The kitchens of Sogni Dorati restaurant, which its fans consider to be one of Chicago`s best, were as black as burnt toast.
It was Tuesday, Dec. 23, when the electrical power was out all over the area for the better part of the day.
It took a futile push or two for me to realize that the kitchen doorbell was not working.
I was lucky to get in.
Cathy Selefski, Sogni Dorati`s pastry cook, happened to look up and recognize me as I walked past the kitchen window on my way to try my luck pounding on the front door at 660 N. Wells St.
Once in, I threaded my way past the noodle racks, to the place where Silvio Pinto, the owner/chef, stood alone among the stock pots.
One could be romantic and say that he looked like a captain on the deck of his torpedoed ship. Actually he looked more like the gob in the engine room who finds out mid-ocean that the captain hasn`t ordered enough coal.
Pinto`s face resembled that of a Christmas card choirboy, illuminated by the glow from a dozen or so candles placed here and there on worktables; but it was missing its usual mischievous grin.
Instead I got a kind of ”they can cut me into ravioli, but they won`t destroy me” look.
After a brief disaster report–Pinto had canceled his lunch business and sent his staff home–he went back to rinsing codfish.
”So much for making capirotada,” he muttered over the running water. Capirotada is a Mexican dessert pudding we had planned to make as a holiday treat for his kitchen staff. I had introduced him to the recipe, a favorite of mine. I was to taste the result and judge how nearly it approached what I had enjoyed when I lived in Mexico City.
I was disappointed. But my next reaction was automatic.
I could see he was going to gamble that the power would go back on before he opened at 5:30 p.m. for dinner. It was then 1 p.m.
Even though the ovens were working, I frankly thought he was brave but too optimistic. Still, I just couldn`t leave him there among a pile of depressingly dead codfish. I reached over and grabbed the largest knife in a row of them.
”Okay, Silvio, what do you want me to do?” I would have marched on Commonwealth Edison with him if he had asked me to.
As reply, he brought me a white coat and plopped a bag of onions on the table. Not a wimpy 5-pound bag, but a huge sack of baseball-sized onions. I went to work, cutting and peeling, watching over my shoulder as he completed his pans of bacalao, the wonderful codfish-potato-garlic dish that is an Italian tradition on Christmas Eve. (His secret? A handful of currants ”for that sweet edge” to offset the blandness of the other ingredients.)
I always had wanted to attend Pinto`s cooking classes at the restaurant, but my schedule never permitted.
Now I exulted. As the salad girl at Sogni Dorati, I would get to see how things work backstage in a big-city restaurant.
This is no side-street, fast-food franchise, or prefrozen, refried food joint. Here one takes the palate for pheasant tortellini, carrot dough noodles filled with ground lamb and little pillows of chocolate dessert ravioli, stuffed with sweet chocolate-dotted ricotta cheese and pine nuts. The kind of food that gastronomic golden dreams are made of.
Tons of hairy onion ends and peels and a few tears later, my back and legs ached. I was cold, too. Despite the ovens, the furnace was out. The hours were creeping by, and a few other staff members, Pinto`s brother Andy and his sister Mary were creeping in.
It was 3 p.m., and it was still as dark as the bottom of a blackened pot. Someone went to buy candles to replace the guttering ones on the table. She returned to report that the power was on in the Merchandise Mart.
Pinto set his jaw and declared that power would be on in his place shortly. Appealing I suppose to Bacchus, god of wine, he promised to break out champagne when it did.
I was not so sure what pull Bacchus had with Com Ed, but I did feel good. I had passed the test as onion-peeler and was graduated to artichokes. Pinto brought an enormous box of them to the counter. He peeled the outer leaves and handed them to me. I cut the artichoke in half, scooped out the hairy white choke with a melon ball scooper, then cut what was left into quarters.
Here`s where I made my first mistake. I wasn`t getting enough of the choke out. Pinto caught it. I liked the way he told me about it. He could have called me an eggplant-head. Instead, he showed me where I had gone wrong and how to do it better.
I redid them, placed the quarters into three huge pans and doused them with olive oil and a mix of white wine, lemon juice, chopped shallots, garlic and parsley and topped it all with seasoned bread crumbs. Off the artichokes went to be baked.
Next we breaded stuffed mussels. I did the ”dry,” flour and then crumbs, and Pinto the ”wet,” the egg yolk in between. I lined the mussels in pans, which also went to the ovens.
Suddenly at 4 p.m. the lights, furnace, everything electrical came on. We all yelled and screamed and carried on.
I screamed twice, the second time because I looked at my hands and found them blackened. Amused, Pinto explained that it was from the artichokes.
Pinto said later, ”Everyone let out their soul scream because everybody was on their last belief.”
Then more people, waiters and kitchen staff, drifted in and took up their usual tasks.
I graduated to what I secretly considered to be sous chef. Pinto still checked on everything I did, but my tasks were more important.
Pinto seemed to know what was going on in every corner of his kitchen, from the prep guys cutting veal and shucking oysters, to the pastry corner where fresh noodle dough is rolled daily. I don`t believe that a noodle could curl in that kitchen without his knowing it.
”Tereso, I`m low on capanota,” he said, then turned to another member of the kitchen staff and declared, ”we`re low on meat sauce, minestrone.”
His is a classic example of the small, chef-owned restaurant, where Pinto offers his talent at doing ”home cooking in a commercial context.”
”I think of it as a funnel, and you, the diner, are the final end,” he said. ”It is all coming toward you. So I have to be itchy and twitchy about everything that`s going on around me.”
He handed me a huge bar of mozzarella cheese and told me to grate it. I also sliced and started deep-frying slices of eggplant in seasoned bread crumbs in the deep fryer behind me. I layered the fried eggplant with meat sauce, the grated cheese and parmesan–eggplant parmigiana!–and I made three huge pans of it.
”That`s my mainstay of the holidays; it reheats good,” Pinto told me as he looked it over.
I was reheating good, too. In fact, I almost passed out twice from the combined effects of a few sips of champagne on an empty stomach and the heat in the oven area. I took a break in the coolness of the bar, and sympathetic Andy Pinto made me a restorative soda and bitters.
At 5:30, Pinto`s sister Mary darted into the kitchen and warned everyone, ”People are coming in!”
I began frying strips of lemon sole, which I had breaded. Pinto, on one of his trips by, said I was ”as good as a professional” in getting them out of the oil at the right moment.
Problem was, although I put them in one at a time, some stuck together. So when no one was looking I ate my mistakes. I also ate a lot of deep-fried eggplant with its custardy insides, as it was 6 p.m. now, and I was hungry. And I had to taste the spinach bread and the artichokes, which had turned out ”soft as custard,” Pinto said as he tasted them, too.
I helped Mary Pinto arrange the lemon sole on big platters around a center of finely chopped fennel in olive oil, salt and lots of black pepper and tangerine segments.
”That`s enough work!” Pinto said to me, and in truth, by then I felt like wilted fennel tops myself.
It had been fun, but exhausting. We sat in a corner of the restaurant and talked a few minutes before I staggered off with a loaf of bread and some bacalao under my arm.
Pinto asked me if I wanted to eat before I left, and I nearly turned green. He laughed and said that most people nibble when they start working in a kitchen. After a while they don`t.
I did peek proudly at the large table where the Christmas seafood buffet was in progress. People were lined up, helping themselves to dishes, some of which I had helped make.
Pinto said if the power had gone off when people were ordering off the menu, it would have been a real disaster. The preplanned buffet saved the day. Power had gone out only once before, the year he opened, in 1981, he said:
”The dining room was full of people. It was July, and it was hot. The stove tops were glowing in the dark from the heat. But that was only a couple of hours. This was longer. The clocks were out at a quarter to 5 in the morning. They didn`t go back on `til 4.”
We talked some more about his philosophy as a chef-owner.
”It is what you do to what you get at the market, blending and putting things together–that`s what I think a true restaurant is all about,” he said.
”I should be giving you what you get at home,” he said of his goal.
”Hopefully you eat well at home. It is a killer, though. I`m too much of a perfectionist. But I think that`s the demand of the job.”
When I mentioned that I had found a commercial kitchen hotter than I had expected, Pinto mused, ”I don`t know if you can take the heat out of the kitchen.”
Well, you can take the electricity out of it. But not, if it has one, its real power and force, its creative light.
