Of Bridgehampton and Thumbprints: Beautiful Italian Chef Solves an Ugly Modern Conundrum

Of Bridgehampton and Thumbprints: Beautiful Italian Chef Solves an Ugly Modern Conundrum 150 150 David Rosengarten

Ponder, and ye shall find.

I’ve been doing a lot of pondering lately, about a tough culinary conundrum: what kind of chef in 2013 truly satisfies? For it seems to me that, in our groundbreakingly chef-crazed era, the thumbprint of the chef is the one thing slipping away in our restaurants.

The thought was spreading across many levels.

1) The concern started, a few months back, at a fancy, catered dinner party, with a fancy chef-fy caterer. The food all looked right…but it had no taste, no soul, nothing that would compel you to eat it. I concluded that the chef doesn’t eat much himself, doesn’t know how to flavor food so that real diners will respond with enthusiasm. TV doesn’t teach you to taste. A non-empathic chef. This meal was a culinary ship with no rudder.

2) It spread later to a three-star dinner, at a very fine restaurant with huge prices, and a huge reputation (in more than one city). Presentations were impeccable, with raging creative thought behind them. Executions were impeccable too…except that…it was hard to see the thumbprint of the chef in most of them. I’m not knocking the incredible training of the team, and their talents…it just didn’t feel like anyone in particular was cooking for me. It was a collective triumph. Not the same.

3) At the eater-besieged food trucks today…yielding some of my favorite treats…I still get the thumbprint problem. At many spots, things are turned out with great haste, assembly-line style, with, necessarily, many key elements prepped in advance. The food is often delicious…don’t get me wrong…but it’s rare that I hear Giovanni, or Luis, or Nguyen singing out to me, like I used to hear Angelo sing arias to me at his funky Flatbush restaurant.

The great hope, it started seeming to me, is in the small, not-too-pricy restaurant…where it still may be possible to have one cook touch every piece of food that goes through the kitchen, directly make or heavily influence every dish that emerges, inevitably add a major dose of himself or herself to the food. If you have a chef willing to do this, that chef had better get to the kitchen first thing in the morning, and be everywhere, like a whirling dervish, until closing. And, let’s not forget…that chef has to have a driving taste, something recognizable that rolls through the cooking. I’m not talking about a creative slant, at all…I’m just talking about a taste in the chef’s mouth, maybe a glimmer of how food tasted in some other time, in some other place. I want my thumbprint chef to sample his or her own food in recipe development and say, sometimes, “This dish doesn’t have it. IT DOESN’T TASTE LIKE ME. Auntie Maria would never have cooked food like this. Back to the cutting board.”

All of these latter elements came together for me last week in…the Hamptons, of all places!…where the looking often takes precedence over the cooking, where lots of diners with heavy wallets are willing to sustain lots of restaurants that bump along at a glam-but-mediocre level. Oh gosh, there are good restaurants in the Hamptons, and good things to eat…but I never expected the old East End to yield an epiphany like this.

The restaurant, which occupies a non-descript side street in Bridgehampton, is called Osteria Salina.

Exterior of Osteria Salina in Bridgehampton, NY, at dusk

Exterior of Osteria Salina in Bridgehampton, NY, at dusk

If you’re going to the Hamptons for Labor Day weekend…it would be a smart thing to pick up your phone right now and call for a reservation. If Billy Joel, Andrew Cuomo, Bobby Flay, Liv Tyler and Bradley Cooper have left any room for you at Osteria Salina, you surely will want to take a table at lunch or dinner, Friday, Saturday or Sunday night. And you’ll be delighted to discover that it doesn’t feel buzzy, or hype-y: it just feels like a really good restaurant in the countryside of Sicily.

It is likely that the man you get on the phone will be Tim Gaglio. On the phone, you’ll know him by his gentle voice; on the floor you’ll know him by his Bermuda shorts/blazer combo. As you work with him, you’ll recognize his vast experience in the business. He was the Director of Operations for Pino Luongo, one of New York’s most heralded restaurateurs, through the rock-star years of Pino’s reign; Tim helped open and run Coco Pazzo, Le Madri, Mad 61, etc.

But the best connection of all on Tim’s road to Osteria Salina was undoubtedly with his wife, Cinzia Gaglio…who just happens to be the aforementioned thumbprint in the kitchen.

Cinzia Gaglio, Osteria Salina's chef, about whom all the fuss is

Cinzia Gaglio, Osteria Salina’s chef, about whom all the fuss is

I’d already fallen in love with her myself, in theoretical detail, before I knew she existed…then, suddenly, there she was (though I didn’t get to actually set eyes on her until the kitchen was closing down, of course). Cinzia was born in New York City, to very Italian parents who had come from the countryside near Rome. “They brought me to Italy when I was a year old,” Cinzia says, “and I’ve never stopped spending a great deal of time there.” Currently, she and Tim own a house in Sicily, just outside of Palermo. And that’s one of the reasons they’ve flagged Sicily as the chief inspiration for the food at Osteria Salina (Salina being an Aeolian island just off the northeast coast of Sicily).

Cinzia has assimilated vast stretches of taste from her Sicily experiences, her times in Lazio, and her times in New York growing up with a very gastronomic Italian family. So it’s not just Sicily that rolls across her stunning menu; you’ll find other Italian inspirations as well.

The first hint of greatness couldn’t be simpler: a platter of cut, perfectly salted, slightly slippery cucumbers is offered for cuke-selection at your table by Tim. They come, of course, from a top local farm, they are refreshing as all get-out…and they show a quiet confidence in the real, the true, the un-showy.

Then comes the Sicilian connection: a gorgeous platter of caponata, the room-temperature Sicilian eggplant gathering, sweet-and-sour to the hilt, super-velvety, and brimming with an old-fashioned fried eggplant flavor. It is served with round toasts of Italian bread that ALONE show the level of care in the kitchen.

Among the appetizers, the biggest hit for me was Polpo Eoliano…

Grilled octopus at Osteria Salina

Grilled octopus at Osteria Salina

…served with fava beans, fingerling potatoes, and a parsley pesto. A lot can go wrong with octopus. Everything went right here. Not only is the texture on the ideal cusp between tender and resilient, but the cephalopodic flavor is perfectly intensified by the grill…which adds its own wonderful character, a smoky/not-too-smoky lagniappe, with the magic of clean grids behind it. The cut of the octopus–long, meaty tentacles–has surely been worked out in meticulous detail by Cinzia to maximum effect.

Another don’t-miss is the Fritto Misto–not exclusively Sicilian, of course, but one of the best Italian fried-seafood-and-vegetable pile-ups you’ll ever encounter…

Fritto Misto at Osteria Salina

Fritto Misto at Osteria Salina

Shrimp, squid, zucchini, lemon slices, capers all arrive in a perfectly seasoned, grease-free form, but full of the flavor of the fryer. There’s no kitchen task as last-minute attention-demanding as deep-frying (the great Milos kitchen in NYC hires two full-time employees JUST to turn out their deep-fried vegetable appetizer!)…and I can taste that Cinzia thumbprint all over this perfectly crisp dish, with no lazy, falling-off crumbs.

One more appetizer possibility I love is the Misticanza di Nonna (grandma’s mixed salad)–which shows off Cinzia’s accomplished hand with greens (you’ll see lots of them as accompaniments all over the menu). This one is a very particular house blend that features dandelion leaves, arugula, spinach, tomato, crisped capers, shaved aged Pecorino, and basil-oil, cured-olive, aged-red-wine-vinegar. “It is not for everyone,” Cinzia says…and I suppose she means the streak of bitterness from the greens, the streak of saltiness from the cheese and olives. Boy is it for ME–that rare thing, a salad with character! And the fact alone that she’s using aged red wine vinegar instead of the salad-misguided balsamic stuff makes me want to kiss her hand as she drizzles!

However, it is in the primi category–a selection of five pastas–that Cinzia scores her biggest hit. In fact, I’m going to say this: her Spaghettini al Ciliegino is the greatest concatenation of pasta and tomatoes that I can ever remember having in the U.S.! Big statement. Big dish.

The killing spaghettini with tomatoes at Osteria Salina

The killing spaghettini with tomatoes at Osteria Salina

You may be able to have this dish this weekend, if you go, because there’s a few weeks left in the Sungold tomato season (little yellow ones that are sweeter than candy). But any season should be fine; Cinzia has already planned her alternative tomato sources for the post-Sungold season.

Do you know how pasta in America often carries way too much sauce? How a perfectly cooked pasta dish in Italy features sauce just clinging, lightly, to the strands? Do you know how many American pasta dishes have little flavor in the pasta itself, the only flavor in the dish coming from the over-abundant sauce?

Not here. This is Italy. Everything is perfect, including the brief cooking of pasta WITH the sauce to marry the flavors. PLUS…the flavor that Cinzia conjures up is other-worldly, an apotheosis of tomato, oil and garlic. She spoke with me at length about the type of garlic she rejects every day–dried-out, old garlic, from far-away places. “There’s a lot of Chinese garlic in the market,” she says. “I will never buy it.” Then comes the cut of the garlic–thin, wide slices. (“Minced garlic is way too harsh,” she says. “Its harsh oil is exacerbated by the mincing.”) And then, of course, the garlic-degree-of-doneness issue. I mentioned to her that lots of cookbooks and instructors tell you keep the garlic white-yellow in the pan, that garlic taking on color is a bad thing. “What, are they nuts?” she responds.

Lastly, in this simple dish with such a complex story, is the mouthfeel. Velvet. Ooze. Without overwhelming the al dente pasta itself.

The other pastas are triumphant as well, all in the Italian style. I loved the Pugliese specialty (southern, but not Sicilian) of orecchiette with bitter greens and sausage–but one of the distinctions here is that the sausage is “fatto in casa!” The big, meaty crumbles are extra-tender and extra-porky, tucking perfectly into the “ears” of the orecchiette as they’re supposed to.

The other pasta hit at my table, though I’m not a huge rigatoni fan, was Mezzi Rigatoni alla Siciliana…

Cinzia's rigatoni at Osteria Salina

Cinzia’s rigatoni at Osteria Salina

…which, to me, is caught deliciously somewhere between Little Italy and Palermo, with big pieces of mozzarella softening everything. Leave it to Cinzia and her very individual palate to reject regular rigatoni; she chooses “half” rigatoni, which have a much more graceful chew.

And then, as the Italian gods have decreed, there are secondi, or main courses. I quickly developed a favorite–a dish I associate with New York City in the 80s, though there may be some Italian heritage in it–a crumbed-and-fried veal chop topped with arugula and tomato salad…

Vitello con Mollica at Osteria Salina

Vitello con Mollica at Osteria Salina

Is this the best version I’ve ever had? Yes. The veal is top quality, tasting almost porky, but still carrying veal’s sweet elegance. The crumbing is ideal–nothing heavy, just a little supporting crunch. The golden doneness was peered upon by Cinzia, no doubt, another perfect moment in her idiosyncratic chain of perfection.

If we could stop there, I’d feel exactly the way I do about Cinzia.

But she’s the pastry chef, too, for chrissake! And her cheesecake…

Pastry chef Cinzia's cheesecake

Pastry chef Cinzia’s cheesecake

…is one of the lightest, most delicious, gullet-glowing ricotta-style cheesecakes I’ve ever had. The flourless chocolate cake is also way beyond the usual, with an intense taste of serious chocolate about it.

And then…Sicily, remember?…cannoli! Home-made! By Cinzia! Including the curled crunchy exterior!

Cinzia's home-made cannoli

Cinzia’s home-made cannoli

Cannoli are often too heavy on the outside, crashing in on the delicacy of the filling. Cinzia manages to make hers balanced, to make sense out of the two textures together.

And the texture of her biscotti…also home-made! Light and grainy, breaking easily in your mouth, loaded with flavor…are these the best biscotti I’ve ever had?

It’s amazing what flows out of a kitchen when an individual with specific taste is truly (like 16 hours a day) watching everything like a hawk; a meal becomes a series of essays in what oughta be, and what is Cinzia.

Hey…even if you’re not going to the Hamptons this weekend…2 1/2 hours from New York City is not such a long drive for a restaurant like this.

And if you’re nowhere near New York City…but will be sometime this year…Osteria Salina plans to be open year-round (“with the possible exception of some time in January and February,” Cinzia told me).

Meet her. See what a thumbprint tastes like. If we’re lucky, there’ll be many more thumbprints in the coming years.

2015 edit: They’ve moved! Osteria Salina is just down Montauk Highway a bit in Wainscott!

Osteria Salina
108 Wainscott Stone Road
Wainscott, NY 11975
631.527.5396
www.osteriasalina.com

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