INTRODUCTION
When you are at Carmine's, there are happy people around you and everyone is smiling.
-ALICE CUTLER, PRESIDENT AND PARTNER
The intoxicating aromas of garlic, olive oil, and tomatoes waft through the front door of Carmine's so that from the moment you enter, you find yourself salivating. As you are led to your table, waiters pass by carrying trays loaded with large platters of hot antipasti, crisp Caesar salad, garlic bread oozing butter, pasta with white clam sauce, steak Contadina, and eggplant Parmesan. Dizzy with anticipation for the meal ahead, you suddenly are distracted by the sight of a gigantic ice cream dessert--aptly named, you later discover, the Titanic--on its way to a happy group at a nearby table. Everywhere you look, customers look well fed, happy, and relaxed. This is going to be some meal!
Laughter fills the air, bubbling into the room and dancing off the walls as it mingles with cheerful conversation and the gloriously inviting scents emanating from the constantly swinging kitchen doors. The tables are spacious, the lighting muted, the wood paneling dark, and the warm-toned beige walls are filled with black-and-white photographs of Italian families and well-known Italian Americans. Everything is designed to evoke the past and the great culinary heritage Italian immigrants brought to our shores, but nothing is actually old or outmoded.
This is the Carmine's experience. It's this experience that you can bring home to your family when you prepare the recipes on the following pages. Our food is a synthesis of what Italians, many from Southern Italy, broughtwith them to New York when they passed through Ellis Island on their way to a better life. It is food rich with tomato sauces, fresh herbs, garlic, olive oil, seafood, pasta, sausages, cheese, and lots of love.
It's Italian!
OUR STYLE OF ITALIAN FOOD
Let's face it. When most Americans think about Italian food, it is dishes such as ours--stuffed mushrooms; pasta with broccoli, sausage, and tomatoes; shrimp scampi; and veal Marsala--that spark the taste buds. Everyone loves spicy meatballs and a good marinara sauce, and everyone loves bubbling hot lasagna--and it's been decades since these foods have been considered "foreign." On the contrary, they are all-American family favorites.
Perhaps this is no surprise. Italians began emigrating to the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, with a concentration arrivingafter 1880. In the beginning, most were single men from Southern Italy, where overcrowding and poverty chased them from home, and most planned to return to Italy once they made some money. In fact, the Italians were dubbed "birds of passage" because they were considered migratory workers who traveled back and forth from one continent to the other. This also explains why so few went into farming, preferring the relatively high wages and numerous but transitory jobs in the cities--although they painstakingly cultivated small urban gardens. Because of the structure and importance of Italian family life, when wives and children finally emigrated, the women tended to stay home or to work in small family businesses rather than sign on as domestic or factory workers. This meant that they were around to cook simple, thrifty meals that reminded everyone in the household of home.
What were these meals? Pasta was easy to make with flour and eggs and cost very little. Tomatoes grew well during American summers and were ideal for canning. Cow's milk was plentiful and could be made into simple fresh cheeses such as mozzarella and ricotta. Pork was not too costly, and the fattier cuts could be cured into salami. Most Americans in those days didn't grow garlic, bell peppers, or zucchini, but that didn't stop the Italians from planting their gardens with these and other vegetables. Nor did they refrain from making wine and grappa in city basements.
When these Italian home cooks prepared meals, economy was always an issue. They braised inexpensive cuts of meat long and slow to tenderize them with tantalizingly delicious results. If they ran out of meat or cheese, resourceful cooks used bread crumbs to add texture to pasta. They stuffed garden-grown peppers with mixtures bolstered with bread cubes, garlic and herbs, and thrifty amounts of meat or chicken. They filled sheets of pasta with creative combinations of vegetables and cheese for ravioli.
From these humble beginnings great traditions were born in the kitchens of Lower Manhattan, Boston's North End, and South Philly. Sunday afternoonswere family days when everyone, from the oldest great-grandmother to the youngest baby, got together to eat and drink, tell stories of the old country, and admire the growing families flourishing in America. Women began cooking their red sauce long before church on Sunday morning, and as soon as they got home from Mass they made the pasta, which they cut into various shapes as they gossiped around the kitchen table. The men sliced off hunks of salami and hard cheese to sustain them until the late-afternoon meal was served, and the kids raced up and down the front stoops, calling to their cousins as they played street games.
This is the experience we strive to re-create at Carmine's. Every day is Sunday afternoon for us, and everyone is always welcome. The food is fresh, hot, and redolent of garlic, basil, and olive oil. We pile platters with fresh salads, steaming, just-cooked pasta bathed in heady red sauce, perfectly seasoned chicken and steak, and glorious vegetables. All of our dishes are served family-style, and all of our dishes are made to order. You might swear there's a little old Italian grandmother in the kitchen stirring pots and adding a pinch of this, a sprinkling of that to make your meal so perfect!
The dishes in this book are wonderful for everyday family meals or for large parties. We can't think of a better way to set a buffet table for a casual family get-together or a more formal dinner party than with platters of Cold Roasted Figs with Gorgonzola, Prosciutto Bits, Grapes, and Balsamic Glaze, our famous Chicken Wings Scarpariello-Style with Gorgonzola Dipping Sauce, perfectly cooked Porterhouse Steak Contadina, and Slow-Roasted Lamb Shoulder Chops with Vegetable Orzo Risotto, followed by Carmine's Tiramisu. Now that's a party!
So, with a smile on your face, a smear of tomato sauce on your apron, and Carmine's Family-Style Cookbook in your kitchen, you and your loved ones can sit down to a hearty, great-tasting meal of the beloved dishes from our restaurant. It's likely these will quickly become your signature dishes, too.
OUR BEGINNINGS AND OUR FUTURE
Long before he opened the first Carmine's in August of 1990 on New York's Upper West Side, Artie Cutler had been tossing around the idea for a family-style Italian restaurant. His interest was fueled when he attended a friend's wedding held in a suburban backyard where old-fashioned, hearty Italian food, served family-style, filled the guests' plates and helped turn the party into a splendidly boisterous celebration. Artie responded to the warmth and happiness of the occasion as well as its utter lack of pretension. Mostly, he recognized how happily the wedding guests responded to the "real food" and liberal portions. With this in mind, he sharpened his vision for a restaurant that would allow Manhattan's chic yuppies to unwind, a restaurant that would attract their parents and their children as well.
Two years after the first Carmine's opened its doors on Broadway and 91st Street, Artie opened another restaurant on 44th Street just west of Broadway."People told him he was nuts," his wife, Alice Cutler, remembers. Times Square had not yet gone through its transformation, and no one thought a restaurant right smack in its heart was a good idea--no one but Artie. He believed the area would very soon become desirable again, says Alice, who now is at the helm of the business. He was right, of course. The 44th Street Carmine's is our busiest and best-known location, and a great favorite with tourists from the United States and all over the world.
Clearly, Artie believed in teamwork, and Alice and her partners carry on that tradition today. "As a company, we are like a big family," she says. "A lot of employees have been here for a long time and the restaurant becomes a home away from home. We still have waiters who started with us when we opened the first Carmine's in 1990." One of the happiest examples of Carmine's dedication to upward mobility is Luis Javier, the talented executive chef at 44th Street, who started eighteen years ago as a salad chef. "To see Luis grow from within the company has been a pleasure," says Alice.
A tight-knit group of like-minded people, most of whom worked with Artie, work at the New York-based Alicart Restaurant Group, directed by CEO and partner Jeffrey Bank. Alicart operates the four Carmine's restaurants as well as Virgil's BBQ, Gabriela's Mexican, and Artie's Delicatessen. The first two Carmine's are in Manhattan. The others are in the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey; and at the Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. There are others in the works. Jeffrey currently has expansion plans on the drawing boards for restaurants in Garden City, Long Island, New York; Las Vegas, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; and Orlando, Florida. In reality, Carmine's could go anywhere.
Carmine's Family-Style Cookbook was put together with the same enthusiasm, attention to detail, and great affection as the restaurants. If we do say so ourselves, we think it's going to be just as big a hit! We hope its pages will soon be stained with red sauce, dribbles of olive oil, and sticky fingerprints, allhappy accidents as you discover our recipes. We trust you will find them as rewarding, delicious, and as ...
