My colleague Julia Moskin says restaurants are New Yorkers’ living rooms. With no space to ourselves, we look outside, to nearby public places where we can sit, read, or unwind. If that’s true, and I think it is, for more than a decade, I’ve seen my favorite living room, Da Andrea, an Italian restaurant in New York City, become increasingly successful and filled with guests I’ve never seen. I’ve seen it become in front. It was frustrating at first, but over time I learned that sharing a living room is much better than losing it forever.
When I first fell in love with Da Andrea, a student whose internship pay directly for eating out, the Northern Italian restaurant on West 13th Street was a quiet space where most of the locals lived with their children (or grandchildren). met for dinner. And it was a place where I would rather eavesdrop on a first date or read a book than not finish a class assignment.
recipe: Shrimp and Salmon Pesto Pasta
Many changes of ownership, layout, personnel, location and clientele, but one dish remained on the menu. It’s a ricotta cavatelli with the most vivid pesto. Until very recently, Nickelodeon green, almost blue-green pesto was a total mystery to me, and I spent years trying to replicate the recipe in vain. But that’s the key to this dish and the most prominent feature of plain seafood pasta. Anyone who makes pesto knows how quickly that bright color can turn brown and pasty. But Da Andrea’s pesto is always glossy velvet, a shade of green that looks as if neon-colored Chicago Dog mixed his relish into cream.
A few weeks ago on a Monday morning at 9am, I went to Da Andrea to see how Executive Chef Meliano Placencia (63) makes this dish. he was busy His grocery package arrived late. But he threw me a spare chef’s whites anyway and gave me a recipe he’s been making for decades. Watching Plasencia cook in an unfamiliar kitchen, in just half an hour he (who has fed me for 13 years) learned everything he needed to know about that pesto.
Like restaurants, pesto has evolved and adapted with the times. That’s where the staying power lies. The pine nuts in his original recipe, which won second place in the 1985 Plague Invitation, have been discontinued in recent years to accommodate allergic guests. It’s often thought that cooking is additive, meaning that the more ingredients, the better. It means that the whole thing shines brighter. Without nuts, pesto is pure basil, enhanced with floral notes by an unbreakable emulsion of liquid and fat.
A deep hue that looks like a neon Chicago dog relish blended into cream.
I gasped when the placencia added ice to the mixer to cool the mixture from the heat of the mixer so the basil wouldn’t oxidize. If a good chef knows how to use heat, a good chef knows how to control it. (As he cooks the seafood, he tells me three times, “I try not to overcook it.”) The most tender pink salmon and shrimp simmered with a dash of olive oil and vegetable stock. Lightly fried in a frying pan. , delicate fish should always be heated. If the pesto is the star of this pasta, the perfectly cooked seafood portion is the brightest star.
In an era where your favorite restaurants are on the doorstep, we’ve found that making people aware of local spots means helping those businesses grow and, more importantly, stay alive. Some of my favorites have closed over the past decade, including Cafe Farai, Hiroko’s Place, and Tahini, and I regret not going more and yelling from the rooftops.
When you eat at Da Andrea, the food is just as good as when I first tried it when I was a 19-year-old English major and smeared my paperback with pesto and olive oil. My old seat, which used to be tucked away in a corner, is now a bar, and I sometimes like to go for a drink before the table is ready. Occasionally, a maître de maid, whom I’ve known since my teens, would urge me back, spread out a table for one, and set out a basket of homemade focaccia and a carafe of red wine. It’s by the toilet, but it’s still my favorite seat in the house.