this is a picture of self made pesto in a mortar. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is spring time in New York City and the April Showers are blowing in the air. The four of us jumped out of a cab as it started to rain on busy 8th Ave. in New York City right before noon. Luckily we have decided that we had to go cross town and so we grabbed a cab at 11:45 AM. We left the advertising agency early and walked right out on to Park Ave. and hailed a yellow cab. We have been working all morning on the new creative program for our Puerto Rican Spanish ads. So we escaped from the meeting room early.
Today, Lucci is in charge of ordering our lunch and as we sit down in Nick and Guido’s Restaurant, the sacrosanct Italian lunch trattoria of Lucci, Guido sits us the best table, as it seems it is reserved for Lucci whenever he shows up. We do not have much of a chance to see the menu selections, as Lucci takes over ordering his favorite food in my honor, since I am the client (and he has adopted me to be trained in the Italian culture) The account executives usually would take me to lunch, but, since they had another commitment they skipped out and turned me over to the creative team. The creative team is Lucci, Helio and the boss Bruno. My impression is that the executive account directors do not want to pass their time with the creative guys… The office in Manhattan is covered by three floors and the creative teams are the crazy artists. “Keep them in their cages.” – is the feeling I get when Bruce or George talk. I notice in the evenings that I am not caught in the middle of this caste system struggle because the account execs go home on the 5 PM train out of Grand Central Station and leave me to be entertained by the creative crew who live in the city and like doing avant garde things, like music, bars and restaurants.
Actually it is Helio who adopted me first when I came out of graduate school last year and joined Whirlpool’s International Division to head the advertising department. My first Agency experience was with Kenyon and Eckhardt in the Pan Am building. Helio was a copy writer there and the account director was Ted Anson, a super “Brit”, who really indoctrinated me into the world of New York and international advertising. K&E had taken on a new account and it is a competitor to Whirlpool we have been asked to look for another agency. Helio went to GARDNER and talked the New York office to solicit the account. So here I am with the creative team of Gardner and I am in “Nick and Guido’s” in New York City doing business! I have to pinch myself at how lucky I am sitting here with the agency conducting business in the world of advertising. Could life be more magnificent?
Bruno & Lucci exchange jocularities in Italian with Guido, and even though Bruno is the boss, he did not get involved in the Lucci sacred ordering process. Lucci insisted that we have “pesto” if there is fresh basil. Si basilico. No arguments. Con Fettuccine. He insisted that it has to be “al Dentoni” – Lucci leans over to me as if giving me a soliloquy in a Shakespearian play and says most restaurants serve pasta “al dente” But“Al Dentone” is a must…! Giuseppe Lucci insists this is the way that the Roman “cognoscente” eats it and it should be. Lucci hails from Rome. Lucci discusses his thoughts on Pesto. First he tells me is that the pesto we ordered comes from Genoa. In Italy, each province has there specialty and Genoa is famous for its Pesto. One would not go to Rome to order Pesto, just as some one from Rome would go to Genoa and order Saltimbocca. Lucci says to me and the table that Basil is a sacred dish. The recipes may very in quantity, but most agree that the ingredients are the same. In my experience in Mexico and the USA I had never really encountered Basil before, this for sure is a new experience for me.
Giuseppe tells me that he makes Pesto as follows:
Two cups of Basil leaves – traditionally ground in a mortar with a pestle (hence the word Pesto) – he uses a food processor sometimes.
Add one clove of garlic
Handful of Pine nuts – pigniolia
Grated Grana – Parmigiano Reggiano is preferred by him – One cup.
A cup of olive oil
Upon completion of grinding ingredients together add a ¼ of a cup of the boiling stock.
Drain the noodles, pour the sauce over the pasta and serve very hot.
WOW! What an experience I was going to have.
My friend Helio, who speaks perfect Spanish, tells me that the name for Basil in Spanish is Albaca and Pigniolia nuts are Piñones; yet we understand 50% of the Italian and let Lucci and Guido hammer out the details on the menu.
Lucci commands that we want two wines: one white and one red. The House wine is FRESCOBALDI – POMINO (White) and FRESCOBALDI – CASTELLO DI NIPOZZANO CHIANTI CLASSICO (Red) a very fine wine house in Rufina Chianti.
He tells Guido, first serve the Salad. He asked for the Pomino right away. That would go with the Pasta dish. The first selection was Tomato salad with basilico e lemone and olive oil, next linguini al pesto, and lastly vitello alla griglia and escarole pan fried tossed with oil and garlic. By now the restaurant is filling up. It makes sense to leave them alone in bantering about the food. Elio Gonzalez is amused, but Lucci is the life of the occasion so we are just sitting back enjoying my education into Italian culture. Helio is a Mexican, born in Chihuahua and has that look of the Tahumara Indians. He is a great copy writer on our account and someone who was already befriended me. I knew him since 1968 when our account was with Kenyon & Eckhardt.
The wine ordering process is magnificent. First he asked for a Pomino Bianco. – Frescobaldi. Wine at this point is a mystery to me. Bob Lightfoot, my Tulane room mate who is Italian -Anglo Saxon mix, introduced me to Italian food when we visited various Italian restaurants in New Orleans. Bob liked Mateus, which is Portuguese and an inoffensive rose wine but nothing that I could relate to in Italian cooking. Ralph Carreño my Whirlpool boss was giving me books on French wine to read. He preferred Bordeaux’s from France. So I was just enthralled with this experience. Ralph always ordered the wine. Lucci wanted to make sure I lost my Francophile leanings on wine and cuisines and wants me to know that Italian cuisine is the best.
Lucci wanted the POMINO cold, not frozen nor at 32 degrees. Guido said that was not a problem; refrigerator cool would do, and not in a bucket of water. This wine would go with the Fettuccine al Pesto alla Genovese and Tomato salad. Then Lucci asks for two bottle of Frescobaldi Castello di Nipozzano – Chianti Classico 1961.
First Guido opens the Pomino and Lucci waves it on – va bene! We enjoy the Linguine and Pesto. I am just amazed that I never knew about Basil before. Lucci re-enforced it is Albaca in Spanish, but not that popular in Spain or in Cuba where he has lived. The Italians almost worship it as a saint in cooking. With this meal I had reached Nirvana – best Italian dish ever for me. Lucci’s point was that Italians had a better cuisine than the French. Ecoffier the great Chef from France, just learned from French history what the Italian great chef’s had taught the court of Louis the XIV after his bride Catherine de Medici insisted on changing French food and refused to eat it until her chef’s made it more palatable. Florentine as good style came from Catherine who loved Spinach.
Basil and Pesto have just jumped to the top of my list of fresh herb spices. I am having a lot of fun learning all this food knowledge. I still kept pinching myself that this was not a dream.
After the pasta Guido rushes away to the back to get the vino rosso and Lucci says, Ron – “Te va gustar”…. At this point I am a vacuum cleaner trying to learn and pick up every nuance I can from this experience.
My company mentor is not here with me and he has let me come to New York alone and I am in the hands of the agency. Ralph Carreño is my boss at Whirlpool and is really the first person who has influenced me since I left my father’s side in Mexico to go to Military prep school in Virginia – sure professors influenced me at SMA, at college at Tulane and at graduate school at T-bird but none with hands on knowledge like this. I still cannot get over that I am here alone, as the client, among these giants of the industry and they are trying to get me on the right path. Ralph had enough trust in me to let me go to this alone. I am sure his boss, the big boss, Jerry Southland said, “Ralph, let Ron become responsible!” Ralph would say, si Jefe!
Guido has come back and puts both bottles of red wine on the table. He brings out his French waiter’s “tire bouchon” and opens the bottles to let the wine breath. He pours a glass for Lucci. Giuseppe looks at it, he swirls it and then he smells it and then he sips it. Slowly he sips it again and then he picks up the bottle and inspects it. He looks at Guido and says, NO VA! In a very loud angry voice that echoes through the restaurant. Everyone at every table is frozen and conversations stops.
Lucci says, I ordered a 1961 and this is 1962. This was said very sternly and seriously. All of us hung on and the air of unhappiness filled the room; we waited to see how this is going to be handled.
Guido’s face is aghast, and looks at the bottle and says to Lucci you are right! He moves both the bottles to another empty table. Turns his back to Lucci and pulls out his pen, and crosses out the 2 and puts a 1 next to it. He edits both bottles.
And Guido serves the wine again. ECCO 1961! The whole restaurant is focused on us. Giuseppe swirls it and sips it, while Bruno and I are cracking up. Lucci swallows, Lucci sings out MAGNIFICO!
We all laugh, clap and tears flow down our face as the roar of laughter fills the restaurant. The tension is over and everyone is happy.
The rest of the meal is uneventful. The veal is paillard style – that is a veal cutlet which is pounded thinly and rapidly cooked on stainless steel or open grill no more than 20 seconds each side. It is served with a lemon.
Here again I learn something new. Lucci tell me that lemons came to the west via Arab traders who brought them from Persia through the Turks and the Islamic traders. Yellow lemons went from Turkey to Venice and down to Italy and over to France, The green lemon found its path along the southern route through North Africa to the Moors and up to Spain. In the US when you ask for lemon it is yellow and in Mexico when you ask for a lemon it is green.
The veal was served with a delicious quick fried escarole with a dab of olive oil and finely minced garlic The Chianti Classico matched real well with the meat and slight bitterness of the escarole.
Bruno approved and told Giuseppe that he did a great job. Guido was happy and so was the rest of the restaurant. We settled on a third bottle of Nipozzano Chianti. Again I felt like a blank sheet of paper with all these new bits of information that popped out. The well known straw wrapped bottles gave birth to the concept of the English word FIASCO. The round bottom bottles were wrapped originally in straw, but during shipment they rolled over and broke. The bottle in Italian was a FIASCO. But the straw wrapper was forced in to innovate a straw bottom so the bottles would not flip over.
Lucci ordered an espresso coffee – alla Machina – which was served with a lemon peel. Lucci would press the zest out over the coffee before drinking it. Guido gave us a small glass of Sambucca con la mosca. – That wonderful taste of licorice again, with a bean roasting in a flaming glass of sambucca alcohol.
Bruno told me Italians liked Aniseta but after the War, Marie Brizzard from France had an anisette style that Italians liked and Sambucca was born. Lucci loved one after a meal like this. Again something new for me. Someone had ordered a complete meal without asking me what I wanted.
We wrapped up and returned to the Agency after a 2 ½ repast. I rode in the taxi and calculated how my life had changed since the time I awakened this morning. A whole new world was opened up to me. Ralph my boss was fond of telling me that as one pursues life by looking for the differences and not the similarities. In this case, if Lucci and Helio had not insisted on taking me to lunch and left me with the Account managers, I would have had two martini’s and a steak. Instead, a whole new world opened up to me. French wine and French cuisine was not the ultimate, but there is a pantheon of fine wine and food outside of France.
There is no question that my micro world was expanding. Mexico, French Louisiana, and Spanish Louisiana and Spanish Puerto Rico are building up my Latino base and knowledge. Thunderbird professors like Gaona a Valdevieso had really tried to open my mind beyond the Mexican borders of my mind. T-bird or the Tute as we called it last year, built the runway and airplane that was launching me into the world, but this was the first time I felt that I was about to learn a lot more and did not have to learn it from a book. How lucky I am that I can go home and cook this pesto dish, because I know what the standard taste should be. My advertising/professor mentor Sobo is chuckling now as he really wanted me to focus on New York and Advertising.
In the European world – especially France and Italy as far as I was concerned – food and wine were important forums to extend ideas. Ralph again said that there are three levels of social conversations, some people talk about people, others talk about things and occurrences, but you, Aloncito, have to be where they talk about ideas.
That day I sat with Lucci, a 35 year old man who had left his beloved Italy when he was a young man. He was a lover and the feeling we all got was he had to leave and he went to Spain. He lived in Madrid and loved bull fighting, Flamenco, and Manzanilla sherry. He found his way to Cuba and lived there in 1959 when Fidel came into power. As an artist he was able to survive, and escaped when he talked the government into letting him travel the world showing his designs of new postage stamps he designed for Cuba. He became a political defector in New York and Bruno picked him up. His reputation in New York is a Casanova, a Don Juan Tenorio. He lives with two women in separate places at the same time. Mondays, Fridays and Sundays with one, and the other days with the other. He has three pieces of art on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art.
I also sat with Helio Gonzalez, a Tahumara Indian, form Chihuahua. What struck me funny about Americans was an Apache on a reservation in Arizona was “protected” but the Apache on the other side of Mexican border was a Mexican. Same people, just different political Geography. Helio was a Mormon and graduated From Brigham Young University. He can write Spanish copy as well as English copy. He married a beauty queen from New Jersey and has a great family.
Bruno Brugnatelli is the senior executive at Gardner very talented and great manager for his creative staff. Although he was born in Italy he came over to New York after the War. He remembers as a boy the US bombers going by his village house. He conquered the American dream and after commercial art school made it into a major agency.
All three were perfect Latin culture that blended into the American WASP world of corporate advertising. I say to myself that his is going to be a great trip.
I am learning that bosses can let their hair down. Bruno does not need Ralph my boss to tell me what to do and I have learned about emotional moments and diffusing them with humor. Americans can be very black and white, but as Ralph said to me to look for the differences. Green lemons, yellow lemons, French Wine & Italian wine are both great with their foods. I should learn how to order food from wines to individual plates and have a communal experience instead of what do you like off the menu?
As we got out of the cab, I looked down at the Pan Am building and said you chose the right career – Sobo is proud of you.
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