Perfectly Frank
Back when I was waiting tables, I liked to end my shift with a couple of stiff drinks at the bar, then wander over to Jimmy and Mary’s Steakhouse at 34th Street and Main — it used to serve food until 3 a.m. — for a plate of ravioli, a tossed salad and two buttered slabs of Roma bread before I started, you know, some serious boozing. The steakhouse was well over forty years old then and was already a bit shabby around the edges, but who cared? The look was part of the restaurant’s distinctive personality; the neighborhood had definitely lost whatever allure it may have once had, but Jimmy and Mary’s still possessed a kind of rakish charm, 1950s glamour gone to seed.
The Italian-American fare was solid enough — garlic-broiled steaks, fried chicken, coconut-cream pies in graham-cracker crusts — and the people watching was even better. In the mid-’80s, the place attracted a rogue’s gallery of guests, from Mission Hills socialites to Main Street working girls. One late night, an octogenarian in a checkered sports coat and jaunty fedora turned to me and announced that he was “the ambassador to the United States from merry old Scotland.” I looked down to see that his shoes were held together with duct tape. “But that was many years ago, dear boy,” he said. “I’ve had a few reverses.”
“It was a diverse clientele, that’s for sure,” recalls Frank Macaluso, who for fourteen years managed the place for his grandmother, the legendary Mary Tidona of the namesake restaurant. (Her original partner, Jimmy Goodwin, stayed in the business only a few months.) “We had doctors, judges, street people. A vast variety of people.”
The boisterous and good-natured Macaluso closed Jimmy and Mary’s Steakhouse in 1994 and started a catering company. It’s taken him nearly a decade to open a new restaurant, this one named for Mary’s great-granddaughter, his daughter Gia. It’s a more upscale venue than Jimmy and Mary’s, but the large portrait of Mary Tidona — in a black-velvet dress, white opera gloves, and pearls — that dominated the 34th Street location is now hanging in a prominent spot in the new dining room.
The dining room of Gia’s Italian Cucina is barely four months old, but the brick building dates back to the early twentieth century, when it was a neighborhood grocery store (including a long stint as one of the early Milgram’s) in a West Side community bustling with industry. By the 1920s, this stretch of the boulevard was already pretty industrial, with chemical companies, repair shops, warehouses, feed stores, and auto-repair shops. With so many businesses, it wasn’t surprising that the area was loaded with little cafés and diners to feed the workers. All the joints were listed in the city directories by the names of the cook-owners: Mrs. Amelia Becker, Mrs. Jennie Householder, Mrs. Anna Hudgins. Within a decade, most of those little restaurants were gone. Nearly half a century would pass before Southwest Boulevard had a revival as “restaurant row.”
Macaluso’s place is the first exclusively Southern Italian restaurant in the neighborhood in years, and it’s a welcome addition. The 49-seat space has been given a neoclassic bistro design — concrete floors; whirling fans hanging from 14-foot ceilings; shiny, uncloaked tables; a granite-topped bar — and a menu that combines the best of the Mary Tidona recipes (lasagna, ravioli, steaks) with newer culinary innovations created by chef Ryan Solien. It’s a successful mix of traditional and stylish, with only a handful of Tidona’s extensive Italian-American dishes surviving into the millennium. One old favorite that didn’t make the cut: Southern-fried chicken (a staple, interestingly enough, of most Sicilian restaurants for decades), which Macaluso says he may add to the menu. “You can’t imagine the calls we get asking about it,” he says.
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I don’t remember Caesar salads prepared tableside at Jimmy and Mary’s, but they’re a huge hit at Gia’s, where Macaluso or one of his staff does a performance-art piece (one well worth the price), creating a remarkably faithful reproduction of Caesar Cardini’s original, made-in-Tijuana version: A garlicky, golden vinaigrette of olive oil, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, egg, red-wine vinegar, anchovies, grated Parmesan, and Worcestershire sauce (with a splash of hot sauce, Frank’s “secret” ingredient) is mixed in a large walnut bowl and tossed with croutons and chopped romaine. It’s delicious and generous enough to stand alone as a complete meal, eaten with a few wedges of the buttery, freshly baked focaccia or one of the heartier appetizers, such as the fried artichoke hearts stuffed with herbed cheese or chef Solien’s elegantly composed cakes of golden fried risotto floating on a puddle of pale-yellow saffron sauce.
On my first visit, I settled for a more demure salad — cubes of ruby-red beets mixed with crumbles of goat cheese, slivers of mint and chopped onion in a red-wine vinaigrette — to accompany a decadent supper of fried potato puffs, Solien’s variation on gnocchi. The airy, amber-crusted dumplings soaked up the sage-seasoned butter sauce.
My friend Steve, practicing that carb-free diet, ate only an antipasto plate that night, but it was generously heaped with a briny olive salad, capocollo ham, salami, mortadella, salty chunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano, soft mozzarella, and provolone. Bob cooed over the tender veal lemonata, its fork-tender flesh lusciously appointed with succulent artichoke hearts and capers.
On my second visit (with Jim and Marie in tow), it was a busy Saturday night and the place was packed, but manager Jamie Colon did a terrific job of keeping the dining room humming. Italian-American Jim, celebrating a birthday supper, was impressed from his first buttery wedge of focaccia. “Doughy and slightly undercooked, the way I like it,” he said. Marie was hoping to see a celebrity in the place (she did recognize a former baton-twirling champion at another table) and liked the energy at Gia’s. “It’s very urban and attractive,” she said. “Why haven’t I heard about it?”
Marie moved to town after Jimmy and Mary’s had closed, but she gave a thumbs-up to the revival of that restaurant’s famous lasagna, a 5-inch slab of baked pasta layered with ricotta, mozzarella, Parmesan and provolone, then smothered in meat sauce. “It’s huge!” she gasped. “It’s awesome.” She couldn’t finish it and took most of the dish home. Jim, on the other hand, wolfed down the Steak Modiga, a juicy, 10-ounce filet stuffed with lobster, shrimp and mushrooms. I somehow managed to snag a piece of his meat, and it was, as they say in Italy, un morso spettacolar. Although I’ve become increasingly bored with salmon (especially the tasteless, farm-raised variety) in local restaurants, chef Solien’s idea of wrapping the fish in a slightly crisp sheath of prosciutto and drizzling it with a fiery red pepper coulis was too inspired to pass up. It was wonderful — moist and flaky under that salty, pink shell.
Ask for the bananas Foster dessert — also prepared tableside — even if you have to whine and wheedle to get it. It’s one of the best desserts in town, far superior to the perfunctory version served at the Phillips Chophouse (where the caramel sauce was made in advance). We watched Frank Macaluso stir up the butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and banana liqueur in a pan, toss in the firm, sliced bananas and light the potent rum. Whoosh! It’s a show and even better yet, a sensual dessert, served hot and sticky over a soothing mound of nutmeg-cinnamon ice cream. “It’s incredible!” said Jim, licking his lips.
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I was less entranced by the tiramisu, which consisted of slightly moist ladyfingers stacked like Lincoln Logs with only a dollop of Mascarpone cheese holding them together and barely a hint of espresso or liqueur. It was too trendy for its own good. Alas, there are none of Mary Tidona’s signature cream pies on the menu (“No one even asks about them,” Macaluso says), but for fans of that particular delicacy, the Town Topic Diner is barely a gnocchi toss away. I’d rather eat the rum-scented bananas Foster anyway. It’s as close as I come to having a stiff drink these days, and there’s never a hangover.
