Thursday, February 24, 2011.
Eat Club At Carmelo.
I hate to get rid of something that works perfectly when a better replacement becomes available. This can even get poignant, as when I ditched my big old 1972 Compugraphic typesetting machine in 1992. By then, even the cheapest computer with a laser printer did an incomparably better job much easier. I felt sad because the old thing still worked fine. But time moves on.
The radio station engineers discovered such a paradigm shift today while rigging up a remote broadcast from Ristorante Carmelo in Mandeville. The equipment needs a regular old phone line to link back to the studio. But regular old phone lines are disappearing. Carmelo's phone system works via an internet connection, not copper wires.
Fortunately, engineer Dominic Mitchum had a new gizmo that itself has made the shift. It sends studio-quality audio back to the studio over a wireless internet connection. But it's not a good solution for a call-in talk show like mine. From the time I say something to the time the caller hears it, a quarter-second or more elapses. If you've never had the experience of trying to talk with someone who is hearing you with even a little delay, I can tell you that it's maddening. Perhaps even impossible.
We filled most of the show in conversation with Carmelo Chirico. That was sub-optimal, not because Carmelo doesn't have anything to say (like most Italians, he has a little too much), but because it's known that a talk show with even high-powered guests will have less appeal than a show dominated by everyday callers.
The most interesting matter to come up was one of the two possible entrees for tonight's Eat Club dinner. This was to be a grilled veal T-bone. Carmelo mentioned that it weighed in at fourteen ounces. Even with a bone, that sounded too high. Veal steaks are half the size of beef steaks. Carmelo called for one of the chops, and there it was: an enormous pink thing with the characteristic aspect of a porterhouse. One look and any possibility of my ordering the fish vanished.
Reservations were slow coming in for this dinner. That's typical on the North Shore. But in the past few days they rolled in, and we wound up with about fifty people. Lots of new faces. Some didn't know who I was, even though I'm allegedly the host. This is humbling. Johnny Carson once said that the most unnerving experience of his life came on his first trip to the South of France, where he walked around for weeks without anyone's recognizing or pointing at him.
Terrific dinner. We started with something odd: a roast suckling pig, which had been on the oven all afternoon. Carmelo oversaw the pig-picking, slicing out beautiful white meat, tender and wonderful. The eggplant caponata it came with supplied not only the Italian accent but also an offbeat but on-target flavor complement.
Nobody seemed to be too upset about the presence of a whole pig on the counter in the kitchen. Even Mary Ann, who is squeamish about such things, dug right in. Asked for seconds, in fact.
Carmelo blamed the pasta dish on me. He said I had it months ago, and that I said it should be on the menu if we ever did an Eat Club dinner here. Swatches of pasta wrapped around wild mushrooms and black truffles were made into little bags. The sauce was a veal stock amplified with more mushrooms. I only vaguely remembered the dish until I tasted it. Then I remembered. The dish was getting a very high approval rating from the others in the room, too.
A salad intervened somewhere, but I was eager to get to the veal porterhouse. After a hard, hot grilling, it looked even better than before. Veal is liable to get tough--there's almost no fat to tenderize it--but that was not an issue here. The only people who weren't raving over it were the fish-eaters, who were satisfied by the fish but jealous of the foodgasms being reported by the veal-eaters.
Bunch of wines from the Piedmont came down. A young woman who said she knew me years ago told us all about them. I drank too much of them. After most of the crowd had dispersed, a few people remained at one table of Carmelo's regulars, with Carmelo pouring shots of a number of premium grappas. I was very happy that Mary Ann was here to get me home.
Ristorante Carmelo. Mandeville: 1901 US Hwy 190 . 985-624-4844.
