Thursday, April 15. Domenica. Well, here I am again. Tax deadline, and I'm nowhere near getting my taxes done. Off goes the extension request.
Interesting development on the Jude front. At a party he met a guy who was intrigued with the movies Jude has been involved with--all low-budget but profitable enterprises. The fellow turned out to be connected with a major studio, and was very interested in making movies the way Jude described. Jude took a meeting at the Warner studio offices, and walked out with a gig managing production details on four films. This is a deep background job in moviemaking, but a very necessary one and the kind of thing Jude most likes to do. He said he didn't know what the exact money would be, but that it would start soon and force him to fly in for Mary Leigh's graduation and fly back out again.
I made a second visit to Domenica, to collect more facts for a review. It will take one more meal after this one, at most--so abbreviated is the menu. This restaurant, for all the press it's received, boils down to two specialties: pizza and salumi. Some of the other dishes are very good, but there aren't many of them, and the two primary specialties are so fine that it's hard to get one's mind off them.
I started with a pizza Calabrese style, with a lot of salty scatterings. Salami, capers, olives. The crust was perfect: crisp here, bready there, charred in the ideal number and size of places. The five-ton stone, wood-fired oven is delivering the goods. It was much too big to finish, but there's always an audience for leftover pizza at home.
Chef Alon Shaya came over for a few minutes. He said his week of Roman-style Passover seder dinners were a big hit, and that on some nights half the restaurant was indulging in the ancient menu. It wasn't certified kosher, of course, what with all those parts of pigs hanging in the cooler.
He brought out one of those parts. It was a whole pig leg, with the hoof still on. "We raised this one at La Provence," he said. "It cured for nine months and it's fantastic." He sliced off two slices, each about one-third fat. It was as good as he said. I haven't had prosciutto served me this way since I was in San Daniele, Friuli in 1988.
He had a couple of new items for me to try. First, a row of zucchini blossoms, stuffed with cheese and fried, napped with a spicy-good, chunk tomato sauce. "This is the season for baby artichokes," Chef Alon said, bearing a plate with a whole fried such flower bud. You eat the whole thing. Nothing stiff, nothing prickly. Just good.
Then came the spring vegetable soup I ordered. Just a cup, thank goodness. It had a bright woodsy flavor, courtesy of some morel mushrooms floating around in it.
Too much food. But dessert must be sampled. The guanduja budino is a flowing chocolate and hazelnut pudding in a glass, topped with whipped cream and a dozen candied hazelnuts. The latter were wonderful. I've had a taste for the chocolate-hazelnut flavor since I discovered the obscure chocolate squares called Ice Cubes back in the 1960s. I haven't seen those for awhile.
Dominica gratified me one more time before I left: they actually know how to make a proper espresso here, dense and oily enough to leave the flavor of the coffee on my palate all the way home.
Domenica. CBD: 123 Baronne (Roosevelt Hotel) 504-648-6020.
