Benchmarking, Italian Style

By now you have figured out that I love to cook.  It goes without saying that I also love to eat.  Food is one of life’s great pleasures.  Preparing foods satisfies the DIY enthusiast in me.  I love to stage a big party or holiday dinner—planning the menu, seeking out recipes while rolling them over my imaginary tongue, procuring the finest of ingredients and arraying them in beautiful vignettes on my large kitchen peninsula.  I love the feeling of complete productivity as raw ingredients transform into finished dishes, filling the house with the promise their flavor profiles.  It’s a sensation that makes me wonder why I was so repelled by chemistry.  Certainly I could have been mistress of any laboratory!

I also love to go out to dinner.  My husband and I particularly like seeking out the restaurants of famous chefs we have seen on Food Network.  I love Bobby Flay’s assertive-yet-not-overpowering Bar Americain.  Scott Conant’s Scarpetta was one of the best bowls of pasta I have ever tasted.  The simple spaghetti and tomato-basil sauce was the perfect bite of freshness and flavor prepared with exquisite technique.  Distrito, from Iron Chef Jose Garces’ restaurant group was a mouth-watering presentation of classic Mexican dishes upgraded to the level of small-plate haute cuisine.

This is why my friend Donna was so astonished when she took me to her favorite neighborhood Italian place for lunch and I ordered (dare I say it?) Chicken Parm.  To be sure, this was no typical pasta-drowned-in-red-sauce place.  It had a lovely menu of thoughtfully chosen and well-prepared dishes.  Even she—the I-won’t-eat-anything-if-it’s-green girl—ordered a beautiful salad of warm crusted goat cheese, walnuts and pears on a bed of bitter greens.  I was unashamed; Chicken Parm it had to be.

Over the years, Chicken Parm has become my yardstick for new Italian restaurants.  For me, it is the ultimate in comfort food—the Burger King Whopper of Italian cuisine.  Just as the Whopper is the perfect combination of junk on a burger, Chicken Parm is the perfect combination of Italian flavors and textures on a plate.  There is the crispy-fried chicken cutlet, the melted cheese, the tangy sauce, and always some pasta.   But I have noticed that it is also a throw-away in many restaurants, a war-horse of a dish that receives no attention.  As such, it is the perfect way to assess the chef’s kitchen.  Do they use commercially-prepared and frozen-for-an-eternity processed chicken cutlets?  Or does the chicken resemble the texture of a fresh chicken-breast, pulling apart with the stringiness of an actual meat product?  Too often I have been served chicken that seems to have been heated and reheated many times before finally landing on my plate.

The sauce is another give away.  My husband and I once popped into an old standard in Boston’s North End because it was the only restaurant that did not have an hour wait.  The restaurant sits on the Freedom Trail and was already old thirty-five years ago when I first came to town.  How bad could it be?  My chicken parmesan (yes, of course that’s what I ordered) was covered with a dull red tomato sauce that tasted like it was poured directly from the can.  There was no roasted or slow-cooked flavor, no onions or seasonings, no herbs.  It had less nuance than a bottle of ketchup.

Another opportunity to impress me is the cheese.  The dish is called “chicken parmesan,” so I expect the cheese to be as prominent and memorable as the chicken.  I am not impressed when they slap a slice of provolone or worse, American cheese, over the chicken and slide it under the heat lamp.  If the dish presents with discernible sharp corners on the cheese I will refuse to eat it.  On the other hand, if my plate arrives with still-bubbling cheese accented by freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, I charge forward.  Extra points if they make the effort to use fresh mozzarella.

The side order of spaghetti is a mandatory and integral part of the Chicken Parm assessment.  Most restaurants par cook their pastas and then refresh them in hot water before serving.  This is fine, however, I do not expect to see my spaghetti floating in dishwater with a dollop of red sauce poured over top.  Spaghetti is properly prepared when it is tossed with the sauce, using some of the starchy pasta water to help the sauce cling to every strand.  The pasta should be flavored with the sauce, not covered by it.  A good bowl of spaghetti is pinkened, the sauce fully absorbed and coated, leaving almost none to drip down the side.

So if you catch me in an Italian restaurant with a steaming plate of Chicken Parm, do not judge me to be a culinary plebeian.  I am doing serious research on flavor, texture, freshness, and technique—not gobbling down an unsophisticated stand-by.   It is hard work, and I am only too glad to oblige.