June 1994: Peccato Di Gola and TOG

The other day I came across an ad for Fantino, an Italian restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton, New York. Here’s the headline: Casuncelli della Val Camonica Farciti con Capone a Carciofi. That headline alone is enough to convince me that Fantino’s serious about Italian food. Should I choose to dine there, I probably won’t be disappointed.

Disappointments worry Tony May, owner of San Domenico (NYC), one of the best Italian restaurants in the city (and, say some, in America). Italian restaurants throughout the United States, he thinks, aren’t very good, a result of the Americanization of Italian food: illegitimate offerings of classic recipes riddled with exaggerations and mindless mutations appealing to the lowest common palate—spaghetti and meatballs, pizza, and the foolish (and often bland) assortments of incongruous combinations that hide the essences of whatever went into the mix in the first place. Pasta has become the miracle ingredient of unimaginative chefs who use it irresponsibly to make ethnically clichéd statements about their trendy bistros. 

Is it any wonder, Tony asks, that no one out there knows what great Italian food is? So many restaurants have polluted the purity of Italian food that, May fears, should the contaminations continue, all traces of cucina Italiani will disappear. Tony, needless to say, is passionate about Italian food.
 
So passionate that in 1982 he launched Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani (GRI), an organization whose members include over 200 restaurateurs, chefs, educators, manufacturers, and food writers who not only want to know all about Italian food and wines, but once they find out are eager to spread the good word about both. 

Tony May has put his money where his mouth is. Like the movie critic who writes a screenplay, Tony risks scorn by creating criteria (the GRI mission statement) against which his restaurant’s performance ultimately must be measured. If it doesn’t measure up, the GRI criteria become little more than pointless expressions of excellence, at least as they pertain to his restaurant. At San Domenico, May excels; it is extraordinary evidence of what GRI’s mission statement is all about. Because May excels, he can continue to rail against counterfeit preparations that pervert the authenticity and taste of Italian food. 

In April, Tony mother-henned 55 GRItes to Perugia in central Italy; and, from there, took them to places in which most would never, in a million years, set foot: great restaurants, wineries, and a truffle farm, where dogs (below), not pigs, root for truffles, all with but one purpose: to deepen their

love for fine Italian foods and wines. It worked.

For those of you who think pasta has no taste unless swamped in red sauce, think again. For every cliché the Italian “restaurant” in America inflicts upon us, there is a classic version that neutralizes that infliction. But you won’t find these classics at the chains that call themselves Italian; won’t find them at pizzerias with their cute candles in empty Chianti bottles; and never in pseudo trattorias that proclaim on their menus, “pasta made fresh daily on premise.” 

It is, thinks May, a sorry state of affairs that, through GRI, he struggles to fix with seminars, education, and the funding of projects to persuade Italian-American restaurateurs to pursue standards of culinary excellence evident in the best Italian restaurants in the world. Where to begin?

For openers, GRI donated money to the Culinary Institute of America to create the Caterina de Medici restaurant. Not a bad idea, eh? Look at it this way: if you’re going to launch a program that insists on excellence in Italian restaurants in the United States, what better place for the launch than at a school training the future cooks of America, some of whom might think about opening an Italian restaurant?

Anything else? Well, there is this thing Tony May has about The Olive Garden (TOG).

As he and I discussed the virtues of TOG, May told me he had been trying for months to meet with Ron Magruder, TOG president, to show him how, for “no increase in food costs,” he could dramatically improve the product his restaurants serve. Magruder, it seems, wasn’t interested. I told Tony I sort of felt TOG was sort of exemplary of what middle America sort of expects Italian food to sort of taste like: a soft-core version of authentic Italian food. Nothing more, nothing less. If it were “more,” I told May, most Americans—at least the midscale market Magruder pursues—wouldn’t recognize, accept or buy it, their palates, prior to trading-up to TOG, informed of what Italian food tastes like at any number of national, regional or local pizzerias.

Here’s May, at the GRI conference in Perugia, talking dispassionately about TOG while debunking my sort of defense.

                                  ljh images/Shutterstock.com

“Nothing is wrong with The Olive Garden. But they are not an Italian restaurant. They are an Italian-style restaurant. There’s a market for that. You can’t tell them they are doing something wrong: they are doing something in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion a year, so who the hell are we to tell them they are wrong? But, if they could present, within their context, a better product with a better understanding of Italian cuisine, we would elevate America’s appreciation of Italian food. When you say, ‘Olive Garden Italian,’ it denigrates the very image of Italian cuisine. That is what we’re arguing about. The Olive Garden can—and should—do a much better job.”

Right: Peccato di gola: lust for the palate.