Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Italian Bounty in Brooklyn

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When in Bay Ridge, visit A.L.C. Italian Grocery & Alimentari.

Enroute to dropping the adorable Tess at her Brooklyn apartment on Sunday, we explored a bit of the Bay Ridge neighborhood. Walter wanted to check out the newly opened A.L.C. Italian Grocery & Alimentari he’d read about in Michele Scicolone’s post on i-Italy.

Louis Coluccio, who co-owns the shop with wife Alison, welcomed us warmly. As we sampled a seductive butternut squash and pancetta lasagna, we trolled the shelves for tempting items to purchase. Here’s what I selected:

Delitia buffalo milk butter
Les Moulins Mahjoub wild mountain capers in sea salt (as big as hazelnuts!)
Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (for only $12/lb!)
Guanciale (cured pork cheek)
L’arte della Pasta fusilli col buco (spiral strands with a hole in the middle)
Il Caprino del Piemonte cremoso (goat’s milk cheese from Piedmont)
Agostino Recca colatura di alici (anchovy juice)

The shop’s Web site is under construction but here’s the contact info.

A. L. Coluccio
8613 Third Avenue (86th Street)
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NYC
718.836.3200

Eataly New York

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Grazie to our friend Jessica Young, talented NYC private chef for beating us to the newly launched Eataly, at 200 Fifth Ave,  in Manhattan. You can catch her tour on her blog Vittle Me This.

A co-production of the Italian Eataly stores, affiliated with Slow Food, and the Mario Batali organization, the emporium houses a grocery with artisanal ingredients, fresh and cured meats, and fresh foods as well as several restaurants.

Jessica, we loved your description of Romanesco as cauliflower that had sex with a Christmas tree!

Ci vediamo all’ Eataly!

A DiBruno’s Picnic

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Cured meats, cheese, rustic bread, and assorted antipasti make a pranzo perfetto.

Cured meats, cheese, rustic bread, and assorted antipasti make a pranzo perfetto.

I’ve made a drool of myself at many an Italian food forum. . .Peck in Milan, Volpetti in Rome, F.lli Burgio in Siracusa and now DiBruno Bros. in Philadelphia. Founded in 1939 by siblings Danny and Joe DiBruno in South Philly’s Italian Market, the emporium now has a location in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, mere minutes from a borrowed apartment where Walter and I enjoyed a weekend get-away.

Our intention of picking up a few hard-to-find pantry staples such as salted anchovies and D.O.P. canned San Marzano tomatoes, quickly morphed into “how many of these exquisite goodies can we buy for an impromptu picnic?”

Here’s what we managed: Seafood salad, artichokes alla romana, mozzarella bocconcini, peppadews stuffed with gorgonzola, red peppers stuffed with ricotta, stuffed grape leaves, olive roll, ciabatta roll, winter salami, runny-pungent taleggio cheese and shaved culatello that melted on our tongues. Walter, the king of the panino, actually extricated the culatello from his sandwich to savor each slice on its own.

Culatello is not a salume you see in every deli case. Restaurateur Tony May in his Italian Cuisine: Basic Cooking Techniques describes it as “one of the most prized and expensive cured meats” and a “very particular type of salume, produced in a small area around Parma. . . the most singular aspect of culatello is that it has the same characteristics of prosciutto but is aged into a casing” . . . with a taste “much sweeter and smoother” than prosciutto.

The DiBruno culatello is produced by Armandino Batali (Mario’s dad) at Salumi Artisan Cured Meats in Seattle. And, yes, it is pricey but at $8 for our picnic portion for two, it was money very, very well spent.

DiBruno's encourages an appetite for learning.

DiBruno Bros. foster an appetite for learning.

Next time you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you may want to indulge in a DiBruno’s picnic.

DiBruno Bros. – Rittenhouse Square
1730 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19013
215.665.9220

For an online taste, visit www.dibruno.com