2/4/93

Gastro-Maestro!

By: Sam Orbaum

    Say "food" these days and everyone automatically thinks "matza." Matza and sacramental wine, matza and tzimmes, matza and halishkes and haroset.
    If you can possibly think of something different for a few paragraphs, something not so very traditional for this time of year, think of crema di zucca, or carpaccio, or filetto di sogliola dell'adriatico. And instead of that painful sweet red you have at the seder table, think of a debonair dry white.
    Enzo Dellea did not come here to talk about how to make a horseradish look fancy on the seder plate. He came to wave his magic ladle over the kitchen at the Sheraton Jerusalem Plaza Hotel, which is about to launch a new menu at its Primavera kosher Italian dairy restaurant.
    When Dellea talks turkey, he says it in Italian. Following a seven-course sneak preview of the restaurant's "Italian Summer" menu for 40-odd food writers, he praised the efforts of the Primavera to overcome the obvious challenges of cooking "a la moda kasher."
    Dellea, here for a couple of weeks to add oomph to the Primavera's summer menu planning, is head of the Italian Chefs Association and spearheads his country's teams in international competitions - a sort of Italian Shalom Kadosh. (Do Italian writers refer to Kadosh as the Israeli Enzo Dellea? ) He is also a professore of the culinary arts in Osaka and Tokyo.
    The hotel actually launched the Primavera a few months ago with a spectacular tasting binge. It seems curious that the hotel felt it necessary to create another splash so soon after, showcasing a big-name chef to introduce a revamped menu. One savvy analyst guessed that it was because the Primavera got a poor critical start, with some bad reviews keeping locals away in droves.
    That's not the sort of thing a hotel's general manager is going to admit, and Raphy Weiner didn't. He said that Dellea could not be present at the launching, but they kept the invitation open, and finally clinched a visit. And when a chef of this caliber arrives to put his stamp on your menu, you don't keep it a secret from the press, right? So the hotel had to beg the food writers to come back for another nosh to meet the gastro-maestro from Brescia.
    (There's something unique about dining in a room full of food writers. As Gerry Aronow, of Israel Travel News, put it, "It's nice to sit and eat with people who don't talk about calories.")
    The lunch was a sampling of what the Primavera is planning. I knew it was Italian because I couldn't understand a thing on the menu, but a lot of the food had a rather international pizzazz. There were few traces of the most obvious Italian ingredients like pasta and tomato.
    We started off with something called "carpaccio di trota salmonata con insalata do finocchietto e dragoncello." It looked like lox. It was a thin orange-red splay of marinated raw fish, refreshingly redolent of lemon, tarragon and olive oil. This was followed by a tantalizing little verenike with verve: "mezzelune farcite alle verdure di primavera." As all you Italian readers will understand, this means that it was a moon-shaped fist of dough sitting on a creamy cheese sauce, with a sublime artichoke-asparagus-pumpkin filling. I could have eaten a bushelful, but I was offered only one.
    Dellea had no compunction in serving pumpkin in two consecutive courses, but nobody complained, and I certainly wasn't about to, because the pumpkin soup ("crema di zucca all'amaretto") was a sensation. It was thick, smooth, enriched with amaretto and garnished with sliced almonds and a smidgen of mace.
    The "risotto ai fiori di zucchine" was, if you are partial to rice, quite good. The best part was the decoration, a large paper-thin deep-fried zucchini flare. Again, there was no provision made for a fellow who would make an ass of himself by eating a lot of them.
    Bring on the sogliola! The main course was "filetto di sogliola dell'adriatico al pomodoro strapazzato." That's a lot of noise for what the Hebrew translation starkly calls "Italian-style fillet of sole." It was accompanied by eggplant and crisp zucchini topped with pureed potato. These were all very neatly arranged but looking lonely on an acre-sized plate. A little elbow room on the plate is one thing, but no one could give me a satisfactory explanation of why we needed so much shiny china between the morsels. That's just the way it's done.
    Dessert was not the crowning glory it should have been. Three pieces of cake wading in a puddle of pistachio sauce, none of it as rich or zesty as it looked. As this was a dairy meal, kashrut need not have been a challenge to making the cake richly creamy, or the sauce more distinct.
    This the menu called "tris di tiramisu con salsa al pistacchio" (the Italians seem to have a word for everything, don't they?), and it was followed by espresso.
    General Manager Weiner stressed that the Primavera is not just for the fancy suppertime crowd; it has what he calls "the best bargain in town," a business lunch that's somewhat, ah, scaled down (get it? no fish) for only $11 plus VAT.