Saturday, February 27, 2010. Just Another Workday. Carmelo Comes Back Strong. It was a sunny, cold day, eaten alive by work. Mary Ann wants to sell links from our restaurant index, and I spent the morning writing and designing a postcard to make that pitch. I discovered something I should have known: you can do all this online, without even having to buy enormous quantities. I might find myself sending out a lot of postcards for a lot of other things.
After that, three hours of radio. I hear it might rain tomorrow, so I took advantage of the afternoon to transplant a wisteria vine from a pot where it's becoming rootbound into the ground. I hope it climbs up all the trees over there and gives the Cool Water Ranch an entrance framed with purple flowers. That should take about ten years. I hope we're still here.
The Marys wanted to go out to dinner, but the usual logjam of indecision as to where to go set in. I took the cows by the horns and dictated that we would go to the newly-relocated Ristorante Carmelo in Mandeville. Really, I knew this was where Mary Ann wanted to go. She wouldn't insist on it, however, to avoid violating my only loosely-held guideline of avoiding restaurants in their early months. (Every now and then, a flicker of guilt briefly surfaces.) Carmelo has been there for only two months. On the other hand, the menu is largely the same as it was back in the French Quarter, and Carmelo Chirico runs the place hands-on with several members of his family. How off kilter could it be?
Not very, to judge by the food this night. We ordered an insane amount of food, and even with my senses dulled by a double Negroni (above; the bartender kept adding more of this and that to get it right, until it was the size of a glass of iced tea), I don't believe any glaring problems turned up. And this was after having to wait almost a half-hour for a table (that's what we get for trying to make plans at the last minute).
When we go to an Italian restaurant with pizza, the order for that goes in before the menus are opened. Mary Ann said that the muffuletta pizza she saw here last week needed to be surveyed. Here it came, from the gas-fired but brick oven. That's too much stuff on a pizza for me, and I think the idea of muffuletta ingredients served hot is revolting. Even so, this was a well-made pie, crusty where it was supposed to be.
In front of me was a big bowl of mussels that pleased me utterly. Mary Leigh was the only unhappy one; the tomato bruschetta was not up to her standards. Come to think of it, it didn't look like the great bruschetta that Carmelo used to serve downtown.
Pasta next. The malfadine with mushrooms and truffle oil had my name all over it. Indeed, this was the dish of the night. Malfadine ("made badly") are noodles that come out of the extrude with irregularly rippled sides, the better to grab the sauce with. What a great flavor! I might have to get this again. On a much more conventional note, Mary Leigh--who is not given to hyperbole--was going ga-ga over the spaghetti bolognese. She said it was as fine as any she could remember in Italy. (I pause to reflect how wonderful it is that my teenagers have been to Italy enough times to have such a thought. When I was her age, going to Italy would have been like going to the moon now.)
Mary Ann's pasta was also good: big shrimp over pasta aglio olio. She decided that this was a night when the food was so good and she felt so much like eating it that she could let her diet go. So she continued the theme with an appetizer of shrimp and crabmeat atop a pillow of polenta, which she enjoyed with lust.
We had an interesting wine with all this. I saw an unfamiliar Soave. The waiter said they didn't have it. Carmelo said that he had hidden it, because too many people were put off by the fact that the bottles contained some yeast residue--not an uncommon element in a well-made Soave. It was terrific, and so far from the watery Soave Bolla that everyone knows that it shouldn't have the same name. Even Mary Ann got enthusiastic about it, and that is a real rarity.
The Marys started whining when they learned that I had yet another dish coming. This was chicken Vesuvio, a concoction common on the East Coast but not often encountered in these parts. Carmelo's version included most of the usual ingredients: chicken, Italian sausage (housemade, he said), pepper, and onions. It lack potatoes, and included a red sauce, both of which are off standard. But it wound up being a terrific dish. And it was on the lighter side, for which at this point I was thankful.
What a great dinner! Here is the first-class Italian restaurant Mandeville has needed. I hope the Northshorinians can open their minds to this style of cooking, which may not be like they're accustomed to eating at Sal & Judy's.
Ristorante Carmelo. Mandeville: 1901 US Hwy 190 985-624-4844. Northern Italian.
