Saturday, October 22, 2011.
Book Premiere. The Most Pretentious Restaurant In Town.
The official first organized public offering of Lost Restaurants Of New Orleans was this afternoon at Octavia Books. The shop's owner Tom Lowenberg has been tireless in his efforts on behalf of my books, and it's just the kind of local bookshop I like. Peggy Scott Laborde, my co-author, is at least as beholden to things local as I am, and she felt good about the place, too.
I have a tradition of bringing food--usually food I make myself from a recipe in the book--to these parties. But I couldn't find a recipe that would work logistically. I was thinking about making the crab bisque from T. Pittari's, but I don't know how we would have served it without risk to the store's inventory. (Octavia is crammed with volumes and readers even on a slow day.) So I asked Al Hornbrook at Parran's Po-Boys to make me a couple of whole-loaf roast beef poor boys in the style of Clarence and Lefty's. That's not much of a stretch for him.
The sandwiches were a big hit. (I was only able to get one sliver.) Peggy orchestrated the talk. She's a broadcast host, too, and her instincts are to direct the conversation. I yield, because she's a lady. I think we talked too long, because the number of books we signed afterwards took until long after the bookstore closed to work through. Well! This is a good start.
One of the people in the crowd was Jay Bonomolo, the third-generation owner of Toney's Spaghetti House. Which was one of the most important reviews in the book. I haven't seen Jay in years. He lives in Baton Rouge now, selling insurance. I can't help but think that he's sorry he moved the restaurant out of the French Quarter, although at the time his logic seemed sound. But trying to resume the same energy in Metairie was doomed from the beginning.
Mary Ann showed up near the end of our session. She suggested that we ask Peggy and her hubby Errol to join us for dinner. He's yet another local yokel like me, and they went for our idea to try one of the many new restaurants on Freret Street.
Four months proved to be a little too soon for me to take my first taste of Ancora. That's the new pizzeria opened by Chef Adolfo Garcia and partners. It received a great deal of early publicity for its enormous stone, wood-burning pizza oven, brought in with great difficulty from Naples, the birthplace of pizza. It was built with rock from Mount Vesuvius, and maintains a heat of over 800 degrees.
The strictures under which Ancora makes its pizza are alleged to duplicate precisely the pizza-making and -eating conditions that obtain in Naples. The dough takes three days to prepare, and the only yeast involved is that which came from the air six years ago. That's when Chef Jeff Talbot made his first batch of starter, the descendants of which are still used to make the dough at Ancora.
Good story, isn't it? Because all these conditions must be maintained for Ancora to make its pizza, the customers are asked to release whatever they may have in the way of preferences, experience, or taste. So you may not have any ingredient removed from the pantheon of house pizzas, lest the baking time (which their website says is between forty-five and ninety seconds) be thrown off by the changes.
Not only that, but (to the chagrin of Errol) you cannot get a pepperoni pizza. The closest they have to pepperoni is a spicy sausage-like salumi. Which, because it is made in house (from pigs raised especially for Ancora!) is ipso facto better, somehow.
We approached all this with an open mind, and began with a board of some of the house-made salumi. None of the names were familiar to me, except those with common Italian names like fegato (liver, made into a kind of paté) and mostarda (whole-grain mustard, stirred into a fruit compote). The board will filled out with three slices each of several sausages and fatty ham. Some very peppery peppers were there for garnish.
The pizzas were Errol's pepperoni look-alike. It packed more of a pepper punch than standard pepperoni, too much for some, but I liked it. My pizza was approved by the server as her favorite. Named for Maria somebody, it was a standard tomato-sauce and cheese pie topped with arugula and coppa, both of which were only enough above room temperature to account for their sitting on top of the dough.
Everybody's different, but one the hallmarks of a good pizza to me is finding little charred areas here and there. According to the Pizza Law followed at Ancora (I read it from the menu), there should be no crustiness. Where did they get that idea? A little crustiness would have improved this crust, which I found too soft. A lost opportunity to use those high temperatures. But those are minor cavils, and I enjoyed this well enough.
Nevertheless, the fantasy of the Best Pizza Imaginable broke down for me. I have been to Naples and most of the rest of Italy quite a few times. I have had pizza in many restaurants that carry the official seal of approval of the Naples Council on Pizza. (I can't remember its name, but its insignia is on the front doors of all the pizzerias that do it "right.") Ancora's pizza is very good, no question about it. But it doesn't remind me a lot of those Neapolitan pizzas. Domenica's, to choose another, comes much closer.
There's more. Errol and I were asking about the sparseness of the selection of liquor in the bar. The server (who was not from Naples! Shouldn't she be? You know, to make it really authentic?) said that they "only carry the things we need for our cocktails." Their cocktails? What about the customers' cocktails?
And another good anecdote: Peggy asked for sugar substitute for her iced tea. Waitress: "I'm sorry, the only sweetener we use is simple syrup." I wanted (needed, really) some Splenda, too. I went next door to the packed house at High Hat (Chef Adolfo is involved in that, too) and grabbed a few packets and brought them back to the two-thirds-empty Ancora.
Mary Ann came up with the perfect line. "This is the most pretentious restaurant I've ever seen!" And we've been in a few. Yes, dear. It is. I don't like pepperoni, either. I think it makes pizza greasy. But it's the most popular pizza meat topping in the world (yes, in Italy, too), and for a restaurateur to say its customers' preferences must be subservient to the restaurant's statement to the world is hauteur of the highest order. Even in an old strip mall with concrete floors.
So Ancora is too new, even though there is no question about the goodness of the pizza. (And that of the other dishes, the service and prices.) But it could be and will be better. Ancora will, as time goes on, make a few adjustments. The customers always force that issue, little by little. The customers are not likely to have come from Naples.
These adjustments will not compromise the sacred Naples pizza traditions. Which, in any case, differ from chef to chef. Every Italian chef I have ever met believes that the way he cooks is the true, authentic way, and that what other chefs do may be very good, but is not really "right." Cooking laws behind the scenes always prove to be total chaos.
Ancora Pizzeria. Uptown: 4508 Freret St. 504-324-1636.
