Twenty years ago,
when Leo, Salvio and Roberto ?
the brothers Varchetta ? helped launch their parents' restaurant, Mamma Melina, in
the University District, the focus was on Italian comfort foods. And for most
Americans in the 1980s, that meant the food of Naples: pizza, calzone and macaroni,
spaghetti, marinara sauce and the tender white cheese known as mozzarella.
But over the
years, Americans, including Seattleites, became more familiar with foods from
other regions of Italy.
Emilia Romagna yielded its secret delights: balsamic vinegar, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and unctuous Parma ham. Fresh pastas such as tagliatelli and hand-formed tortellini made with soft wheat
flour instead of hard Durham
wheat started appearing on local menus.
We traveled to Florence and discovered
the simple joys of Tuscan-style vegetables ? asparagus and artichokes naked as Michelangelo's David,
barely drizzled with olive oil. Risotto in the style of Milan became a menu staple. Local bakeries
started producing focaccia, and diners grew hungry
for more authentic Italian flavors.
So the Varchetta family experimented with other Italian dining
venues, including Leo Melina on First and Union
and Buongusto on Queen Anne Hill, now home to Vincenzo's Gourmet Pizza. But nothing they tried endeared
itself to Seattle
the way Mamma Melina did. That is, until last September when the brothers
collaborated to produce Barolo Ristorante.
Mamma Melina, says Leo Varchetta,
"is the food of the south, of Naples.
Barolo is the food of the north, of the Piedmont."
Why, I wondered, would three brothers from the south decide to serve foods of
the north?
"When my
great-grandfather opened his first restaurant in 1898, the regional cuisines of
Italy
were still very separate. Even when I was a kid, we would drive from one end of
the country to the other to try foods from different regions. But Italy is a small country, and more and more,
Italians are familiar with foods from everywhere in Italy. After all these years in Seattle, I wanted to serve foods of the Piedmont because
that region of Italy
is so much like the Northwest. The weather is similar, the foods are
similar."
Nestled between Switzerland and France,
the Piedmont is, after all, the northwest corner of Italy. In addition to being the
home of Italy's
most noble wines, Barolo and Barbera, it is famous
for dairy products like the incomparable Fontina
cheese, for grains like rice, corn and wheat yielding risotto, polenta and
creamy pasta dishes. It is game country and mushroom country. As home of the
famous white truffles of Alba, it is the center of the truffle lovers' world.
All these traditions are reflected in the menu at Barolo.
As many as a
dozen different made-in-house pastas and risottos appear on the menu every
night. Expect some of them to contain wild mushrooms and/or game. House-made gnocchi with braised pheasant, anyone? And
because this is Seattle,
look for seafood variations on the classic Piedmontese
themes. One rainy day last winter was considerably brightened by a delectable spaghettini with sparkling fresh chunks of Dungeness crab,
warming bits of crushed red chilies and sweet caramelized grape tomatoes.
James Best, who
trained under their mother at Mamma Melina and helped open Leo Melina, is the
chef. Between his posts with the Varchettas, Best
donned a toque at the Four Diamond-award-winning Sun
Mountain Lodge in Eastern Washington
and the prestigious Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah. "We work
together to develop new items for the menu, and James, having trained with our
mother, totally gets it," Leo says.
But Barolo isn't
all about the food. "When you do a regional restaurant," he says,
"you're not only cooking regional food, you're representing a culture. We
wanted the dining room to reflect the Italy we know. There, you will see
Roman ruins right next to an ultra-modern building. It's a mix of traditional
and modern." Italian-American designer Denise Corso
interpreted Melina's vision with both antique and modern furnishings set
against a backdrop of clean architectural lines and framed oil paintings commissioned
by the family patriarch, Pasquale Varchetta, who is
living happily ever after with the family matriarch, Melina, in Formia, halfway between Naples and Rome on the Italian
coast.
Greg
Atkinson is author of "West Coast Cooking." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials