We’ve seen “The Godfather’s” men of honor deliver a type of justice that eluded the government, the sexy but dumb Tony Manero point his finger toward the heavens on the disco floor and the high-strung “Moonstruck” family happily solving its problems in kitchen-table screaming matches to name just a few. The millennium ushered in Tony Soprano on Prozac, his hapless mob crew and bored wife, Carmela, baking ziti for a flirtatious priest–all of whom served as darker anti-stereotypes to these earlier romanticized film motifs. Stereotypes, anti-stereotypes, are there any other means with which to portray Italian-American culture? Why, of course, a reality-TV show.
“The Restaurant,” the six-episode reality show that premieres on NBC on July 20, is ostensibly about the pressures of celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito opening his new Manhattan restaurant, Rocco’s, and includes a cast of aspiring actor-waiters all ready for their close-ups, Mr. DiS. But the choice to feature homey Italian cooking, along with his 78-year-old mother and executive chef, Nicolina, molding 600 meatballs daily in the kitchen, Zio Giuseppe stuffing sausages and Zia Maria making pasta means that family, food, nostalgia and the embrace of a culture that DiSpirito once preferred to ignore will all play important supporting roles.
For a man who grew up ashamed to be Italian-American and made his culinary mark at Union Pacific restaurant creating a nouvelle cuisine with dishes like sashimi tuna with mango, Asian pear, cilantro and wasabi wrapped in a roll, DiSpirito’s choice to open Rocco’s marks a full-fledged return to his roots. This personal and culinary journey, DiSpirito explained in a recent interview, was about five years in the making.
“Simultaneous with my discovering what I did with food at Union Pacific, which is to combine flavors in a unique way,” said the 36-year-old chef, “I also realized that I had been running away from something, mainly my Italian-American heritage, both the food and the culture.”
The son of southern Italian immigrants who settled in Jamaica, Queens, in the 1950s, DiSpirito experienced the normal insecurities of growing up with working-class parents who didn’t speak English and couldn’t help ease the strains of his academic and social worlds. “They didn’t know what the SATs were,” said DiSpirito.
“We were struggling to make it in America, and I thought that running away from that and acculturating was my ticket out. That’s why when people would say, ‘Why don’t you cook Italian food?’ I used to look at them and say, ‘Excuse me, why would I cook Italian food?’ Now that I’m comfortable with being who I am and realized that being an Italian-American immigrant’s child does not necessarily make me this or the other, then I can stand alone. You know, I had an epiphany really.”
For the aspiring young chef who wanted to master consomme celestine–the clarified beef broth and custard slices that is a staple of classic French cooking–this epiphany will now be broadcast to millions of viewers. According to DiSpirito, his identity struggle is a theme of the show: “I think the Italian family element has become important not because the food is more interesting than nouvelle cuisine, but because of the tension that arises from this ethnic self-hate, and this return-to-your-roots story is an interesting and compelling one that people can relate to.”
To be a successful national television show, however, the more stereotypes embraced the better, and so far DiSpirito seems to hold no shame in this arena. A boyishly good-looking bachelor who knows how to cook (as the show’s promo goes), DiSpirito has transformed the role of mama’s boy into the sexy, sensitive 2K man. The restaurant’s decor–all done with a wink–is filled with Italian-American kitsch, like a plastic Madonna above the bar and an elaborate Bay of Naples mural composed of 250,000 sparkling glass beads, which spell at one corner CIAO DI NAPOLI. A beefy maitre d’ with a SAG card, who resembles Bobby Baccala on “The Sopranos,” sings “Happy Birthday” to celebrating diners. Waiters wear belt buckles that say RED SAUCE.
Even the menu, the pink-paged La Gazzetta di Rocco that imitates Italy’s daily sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport, showcases a staunchly nationalistic motto: “Italians Do It Better” and features a series of crude articles on its back page, like a picture of the “Hot Italian of the Day: Simonetta Stefanelli” who made a brief appearance in “The Godfather II.” Stefanelli is partially nude in the La Gazzetta picture and the caption dutifully tells us, “And here’s her boob.”
But if La Gazzetta is a spoof and reality shows have proved to be far from real life, Rocco DiSpirito’s restaurant features one true thing–the food. Fusilli pomodorini with zucchini flowers, orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, the sublime bitterness of wild arugula, and the magnificent melt-in-your-mouth “mama’s meatballs.” Yes, the meatballs live up to their hype. Nicolina DiSpirito, who won’t tell the recipe, likes to list “love” as the essential ingredient, invoking a touch of magic realism in her Campania cuisine.
DiSpirito makes clear that he “doesn’t pretend to be a great regional Italian chef. “I want to cook what I know well, which is Italian-American cooking.”
That “The Restaurant” wishes to broadcast this cooking should no longer surprise many thirty- and fortysomething Italian-Americans of my generation, who grew up thinking that a pot of boiling water was as hip as a Dean Martin single then watched the transformation of Italian food from family fare to chic cuisine in the 1980s. Although many of these upscale restaurants served northern Italian food, even southern peasant dishes my grandmother prepared could be found on menus. Today “rustic” means that an elegant downtown restaurant called Peasant cooks chicken complete with its feet (a childhood delight of mine) in a wood-burning oven; and when the bill comes to over $100 for two people without a bottle of wine, the once secret shame of sucking the cartilage of a chicken’s foot turns into an overt pride of the tastes of one’s youth. “Were the nails trimmed?” DiSpirito asks me with a smile, “because when I use them, I trim the nails.”
My favorite southern Italian touch on Rocco’s dessert menu is zeppole, fried balls of dough served in a brown paper bag that announces its authenticity with splotchy grease marks. Every Christmas Eve after we finished our traditional all-fish meal, my mother tried to fry zeppole–or zaples as we called them in dialect–but the large pot of olive oil had a mind of its own and caused a kitchen fire almost every year. My mother’s indomitable will to re-create these balls–despite the charred memories of the prior Christmas–was a testament, I believe, to her longing to preserve a piece of her parent’s southern Italian land in a New Jersey suburb. Although her zeppole tasted like fried bread, always too heavy for me–“I can never get it like mama” she’d say–the acts of trying, and extinguishing, became part of our Christmas tradition. My mother, who is now 81, eventually gave up the challenge, afraid of burning down the house.
At Rocco’s, however, I could eat zeppole without fear of frying and discovered the sensual delights of this amazingly light and crunchy dessert, served piping hot. Nicolina DiSpirito said that she’ll “never tell anybody what to do in the kitchen,” but suggested that my mother used too much oil.
Her son Rocco is attempting to share a culture that for many grandchildren of immigrants is rooted in 19th-century past. But for how long can an immigrant culture be preserved? When DiSpirito’s family moved from Queens to Long Island, his grandmother raised her own livestock, had a rabbit and chicken hutch, and grew at least 20 different kinds of produce, he said.
“She had an orchard of apple, pear, cherry and blackberry trees. She made her own wine, preserved her own tomatoes. She made bread every day, as well as ricotta cheese and sausages. You know, she lived life the way she lived it in Campania. Amazing, really.”
Amazing indeed, especially since all hyphenated ethnicities will most likely be absorbed one day into the larger heterogeneous American landscape. As Italian-American culture becomes further removed from its origins, DiSpirito may be providing the next best thing: A culture of the imagination, and of desire, in which our past is no longer erased but becomes a living part of who we are, and identity is strengthened by a tree’s twisted roots, not just its crown.
