Only one day left to get your Scooter’s Frozen Custard fix

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
November 29, 2012
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LAKEVIEW — Scooter’s Frozen Custard closes Friday for the winter. Don’t say they didn’t warn you.

Bright yellow signs taped to the windows of the Lakeview shop have for the past two weeks counted down the remaining days.

On Facebook and Twitter, Mardi Moore, who with her husband Denny owns the shop, faithfully posts photos and descriptions of the day’s flavors.

Plastered on the walls and cooler inside the store, more signs invite customers to “STOCK UP.” Not that customers need much nudging.

Lexi Fink, 29, stopped in Wednesday with her young cousins and their friends. She had to — she’s going out of town early Friday. “We had to get in one last Scooter’s stop,” said Fink, as she waited for her order, a chocolate-peanut butter-pretzel concrete.

“We have customers who try to be the first ones in [on closing day], and they will stay until we close. They literally come in and camp out,” said Denny Moore. “Some will buy as many as 14 or 15 quarts.”

Chicagoans know the joke about there being only two seasons in Chicago, winter and construction.

It could be argued that there is a third — the closing (and spring re-opening) of the very seasonal, family-run frozen treat shops around town.

Mario’s Italian Lemonade, the famous little stand in Little Italy, is like a sweet summer fling, open only from May to September. Contributors to the food chat site LTHForum.com keep tabs on major developments at Mario’s, such as when peach Italian ice is in.

The Original Rainbow Cone in Beverly runs from March to early November. Last week, it opened for a one-day, pre-Thanksgiving sale.

During its final week, Scooter’s will sell more pints and quarts of its custard, in flavors that include Peppermint Candy and Coffee Buzz, than in any other month of the year, said Denny Moore.

The shop opens around 2 p.m. Friday and will sell out. It’s just a matter of when. Could be 4 p.m., could be 7 p.m.

This is the 10th year in business for the Moores, who left their corporate telecommunications careers to open Scooter’s on the northeast corner of Belmont Avenue and Paulina Street.

On summer evenings, a line routinely snakes out the door and onto the sidewalk on Paulina. Adults, kids, strollers and dogs share space on the benches and planters outside. It’s a happy, sticky place.

That first winter, the Moores stayed open until Dec. 21 and re-opened shortly after New Year’s. It was a blur. They didn’t do that again.

Their break is longer now, and they try to get out of town for a week or so in January. But with wholesale clients that include Ina’s in the West Loop and Jerry’s Sandwich Shop in Wicker Park and Andersonville, and a trade show in Michigan that they attend yearly, their work is never done.

“It’s probably the best custard I’ve ever had,” said Mark Bires, owner of Jerry’s Sandwiches, which uses Scooter’s custard year-round in its desserts. “Their stuff is real clean-tasting, not fatty.”

The Moores know their stuff. Get him going, and Denny Moore will tell you how frozen custard made its way from Coney Island in New York to the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago (the Wisconsin dairy the Moores use is the same dairy that supplied the Fair), and why custard is so much creamier than ice cream (much less air beaten in).

What you really should know: Air is the enemy of any frozen treat. So if you’re lucky to snag a pint at Scooter’s in these precious last days, Denny Moore suggests not removing the lid unless you’re ready to eat it all — and to let it sit at room temperature to soften up a bit.

Otherwise, an unopened pint will keep for three months in the freezer. Which should tide you over until March 1, when Scooter’s re-opens.

Baker Ana Katsenios on Fundraising Push to Open Paper Moon Pastry

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
February 6, 2014
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LOGAN SQUARE — There are pink marshmallows and hard candies glued to the walls inside the storefront at 3523 W. Fullerton Ave. It’s the work of Ana Katsenios, who wants to make her future bakery look like a gingerbread house.

But the sweets don’t hold up that well. If you look closely, you can see they’re dull, crooked, a little dirty, and so Katsenios has to rip them off and start over.

Moxie and a hot glue gun — this has defined Katsenios’ struggle to get her business off the ground.

“Naively optimistic is something you just have to be,” she said.

The former hotel pastry chef has a name for her bakery: Paper Moon Pastry. She has the skills and the (mostly vegan) goods: chewy cookies as big as salad plates, mini-pot pies, “fauxstess” chocolate cupcakes. For two years, she’s had the lease on the storefront.

Katsenios, 34, just doesn’t have the money she needs — ideally, $25,000 — to finish rehabbing the storefront and officially open the doors. So she’s launched an Indiegogo campaign, which ends on Feb. 23. She’s raised nearly $1,600 so far.

She also recently started hosting weekend pop-up markets selling her treats as well as those of other small vendors — and not just food, but clothing, jewelry and art. The next market is Saturday and Sunday.

“I have operated off of blind faith, but I feel like it’s time to make that push,” she said. “At this point, I think everyone in my family is just like, ‘Oh my God, when are you going to open?’

“I may have to open as a retail boutique, and sell everything pre-packaged. I’ll find a way. It may not be the way I want at first, but no giving up.”

It would hardly be the most unconventional thing she’s done. Last summer, Katsenios sold pastries to late-night barhoppers around the neighborhood, first from a tray strapped around her neck (tattooed hipster meets 1930s cigarette girl), then from a wagon she built herself.

“People called me the Cookie Lady,” she said.

Owning a bakery has always been her goal. Katsenios went to culinary school in Tucson and worked in kitchens there and in the Portland area before moving back to Chicago to bake at Taxim in Wicker Park and the now-closed Bleeding Heart Bakery.

She started her business four years ago out of her apartment. Paper Moon was the name of the family-style restaurant in the northwest suburbs her dad once owned.

As Katsenios picked up wholesale customers, including the Dill Pickle Food Co-op, New Wave Coffee and Cafe Mustache, she moved into a shared commercial kitchen.

In 2012, she found the cozy, 1,000-square-foot space on Fullerton Ave. and began the arduous task of converting the old day spa into a bakery. Her dad built a wall to enclose the kitchen. She ripped out the drop ceiling and light fixtures and installed the sinks herself.

It’s been a piecemeal rehab. Aside from walls to paint, Katsenios still has pastries to bake and no one to help her. She pulls frequent all-nighters and squirrels away equipment when she can.

“That’s why I admire her so much,” said chocolatier and fellow Logan Square resident Katherine Duncan of Katherine Anne Confections, 2745 W. Armitage Ave. “I don’t think people know just how hard it is as a one-woman business. And she’s so creative. The fact that she made a pastry wagon and rode it around the neighborhood — very creative.”

About that wagon: Katsenios was a vendor at the Logan Square Night Market last summer. Thus began the late-night pastry peddling at neighborhood bars where she knew the staff, so that whatever she didn’t sell at the farmers market wouldn’t go to waste.

“People were confused by it at first. They would ask, ‘Are they drug cookies?’ ” Katsenios said.

While the “portable bakery” was fun and quirky enough to bring in decent dough, it cost her some wholesale clients. Katsenios just couldn’t keep up.

“Her brownies and bars are great. People still ask for them, but no way could she meet the demand, or even deliver at a certain time,” said Dana Norden, buyer at the Dill Pickle Co-Op, which sold her pastries for three years until about four months ago.

“She makes an awesome muffin,” said Ralph Darski, co-owner of Cafe Mustache. But she wasn’t “as consistent as we’d like her to be in terms of getting here,” he said.

“That’s exactly right,” Katsenios said. “I was overwhelmed. That’s what this is all about. With the correct resources, I can fix these problems and just focus.”

“I’m hopeful,” Norden responded. “She really is a hustler in the good sense of that word.”

With the pastry wagon grounded for the winter, Katsenios is focused on the Indiegogo fundraiser and the pop-up markets at the storefront.

This weekend’s market is vegan and valentine-themed and will be open from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. both days. Cookbook author and blogger Natalie Slater will sign books and do a cooking demo. There will be vegan truffles from Katherine Anne Confections, gluten-free macarons from Bot Bakery and smoothies from Vert; jewelry from Tarnish; clothes from Lovesick Vintage, and stationery from Katie Holland, among others.

If — or when — Katsenios opens Paper Moon Pastry, she said she’d like to keep this boutique-within-a-bakery format to showcase other people’s stuff as well as her own.

“I feel so connected to the idea of the struggling entrepreneur, the outside-the-box small vendor,” she said. “I want to celebrate that.”

Right now, her struggle doesn’t exactly feel like a party. Still, she said with the slightest shrug, “I undeniably believe I will succeed. I make the best product.”

 

Under Gale Gand’s tutelage, teen chases pastry chef dreams

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
March 12, 2013
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CHICAGO — The first weekend in March was busy as usual for Jess Dawson.

She had her regular eight-hour shift Saturday in the kitchen at Spiaggia, and a cooking demo Sunday with pastry chef Gale Gand at the International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place.

Oh, and homework.

Dawson is a 17-year-old a high school junior with smiley eyes. She also is an aspiring pastry chef, intern to famed pastry chef Gale Gand and camera-toting blogger, with a Facebook friends list that reads like a “who’s who of chefs,” said her mom, Darcy Dawson.

Every Saturday, and some Friday afternoons, Dawson drives from her Libertyville home to Spiaggia, 980 N. Michigan Ave., where she helps make the desserts for the restaurant, its cafe and private dining room.

Since late January, she has been staging (working without pay, in culinary speak) on Sundays at the Little Goat Diner in the West Loop.

Dawson is the youngest person on the payroll at Spiaggia, a fact not lost on her.

“I can’t really describe it, the first time I walked through the doors, to see everyone doing something and being this huge team,” she said.

She brings a youthful jolt of enthusiasm, but that youthfulness isn’t a hindrance, her boss said.

“Sometimes you worry, working with young people, that you’ll have to hold their hand. Not with Jess,” said Spiaggia’s chef di cucina Chris Marchino. “She goes above and beyond, just being excited about being here, and she comes with her own ideas, too.”

Like when Marchino asked the pastry team to rework the dolcini, or little desserts. The next day, “she came with a page of ideas,” Marchino said.

On a recent Saturday morning, in one corner of the Spiaggia kitchen, Dawson made a big batch of applesauce, then moved on to rolling chocolate ganache into truffles and coating them in crushed cocoa nibs. Not very glamorous.

She paused to watch pastry chef Nicole Guini assemble a new dessert, chocolate tart with a walnut-cornmeal crust, candied walnuts and buttermilk gelato. They dug in with spoons, Dawson nodding quietly as Guini remarked on the sorbet’s tanginess.

The day before, Dawson found out she had kidney stones. Tylenol was helping ease the stabbing pain in her sides for this shift, she said with a grin. She worked a full day, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“She’d stay 16 hours, if I’d let her,” Marchino said.

An Easy-Bake beginning

Dawson was that kid who cooked at her parents’ knees as a toddler. (She and her twin brother have two younger brothers, and all like to help in the kitchen, Darcy Dawson said.)

The bulb on her Easy-Bake Oven broke, perhaps from overuse, when she was 7.

“I was so upset,” she said. Rather than replace the toy, her mom suggested she switch to the real oven.

The first thing she made was key lime pie with meringue topping.

“I showed her how to do it one time, that’s it,” Darcy Dawson said.

At 13, Dawson got her first taste of rejection. She applied for a job at a Libertyville bakery.

“I called them like five times, and they hung up on me,” she said.

The stars aligned a year later when she saw a sign at the bank for a book signing by Gand. She purposely waited to be last in line so she could introduce herself and ask Gand for advice about getting her foot in the pastry world’s door.

“I said to find yourself a pastry chef to assist, whether it’s doing dishes or schlepping stuff to the car or cutting up a thousand cream puffs,” Gand said.

Dawson’s reply: “Well, do you need someone?”

Pastry mama

Doors keep opening in the three years Dawson has been schlepping for Gand, who she calls her “pastry mama.”

Gand brought her onstage to assist during last year’s National Restaurant Association show, where she met Sarah Grueneberg, Spiaggia’s executive chef.

She has helped at two Housewares shows and numerous dinners, including at New York’s James Beard House, where she met Louisiana chef John Folse — who offered her a full scholarship to his cooking school.

To raise money for a five-week trip to Italy last summer to take cooking classes, Dawson made cookies and sold them at Gand’s events. She held similar pop-up bake sales at her school. She raised $2,000.

Gand is angling to get Jess on as a photo assistant for her forthcoming cookbook.

“I haven’t told the photographer yet that she’s only 17,” Gand said. “I’ve sent her portfolio to him, but I haven’t said, ‘Oh, by the way, she’s a child.'”

Photography, Dawson’s other passion, could very well turn into a career, as it has for her mom.

Dawson’s current self-directed project is baking and then photographing the recipes from Gand’s book, “Chocolate and Vanilla.” She writes about it on her blog, Livin’ in the Kitchen, and posts photos on Gand’s Facebook page.

“We kick it around — is she a photographer who does food, or is she a chef who does photography?” Gand said.

After high school

Dawson doesn’t know that answer yet. She’s still a kid who texts and giggles. She likes to bake barefoot, so much so that Gand has had to remind her to wear shoes in the kitchen.

“She’s got a casualness about her, and that’s the only thing,” Gand said. “I worry people might not take her seriously, because she is so light-hearted.”

Gand and others agree she has talent and drive beyond her years.

“She just sets her mind to something and plows through. That’s her nature,” said Darcy Dawson, who had to set a 9 p.m. end time to Dawson’s weeknight baking, lest she pull an all-nighter (she would) or neglect schoolwork (she doesn’t).

“Any chef would be lucky to have her around,” Marchino said.

Dawson sought and was given permission from the school board for a shorter, four-period schedule for her senior year so she can pursue more culinary work.

She has her sights set on attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., after high school, despite Folse’s generous offer.

“Honestly, I’d just like to do a normal thing,” said the not-so-normal teen. “It’s so normal for people to go to college, and I’d like to try it before I decide what to do.”

 

At Cook County Jail, kitchen gives inmates a second chance

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
May 1, 2014
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LITTLE VILLAGE — A few days a week, 20 inmates at the Cook County Jail escape to the basement of their medium-security home.

There is a kitchen down here. The floors are concrete. The walls are white. Surfaces are stainless steel, dull and spotless. There is nothing in plain sight — no colorful produce, no hunks of meat or bowls of spices — that suggests or invites the kind of happy, sloppy, aromatic cooking that brings people to the table. No distinct smells, good or bad, waft through here.

Still, for three hours at a time, this kitchen is a most welcoming place for the inmates of Division 11.

The men — a few of them just 18 and 19 years old — are students in a pilot culinary program that began in late March. Their goal for the next 90 days is to learn the skills they need to land kitchen jobs when they get out of jail, so they can stay out.

The chef in charge, Bruno Abate, owns Tocco restaurant in trendy Wicker Park, six miles and a world away from the massive jail complex near 31st Street and California Avenue.

Abate, 59, a native of Naples, Italy, is no stranger to this world behind bars. He taught a similar program at the Cook County Boot Camp last year, and before that at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles.

He knows his limitations. This is not culinary school. Knowing a brunoise from a baton cut doesn’t matter much here. But, he said, it will be an education.

For the first class, Abate went over kitchen safety and sanitation rules and brought out fragrant bunches of rosemary, thyme, basil and sage. Most of the men hadn’t seen or smelled fresh herbs before.

“I always thought it was fancy stuff for restaurants,” one inmate said.

“In three months, I can’t do miracles,” Abate said. “My mission is to transfer to them the love of food. Not everyone wants to be a chef. But if you have the love of food, you have the love of life.”

Zero tolerance

On a Tuesday morning, the inmates, wearing white chef jackets and hats — leftovers from the boot camp cooking program — stood at a long work table, each facing a ball of pizza dough made the previous day.

Abate wanted them to get a feel for the dough, to stretch it and work it into a circle. It didn’t have to be perfect. It wasn’t perfect. The dough was tearing all over. Abate said they might have used too much yeast or let the dough sit too long out of the cooler. They would make more and try again.

Cooking can be forgiving. But when it comes to discipline, there are no do-overs in the program.

“It’s zero-tolerance. One screw-up, one incident, and they’re out,” said Ben Breit, director of communications for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.

Each inmate was vetted in a three-week process overseen by Lt. D. Delitz, a 19-year veteran of the jail and the group’s mother hen. She has three boys of her own.

Out of more than 70 inmates interviewed, 24 were chosen. The class is now down to 20 because four were sent to state prison.

None have been charged with a violent crime or have gang affiliations. All are serving at least 90-day sentences. And they all have to be serious about cooking and change, and to explain that in written essays as part of the application process.

Delitz also chose the officers who bring the inmates from their cells down to the kitchen and watch over them during class.

Knives, if and when they are used, are tethered to work tables. The handwritten name tags pinned to their white jackets are removed and collected at the end of class before they return to their cells.

“You should see some of what’s been turned into a weapon. You’d be surprised at the creativity,” Breit said.

Still, said Delitz, “I’m pretty confident in the group we have.”

Participation is a privilege. These men know it.

“I got blessed. I was in the right place at the right time. I’m just taking advantage of everything I can and making it positive,” said Timothy, 29, a father of two girls. It’s his fifth stint behind bars — DUI and driving on a suspended license this time — and his first in a program like this.

Jerry, 31, is trying to get back to where he had been, managing a Papa John’s pizza shop, before drugs landed him in Division 11.

“The people I worked for really want me to come back,” he said. “I’m here to learn more about the food business. It’s a great opportunity for me.”

Abate brings the ingredients for each lesson. He had to call in a favor for a donated stove. The only other stove is in a smaller room separate from the main kitchen, not ideal for his lessons.

In the first few weeks, they’ve made pasta, pizza, focaccia, gnocchi and panzerotti — from scratch, by hand. Once Abate gets permission from the jail, he plans to bring in an iron to teach them how to press their chef jackets.

“Those jackets have to stay clean,” he told them.

Hands-on learning

At 6-foot-5, Abate towers over the group. He is every bit Italian, from his thick accent and tinted glasses to the way he talks with his hands.

He peppers his speech with “garbage” and “bulls—.” As in: American pizza and Popeye’s fried chicken — garbage. Fancy “fusion confusion” cooking — bulls—.

Some of the men joke that they can’t understand him because of his accent. But they listen.

“I’m choosing to learn instead of sitting around doing dead time. If you can’t eat, you can’t live,” said DeAndre, 37, who longs to someday open a casual restaurant, “like a Boston Market.”

Abate gives the men reading homework from a book titled “On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals.” He bought 14 copies of the book, so some of them have to share.

Delitz, who oversees Division 11’s other work programs, watches every class. She is constantly on the move, peeking over shoulders, offering an encouraging voice or a stern one, depending on the moment.

“Most of the programs are more mental, you know? But this one, you actually get to see the results. And most men … that’s the way they learn,” she said.

Delitz has taken a particular interest in a 19-year-old named Darien, who’s in on robbery charges. She calls him Baby Boy.

“I normally wouldn’t choose such a young one, but there was something about this one,” she said, watching him pat dough into a neat circle with a crimped border.

“See, he wanted us to roll it thin, but I like to be different than everybody else. I did mine with an edge,” Darien said.

There’s a grin lurking just behind his serious eyes. He said his uncle is a chef, so the kitchen is familiar territory.

“I’ve cooked fried chicken, pancakes, mashed potatoes,” he said.

Darien said he might follow in his uncle’s footsteps. But there is something else he said he’ll do first.

“Once I get out, I want to go somewhere else. A different state,” he said, smoothing his floured hands across the dough, which had begun to dry out. “The farther you go, the less people you know. I got in with the wrong people.”

The elusive job

Time drags inside Division 11, but once you’re out, the clock is ticking. Go back to the old neighborhood and fall in with the same crowd, and you’ll likely end up back in jail, or worse.

“It becomes a vicious cycle,” Breit said.

Criminal justice experts say the first few weeks after release are crucial. A 2008 paper by the nonprofit Urban Institute cites research that found the likelihood of violations and re-arrests in that first month to be almost double that of the 15th month.

Employment is critical to staying out of trouble, experts say. But it is no guarantee, and easier said than done. The stain of a criminal record is too deep for many potential employers to look past. Often the interview is over before it even begins.

Within this complicated climate, there has been a growing emphasis on job-training programs and services as a strategy to reduce unemployment as well as recidivism, said Hank Rosen, policy analyst at the nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center.

Programs have diversified to include more unique approaches such as community gardening. These, along with vocational training, work release and prison industries, are now “wildly popular” in prisons and jails, Rosen said.

The corrections field also is “getting smarter at how it structures and delivers rehabilitative services to reduce the likelihood someone will re-offend at release,” he said.

In other words, they aren’t for every inmate. Research has shown that those deemed “high-risk” benefit the most from intensive programs that nurture job readiness as well as behavioral change. Their low-risk peers, on the other hand, might actually be worse off in such settings.

Growing hope

The programs at Cook County Jail read like a Discovery Center catalog: barber school, guitar, parenting. Volunteers like Abate run them at no cost to the county. There are anger management classes and others related to health and well-being, too.

“Every hour they’re doing something. That’s my goal, to keep them continuously busy,” Delitz said.

The jail’s gardening program, run since 1993 with the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service, might be its most well known and visible (literally — you can see it from California Avenue). Inmates maintain the garden and can earn master gardener certification. Last summer, they built a home for their newest residents, chickens. The produce goes to some of Chicago’s top restaurants.

The barber program, started in 2012 in partnership with Larry’s Barber College, a leading Chicago school, recently expanded to Division 11. It’s a big deal. Inmates who successfully complete instruction and testing will be licensed to cut hair in Illinois.

Delitz and her staff are constantly refining the jail’s network of services. Her plan is to expand the culinary program from three-hour sessions to eight hours.

She has other ideas: an incentive program, for example, to reward good behavior in Division 11 with food cooked by inmates in the culinary program. Abate wants his students to eventually produce pasta and other foods that could be sold on store shelves.

A push forward

Several weeks ago, a former Division 11 inmate started a new job washing dishes at Tocco, Abate’s restaurant.

“That’s where people have to start,” Abate said. “That’s where they prove to me they want to change their lives.”

Of course, he can’t hire everyone who passes through the class, but he said he will make calls on their behalf. The food service industry is always in need of hard workers and more accepting than others of someone with marks on his record.

Abate doesn’t bother asking his students about the past.

“It’s none of my business to ask,” he said.

They likely don’t know his back story, either — why he spends this time with them every week.

About four years ago, Abate’s daughter befriended a woman whose dad killed her mom. The dad was sentenced to Due Palazzi, a prison near Padua, Italy.

The prison is famous in Italy for its award-winning bakery, Pasticceria Giotto, where inmates bake and sell thousands of loaves of panettone, a sweet bread, and other pastries.

The story stuck with Abate. Around this time, he said he remembers watching a TV program about incarcerated youth, some as young as 14. It was unsettling.

“Something told me, ‘Hey, you need to do something.’ God maybe pushed me,” he said.

Abate doesn’t have a strict lesson plan for his program at Division 11, except to teach them how to cook and appreciate real food, the kind he grew up eating, the kind he believes everyone deserves.

For the pizza dough class, he brought in a wooden pizza peel and had them take turns sliding it under their rolled-out dough. While they worked, he urged them to stay away from processed foods like hot dogs.

“Olive oil,” he announced, holding up a slim bottle he’d brought from the restaurant. “This will save your life forever.”

It just might.

 

A lotsa pasta: Italian Village to celebrate 80 ‘very nice’ years

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
March 12, 2007

Plastic spoon in hand, Frank Capitanini dipped into sauces simmering in the kitchen of the Italian Village.

“Very nice, very nice,” he said, nodding to the cooks moving around him.

This is a four-day-a-week exercise for Capitanini, 74. He wants to make sure each spoonful tastes exactly as it should — exactly how his father, Alfredo Capitanini, the restaurant’s late founder, had done it.

The Village, thought to be Chicago’s oldest Italian restaurant, turns 80 this year. For the Capitanini family, three generations of whom have shepherded it through the decades, the motto seems to be this: Change with the times. But not too much.

Secret to longevity

The building at 71 W. Monroe — actually three restaurants under one roof — offers carryout and delivery and recently started doing room service for the nearby Hampton Majestic hotel. They produce a line of pasta sauces sold at Whole Foods and Sunset Foods stores. But the twinkling lights and frescoed walls of the upstairs Village are of a different era.

“It’s like a chocolate chip cookie,” said Gina Capitanini, 48, Frank’s daughter and Alfredo’s granddaughter who now runs the place with her brother, Al Capitanini, 44. “Why put cinnamon in it if it doesn’t need it?”

Italian immigrant Alfredo Capitanini opened the Italian Village in 1927, using a cigar box as his cash register. In 1955, he opened a second restaurant, La Cantina, in the basement.

Business hit a low after the 1968 race riots sparked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, said Frank’s brother, Ray Capitanini.

“We came out the door and looked west and saw all the fires,” Ray said. “Nobody came downtown after that.”

But they dug in and held on, and customers came back. Sons Frank and Ray made their mark in 1961 with the opening of the upscale Florentine Room on the main floor. In 1990, it was grandchildren Al and Gina’s turn, with the makeover of the Florentine Room into Vivere.

Gathered around a platter of biscotti in a cozy nook of the second-floor Village, the Capitaninis talk in rapid-fire succession about lasting in an industry where failure often comes in the first three years.

“We show up every day to work,” Ray said.

“We put the customer first,” Gina said.

“There’s always a Capitanini here,” said Al’s wife, Pam.

The next generation

There have been menu flops through the years — frog legs, tripe, ribs. But chicken Alfredo and cannelloni — both Alfredo Capitanini creations, according to the family — remain. The recipes haven’t changed.

Some waiters have been around so long they are assigned to only one table. “With a captain backup,” Al laughed.

The captains, as it happens, wear tuxedos and bow ties.

There’s a fourth generation of Capitaninis coming up. Al and Gina’s children are too young yet, but Gina’s 12-year-old daughter wants to take cooking classes at Kendall College.

 

Starting from scratch

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
June 8, 2011
Link to article

“I’m thinking if this works,” says Mary Jane Tala, not two minutes into her first cooking lesson, “the Cubs are gonna win the World Series.”

Translation: If Tala — a Lean Cuisine devotee who went 15 years before turning on the oven in her Near North condo — can learn how to cook in six weeks, anything is possible.

In May, Sun-Times readers chose the 57-year-old accountant as our guinea pig for a culinary makeover under the guidance of chef John Bubala.

Our goal: to show Tala that cooking is not to be feared or dismissed as mysterious or too much of a bother. By familiarizing her with her postage stamp-size kitchen and getting her hands dirty, we’ll get it done.

Our lessons are once a week, two hours at a time. We’re halfway through our experiment. Tala has done the bulk of the chopping. She’s shelled fava beans, cut corn off the cob and sliced an eggplant, all for the first time.

Bubala did step in to cut up a chicken and peel and de-vein shrimp. Tala couldn’t bring herself to do that, not just yet. The shrimp look like “giant insects” and the chicken “sounds slippery,” she grimaces.

Chicken, the world’s most popular protein, is part of our first lesson. One chicken can produce multiple meals. The other part, at Tala’s request, is gazpacho. It is one of her favorite things to eat. And it is, she now knows, the easiest thing to make.

Square one

Everyone in Tala’s family can cook. But she never learned and just didn’t bother when she was married, because her then-husband was a fantastic cook.

It seems to make more sense to stock up on frozen meals and ready-to-eat foods, or go out to eat, or stick with salad and bottled dressing.

“If you are what you eat, I’m going to live to be 120, because I am preservatives,” Tala says.

The upside: Tala has been on a health kick ever since her appendectomy last fall. She hasn’t smoked a cigarette in eight months. She walks to work. She has discovered Pilates. Learning to make wholesome meals is the next natural step, and she’s eager to learn.

In her freezer: Lean Cuisines, low-fat ice cream, frozen fruit bars, frozen daquiri mix and a loaf of oat bread. In the refrigerator: juice, milk, a pitcher of Crystal Light, jarred spaghetti sauce, fat-free salad dressing, yogurt and two bottles of Chardonnay.

Her kitchen measures roughly 6 feet by 10 feet. A plaque on the wall reads, “Everybody has to believe in something. I believe I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

Bubala has his work cut out for him.

“Do you have butter in the fridge?” he asks.

“I have I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” Tala replies as Bubala shoots me a wary look. “Honey, I cut out trans fats.”

She owns two knives and three pans. The pantry is dicier — no salt, no pepper, a bottle of oil with a label that looks about eight years past its expiration date. Bubala cheated a little, bringing his own knives. But, he tells her, a tricked-out kitchen loaded with shiny gadgets isn’t necessary if all you want to do is make dinner.

“I never buy my knives new. I buy them used,” from Northwestern Cutlery at 810 W. Lake, he says.

Tala does have a shiny blender, which is all she needs to make gazpacho. And her 8-inch skillet, though not a natural choice for making soup, is the largest one she owns, so that’s what we’re going to use.

Wait to salt

Gazpacho takes only a few minutes, so the chicken is first up. Always start with whatever takes longest to cook, Bubala says.

He keeps a plastic bag within reach for scraps. Cleaning as you cook is a good habit to pick up.

After a shaky start (“What does one use to wash vegetables — soap?” Tala asks), Bubala has her chop a carrot, shallot and part of a fennel bulb. He shows her how to smash a head of garlic into cloves with the side of a knife — a broad spoon or the bottom of a pan also works — so the cloves are easy to peel.

The vegetables, sauteed in a bit of the questionable oil, are the base of the stock. They’re flavor-building blocks, always good to have around and they keep well in the crisper drawer.

Tala sprinkles Mrs. Dash into the pan — just a dash. “You can always add, but never take away,” Bubala says. “As the stock reduces, it gets saltier.”

He nestles chicken pieces into the pan to brown, and wraps the rest of the raw chicken in plastic wrap and foil for the freezer. Later this summer, when we are out of Tala’s life, she’ll be able to pull out the chicken, labeled as such, and make a meal, or three. Roast chicken, chicken soup, pasta with chicken . . .

The pan is sizzling. Tala pours in cold water to cover the chicken and turns up the heat to bring it to a boil, then back down to a simmer. Bubala shows her how to skim impurities from the top with a spoon.

She’s cooking now.

Two soups

Tala gingerly chops a tomato and other vegetables for gazpacho. The cuts don’t have to be perfect, since everything will get pureed.

The cuts don’t have to be perfect, period (but the thumb and fingertips of her free hand have to stay tucked in while she chops.) “You have to do what makes sense for you,” Bubala says.

In the blender they go, with some flat-leaf parsley, basil and cilantro leaves and the juice of a lime. Rolling the lime on the cutting board primes the juices — and momentarily transports Tala to her bartending days at the old Playboy Hotel. A whir in the blender and, voila, gazpacho. It’s soup, but it could be a sauce or marinade, too.

Bubala seasons it, and Tala tastes. “You can taste every little thingy we put in there,” she marvels.

Since she quit smoking, Tala says her palate has become more attuned to how salty, or not salty, foods are.

After 30 minutes, it’s time to pull the chicken from the pot, the meat off the bone and strain the broth, then combine the meat, broth and vegetables in a bowl. Chicken soup — done.

Dressing down

The day before our next lesson, Tala sends this e-mail: “Due to an experiment, I now have red wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, black pepper, celery and freeze-dried chives (couldn’t find fresh).”

She has made gazpacho again using a recipe she found online, and it’s sprightlier than the first version, though she grumbles, “The recipe said 15 minutes, but it was more like one hour with all that chopping.”

Bubala has brought two lovely cod fillets plus salad fixings, including sun-dried tomatoes, olives, balsamic vinegar and baby spinach. I have kosher salt, black pepper (with a built-in grinder), more olive oil and butter. The pantry is now stocked.

Tala eats salads often. Homemade vinaigrette is a must.

The typical ratio, Bubala says, is three or four parts oil to one part vinegar, “but it all depends on your palate.” The biggest mistake is adding salt at the wrong time. “Add the salt to the vinegar. If you add it after the oil, the salt won’t dissolve and it’ll just taste salty,” he says.

Tala stirs a pinch of salt into 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar, then measures out 1 cup of olive oil. She adds a bit of chopped garlic and shallot. A few seconds and a few turns of a spoon is all it takes.

Variations are plentiful — add chopped herbs, use different vinegars, whisk in feta or grated Parmesan. For a true emulsion, whisk in a dab of mustard.

Fish, quickly

The dressing comes in handy for our second dish — fish a la microwave. Microwave cooking can be overlooked, but it’s ideal for solo cooks such as Tala. Cleanup is minimal, and it doesn’t stink up the place. It just takes a watchful eye.

Vegetable prep is first: scallion bottoms, thin slices of ginger root and lemon, some of last week’s fennel, julienned. Fish prep comes last. “Always do your raw product first or last, never in the middle,” Bubala says.

He shows how to check for stray bones, running his fingers along the fillet. “Never leave the fish house without your fish on ice,” he cautions. “You want to keep the fish as cold as possible until you get home.”

He lays the aromatics and a plump sprig of oregano on top of the cod, then splashes it with white wine and some vinaigrette. Plastic wrap over the fish will help create steam.

Tala’s microwave is old-school — no rotating tray — but after four minutes on high and a rotation halfway through, the fish is opaque, as it should be.

Bubala pours the hot liquid from the fish into a small bowl, where a pat of butter waits to be whisked. The fancy term for this technique is monte au beurre. Butter sauce, baby.

“We not only have a dish, we have art,” says Tala.

The second fillet gets cracked black pepper and more vinaigrette as its seasoning, and a few minutes in the microwave. Set on top of lightly dressed spinach and olives, it’s yet another meal.

“The dressing ended up on everything,” Tala murmurs. “And each dish is really only five ingredients,” Bubala adds.

There isn’t much to clean up, mostly ingredients to wrap up and store for next time.

“Next time,” Tala offers, “can we do scallops?”