Someone’s in the Kitchen With Dona
Posted by bellastraniera - 28/04/10 at 01:04 pm In today’s Times, Donatella Arpaia announces the launch of her new restaurant, a Neapolitan-style pizza place in Chelsea, named – wait for it – Donatella. Here she assumes the title of executive chef, since as she puts it “the menu is developed, written and tested by me.”
But anyone who heard the P.R. around the relaunch of Mia Dona will find this party line familiar – and tricky to prove. On the Mia Dona website, a section on the cuisine states “Dona wrote the menu, and she, her mother and her aunts trained the kitchen cooks themselves.” Sit down for a meal here, however, and you will find distinct notes of Michael Psilakis in the fish dishes with capers and olives. There were also changes to family recipes, most notably the famous meatballs, as can be expected when you take grandma’s recipes and give them to a “kitchen cook” who was previously a sous-chef at Union Square Cafe, Jarett Appell. Appell is currently training in Italy, and according to one source, will be going on to the kitchen at Donatella when he returns.
As David Burke tells the Times, “‘everyone wants to be a chef,’ but…doing so in a top-level restaurant ‘is something that takes years and years of practice and experience.’” It’s one thing to spend your childhood “always in the kitchen,” as Donatella says here, “soak[ing] up the Puglian aesthetic,” and another thing to run a professional kitchen.
This is not to say that Donatella is not a hard worker – certainly the breadth of her culinary business is testimony to that. But previous chefs with years of training were happy to credit their mentors in print, whereas in this article, Donatella credits only her family and David Burke – though she was solely in the front of the house at davidburke & donatella.
For the opposite take on who does what in the kitchen, it’s worth rereading an earlier Times piece by Alex Witchel on Cafe Boulud. Not only was Cafe Boulud owner and superstar chef Daniel Boulud not in the article, his executive chef Gavin Kaysen insisted that his intern – his intern! – demonstrate how to make the braised short rib dumplings featured in the story. Where did the short rib filler recipe come from? Former chef Andrew Carmellini developed the Cafe Boulud recipe, which was based on a recipe from his grandmother.
Donatella’s recipes in today’s Times and May’s Bon Appetit, which also ran a sizeable feature on Donatella, seem to be her own family’s cucina povera cuisine. But when it comes to running the kitchen, why not give credit where credit is due?
If, as Donatella’s (and Rachel Ray’s) publicist Charlie Dougiello claims, she is “taking off her high heels and trading them in for a hot oven,” she will be in for one of the toughest, sweatiest jobs in the New York restaurant world, working in front of a custom-made five-and-a-half-ton oven made of volcanic bricks. Let’s hope Donatella’s patient “kitchen cooks” follow her to her eponymous new restaurant. On the other hand, if we actually see her manning that oven, the restaurant could sell tickets.
NYT: Donatella Arpaia Is Putting Chef’s Whites Over Her Prada
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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.
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