Honest Weight Food Coop

Solace, and grilled cheese

by Gustav

Beloved Dining Companion assesses the scenario and observes, wisely, "We eat a Lot." I allow as how that's an astute observation, and then we cede to the delicious nostalgia of many shared meals, mediocre or marvelous, in good times and bad, up and down the Hudson. We are at our new, favorite café, or more specifically, paninoteca, 'ino, tucked away on Bedford Street in the West Village. The visit to the City is an enigmatic one, filled with tears and smiles, a gelid March rain, and tiny birds twittering in a peaceful churchyard…. So the BDC and I have retreated to 'ino, which is where we go lately to assuage big city jitters and angsts and losses, but also to savor what we savor most- simple, fine Italian food.

Here in the good old West Village the streets are convoluted, cozy, protected (some trees never seem to lose their leaves) and the pace is palpably slower than uptown (though to me the whole city seems somehow more ambling these days. Even the taxis in midtown seem to have a slowed choreography… Perchance other folks, like us, defiantly take the time to smell the hyacinths.) We arrive at a packed 'ino, but manager Jeff affably takes our heavy coats and magically finds us the perfect table. The tiny restaurant is toasty warm and pleasantly redolent of drying wool and garlic sizzling in good olive oil. There is the hum of low conversations in several languages, and the steady hiss of the cappuccino machine. There is a hint of potential solace here. We settle in, and our server Lily assures us that she's in no way motivated to turn the table and that we should chill. These are bemused and perceptive professionals who take a comforting pride in their work and the food they bring you. Bless their hearts.

'ino ( all lower case, and short for "panino") serves bruschette, tramezzini and panini, those compelling little sandwiches that go so well with a glass of wine or my preferred fuzzy Italian water. New Vocabulary? Tramezzini are small savory sandwiches, often crustless, and mostly eaten at a bar. Bruschetta is toasted bread rubbed with garlic and olive oil and then topped with freshly diced tomato, sometimes further embellished with onion or mushrooms. Fettunta is the grilled bread merely rubbed with oil and garlic, and Panini really refers to a bread roll, split, filled and toasted or grilled, often with a pressing device. There are panini all over the City now, reportedly, and some places are complicating them unduly with crazy incongruous ingredients and much ado. Find a fad…

'ino, however, which opened in 1997, reigns supreme, in part because they keep their eye on the details and know well that restraint is the crux of the better Italian food. That's why we respect and adore this cuisine and its few serious outposts here. (That over-garlicky, heavy on the rosemary, bitter red sauce approach, with its groaning board "abbondanza" mind-set seems fatuous, though it certainly had its place in a lot of people's hearts and tummies. I must admit….) Most of the menu items at 'ino have only five or six ingredients, but those ingredients are chosen with wise restraint. Jeff tells me later that the bread for our panini comes from the esteemed Blue Ribbon Bakery up the street, and that it is baked slightly under, so that it will not overcook in the panini press and be hard and sharp on your tongue. The cheeses in our favorite panino complement one another beautifully. They are caccio di Roma, crotonese and grana padano, and together they're superb: the mellow caccio melts luxuriantly, the crotonese points up the sheepiness in the caccio, and the grana holds it all together with its fruit/nut piquancy. The white truffle oil is added only at the last minute: the chef knows well of the truffle's use as a condiment and that it must never be overheated. This panino is the sandwich you get when you ring for a grilled cheese in heaven. It is like a swath of fonduta between crusty golden bread, the cheeses silken and almost pellucid as you pull it apart (Fonduta being that luxuriant Piedmontese amalgam of Fontina d'Aosta, butter, milk and eggs, often embellished with grated white truffle. We think back on fonduta, and also that fleeting week years ago when we had many truffles, for some reason, and simply had to eat them every night, in fonduta, shaved over tagliatelle, every night, knowing full well that this abundance of truffle was a fleeting phenom.) Our bowl of olives at 'ino comes with several perfectly roasted cloves of garlic, buttery and sweet, and the antipasto fairly sparkles in its piquant variety. I don't know where 'ino gets their produce, but the greens glisten, the rucola rocks,the fennel is crisp, and all is dressed with care. We are not the only characters in love with lunch at 'ino: no less estimable critics than molto Mario himself, and the newly released Senora Stewart, say that 'ino has the best sandwiches in town. And it is open 'til two o'clock in the morning.

The lunch crowd disperses, and we are apparently welcome to sit and savor our luxuriant, densely-foamed cappuccinos. Lily joins us for a while. The city swirls outside. That wintry, haunting melancholia (that sometimes only Miles seems to understand) lightens. The world and its denizens take such good care of us. So many beautiful meals and memories of them…

Since we discovered 'ino last year, we have been playing with the panino concept regularly (nota bene the uncanny comforts of grilled cheese in the gray days of February). We've come up with some pretty jazzy versions, though none to rival those of our inspiration on Bedford Street. Our esteemed friend Fabio Cuccia provides us at Honest Weight with a remarkable variety of Italian cheeses and is always there to answer our questions about all Italian comestibles. He's got exceptional examples of the crotonese, caccio and grana necessary to come up with the sandwich of the seraphim mentioned above. We like to use Fabio's cacciota al tartufo, a fragrant sheep milk cheese flecked with black truffle on one of our concoctions. We sauté a variety of mushrooms with a little garlic and some rosemary until all is golden. Then we chop them in the processor or with the mezzaluna (we love that instrument, and grow more reliant on it all the time.) Then we build our panino with the cacciota al tartufo and some of the excellent foccaccia from our grocery department. Gayle has a great variety of fresh mushrooms these days. We do our panini in a well-seasoned iron frying pan, in a bit of olive oil, and we press it with another (even more worn) iron frying pan. It works beautifully, giving a deeply burnished, crisp crust and a perfectly gooey interior. You could also press the panino with a brick wrapped in foil, or go for it and get yourself any one of the myriad panini presses available lately. We're going to. You all know our predilection for spinach sautéed quickly with garlic, EVOO and crushed red pepper (how could one live without it?) We like to make a panino with that spinach, or any coarse greens, tucked between layers of our complex, raw-milk Fontina d'Aosta, or another lovely Northern cow's milk cheese, relatively new in our case, Montasio. Notice that you need at most a handful of inexpensive ingredients: seek out the very best and pay attention to what's in season. That's the credo of 'ino, and all real Italian food.

Our grocery and produce departments can provide you with all the bitter greens, organic garlic, mushrooms, breads and condiments you need for your own panini ventures. HABA has a splendid array of herbs and spices that are re-stocked constantly. Us cheese mongers carry all of those formaggi cited above all the time now, thanks to Senor Cuccia. Pecorino Crotonese will be offered at a ten- percent reduction during April. Savor the hyacinths, and may your spring be filled with solace and renewal.