we’re big slow cookers here in the Parzen household).

If you’re not familiar with Michele’s work, she’s one of the top Italian cookery book authors working in the field today and she’s one of the best cooks I’ve ever met. The thing I love about her recipes is their precision: Michele grew up in an era of food publishing when recipes were tested over and over and over again. As an editor for Ladies Home Journal, she told me, every recipe had to be executed no fewer than three times before it made it into the magazine.

She also happens to be married to one of my Italian wine mentors, the inimitable Charles Scicolone, an Obi-Wan Kenobi of an Italian wine universe that has been dominated, sadly, by the “dark side” of the force in recent decades.

They’re some of my best friends in New York and I’m looking forward to seeing them when I travel there later this month.

Stay tuned!