The Secret of Cacio Pepe

Inside NYC restaurants, book and movie recommendations, a contemporary classic cocktail, and links we've been loving.

My late, beloved father had many rituals he loved, one of which was making cheese fondue on Christmas Eve. I’d watch him carefully rub the fondue pot with garlic, heat the wine and kirsch in the pot on the stove, then remove it from the heat and begin gently stirring in the cheese.

I marveled at the way the hard shredded cheese didn’t simply melt in the wine, but combined with it to form the luxurious thick fondue.

Fast forward fifty years to West 12th Street, where Ann and I have been dying to give cacio pepe, the cheese and pepper pasta dish, another go. We’d tried, somewhat carelessly, two times before, with recipes we found online. Both were the same: heavy, clumpy, barely edible caccio pepe, the cheese knotted into chunks, separated fat, insipid pasta.

This time, we did some research and found two invaluable sources that followed similar tacks: Lydia Bastianich’s recipe, and Kenji’s Serious Eats description of what makes it work.

We did a version closer to Kenji’s in that we finished the pasta in a Dutch oven, cooking it first in a small amount of water in a cast iron skillet (to increase the starchiness of the water which will be part of the sauce). First we bloomed the pepper in some olive oil in the Dutch oven, added a ladle of the pasta water into it, then transferred the pasta to the Dutch oven using tongs so that plenty of water came with it.

Then we stirred in the grated pecorino romano, a half cup at a time, over the pasta, stirring continuously, and adding hot pasta water when it became too thick. Cheese, pasta water, cheese, pasta water. The cheese and water emulsified beautifully into a creamy homogenous sauce.

Here was the key to perfect cacio pepe: Never letting the cheese get too hot. Get the cheese too hot, and its proteins seize into clumps. And once that happens, there’s no fixing it, no undoing the clumps of knotted protein. Simply use the hot pasta water, which will be under 200˚F, to do the melting.

Just like Dad’s fondue. Dad never let the fondue come to a boil—he just let the heat of the liquid take care of the cheese. Same with the cacio pepe—let the gentle heat of the starchy pasta water make love to the cheese. The result is a delectable, cheesy, three-ingredient dish.

I’ve posted a recipe with all the notes and finesse points here. It’s one of the great pasta dishes.

Your Table Is Ready …

I just finished a fabulous memoir about life in the front of the house of New York City restaurants, from the drug-fueled 1980s, up through the 2000s and the pandemic. It was written by veteran Maitre d’Hotel, Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, was published in the fall.

I’m writing about it here, rather than in the reading endorsements below because I loved this book. Since Kitchen Confidential, there have been many memoirs written by chefs and servers, most of them pretty good. This book, Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York Maître D’, is a worthy front-of-the-house companion to KC.

Illustration of The River Cafe by John Donohue.

It’s not as surprising as KC was in 1999. We all know now about bad behavior in the kitchen and the dark subculture of people who work in restaurants, but reading this book reminded me afresh of just how astonishing it all is, this world of the chichi Manhattan restaurant. How much drinking is done on the job, the abusive chefs, the drugs in the bathroom, the sex. It’s all here told in lively, funny, bawdy prose and fabulous stories. Even the mob is involved.

And the behind the scenes stories of some of the best known restaurants in the city are compelling: The River Cafe, The Water Club, Odeon, Raoul’s, Bobo, and Steven Starr’s Le Coucou.

Illustration of Raoul’s by John Donohue.

If you’re a fan of restaurant culture, this is a terrific book by a talented writer. The only downside for me is that now I have to go to Le Coucou!

(And the lovely illustrations above are by John Donohue, who has turned his obsession with drawing his dish rack every night into a thriving career drawing the exteriors of the world’s great restaurants. The above are from his All the Restaurants in New York. His latest, A Taste of London, will be out in May. You can purchase individual prints from his site, alltherestaurants.com.)

What we’re drinking…

After enjoying last newsletter’s Naked and Fabulous cocktail, I became interested in exploring other cocktails that use four ingredients in equal measures. The template begins with The Last Word, a fantastic cocktail from just before Prohibition (3/4 oz each: gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, lime juice). Bartenders have since been playing a lot with this template.

I stopped into the craft cocktail bar, LB, on 7th Avenue and Leroy, and asked bartender/writer Chris Vola for a Naked and Famous (mezcal and yellow chartreuse. Delicious. As is a Paper Plane, a bourbon-amaro 4-ingredients-in-equal-measures cocktail, by Sam Ross.

And this one, Phil Ward’s The Final Ward. Which is exactly a Last Word using rye instead of gin, lemon instead of lime. It’s fabulous.

The Final Ward

• 3/4 ounce rye (preferably 100 proof)

• 3/4 ounce green Chartreuse

• 3/4 ounce maraschino liqueur

• 3/4 ounce lemon juice

Combine all the liquids in a shaker with ice, shake to chill and combine, strain into a chilled coupe.

Using a template is a great way to experiment and come up with new cocktails, which is what my next book, The Book of Cocktail Ratios, is all about.

What we’re watching …

I thought Navalny, , about the Russian politician whom Putin tried unsuccessfully to kill by poison, would be my hands down pick for best documentary. (The doc makes it all too clear that this Putin’s doing—and let us not forget the journalist on the plane rerouted to Belarus and remains, I believe, under house arrest there).

But Nan Goldin’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed makes this category really hard to call. This documentary is a complex mixture of stories: the famous photographer’s story and family history; her documentation of the gay, trans, and downtown life in the late 70s and 80s; the beating she took at the hands of a lover which ultimately resulted in her addiction to opioids; and her current activism to bring the family responsible for our deadly opioid crisis, the Sacklers, to account for what they’ve done to this country in order to enrich themselves and enshrine their name in famous art museums throughout the world. There are just too many themes going on here to list them all—the repressive suburbs of the 1960s, the outcast lives of downtown NYC (and Boston, for that matter), Goldin’s ground-breaking photography. Addiction. Big pharma, womens’ subjugation by men.

Amazingly, it’s all woven together into one brilliant 2-hour documentary. The film weighed heavily on Ann:

I was absolutely riveted for the entire two hours. Goldin explores addiction, politics, family dysfunction, art, sex, corporate greed, and grief all in one movie. We saw it a week ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. 

We also saw the Animated Shorts nominated for Oscars. They were all splendid and well worth finding. My favorite was the meta-stop-motion film, An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It (takes place in an office but otherwise defies description—just watch it; the link takes you to the Vimeo link). The other standout, Ann’s fave, was My Year of Dicks about a teenager’s attempts to lose her virginity. Both hilarious and touching (and streaming on Vimeo and, for another week, Hulu ).

I watched the first episode of Somebody Somewhere, a series on HBO about a woman who returns to her hometown in Kansas after the death of her sister (she’s played by the cabaret phenom, Bridgett Everett) and I loved it so much I didn’t watch another so that Ann and I could watch it together.

One of Ann’s favorite things to do is to go to an afternoon movie in the middle of the week. I had to work and could not join her, regrettably:

The Film Forum is having a Jeanne Moreau festival and I spent a lovely, chilly afternoon watching Elevator to the Gallows, from 1958, Louis Malle’s first feature film (he was only 24!), with a score by Miles Davis (two years before Kind of Blue). “Blonde-tressed Jeanne Moreau and ex-paratrooper lover Maurice Ronet scheme to murder her husband by faking a suicide, but a forgotten rope, a leather-jacketed young punk car thief and a malfunctioning ascenseur conspire to complicate their plans.” I loved every minute. 

And finally, we saw the wrong Pinocchio! We’d been wanting to see the one by Guillermo del Toro. A google search insisted it was on Netflix but I could only locate the short about the making of it. I thought the one on Disney+ might be it but alas, it was the one with Tom Hanks. It reminded me that I can never enjoy a movie in which Hanks affects some kind accent or another. (BTW, I couldn’t find it because the name of the film is “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.” Oy.)

What we’re reading …

Ann surprised me with a lovely volume she found at Three Lives Bookstore, Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans, who is most famous for his series of Madeleine books. This is a delightful novel about the characters and hijinx at a posh Manhattan hotel in the 1920s. With illustrations by the author. A pleasure.

I’ve also been browsing The Manly Art of Knitting, considered a cult classsic, BTW, as I try to work my way through the k1 p1 ribbing of my first hat.

Ann, as ever, has great picks for you this week:

A TOWN CALLED SOLACE by Mary Lawson is an old fashioned, character-driven novel that takes place in a small town in northern Ontario. There’s an old woman who mysteriously leaves her house to Liam, a recently divorced guy happy to flee Toronto and his ex-wife. Next door, seven-year-old Clara awaits the return of her runaway sister, while keeping an eye on Liam and the house. Why did the old woman leave a virtual stranger her house? What happened years ago when Liam’s family lived next door? I highly recommend this one, and I’m getting Lawson’s other novels too. 

Pre-order your must read summer book, LITTLE MONSTERS by Adrienne Brodeur, whose memoir WILD GAME blew my socks off a couple years ago. Like that one, this novel takes place on Cape Cod, which Adrienne writes about so beautifully. Set during one fraught summer as patriarch Adam Gardner’s seventieth birthday approaches, he and his grown children Ken and Abby harbor secrets that threaten to spill out. Then, like in all good books, a stranger comes to town. It will arrive in July, just in time for you to take it to the beach!

What we’re listening to …

The poet Major Jackson has taken over a poetry podcast called The Slowdown. Each weekday he chooses a poem but he does so with an extended essay on the theme of the poem as it relates to his own life. It’s invariably a thoughtful six or seven minute listen. (N.b. Each episode is preceded by about a minute-long ad that Major reads before he begins.)

On Saturday following our viewing of the Nan Goldin documentary, we returned to Le Gigot, the lovely little bistro on Cornelia Street. We were delighting in the music the restaurant was playing—French versions of pop songs of the 60s—”Love Me Do,” “Baby Love,” and the like. We asked the bartender what was playing. His name is Riley Sumala and he said he’d put this playlist together on Spotify. It’s a hoot. Go to Spotify and search “Des Couvres” for the playlist.

Links we’ve loved …

• Are you a writer and struggling? You’re not alone, as this wonderful ode to failure by Stephen Marche describes.

• This is a fabulous profile of Malachy McCourt, Frank’s only slightly lesser known brother, who checked himself out of hospice and is still cracking us up.

• Covid has spurred the return of the luncheonette.

• Here is a terrific article on the bathrooms of New York in this piece from The New Yorker archives, written in 1939.

• The grand Hotel Pennsylvania is being taken down floor by floor. This terrific story about it, by Dan Barry in The Times, includes some gorgeous old photos.

• A young news assistant at The Times wrote this thoughtful essay in defense of processed food.

• Excellent article by Kim Severson on a new book that explores the fascinating origins of food terms (Mukha was the name of an 18th century port that trafficked in coffee, giving us mocha; the city of Chicago gets its name from a Native American word for the wild leeks that grow there).

• The Hollywood sign turns 100 this year—did you know it was erected as an ad for a local real estate company?

• A possible date for Elvis impersonators, this woman has been dressing as Dolly Parton for ten years.

• And this woman rode a ski resort chairlift for seven hours for Outside magazine to try to learn why people endure such headaches and expense to slide down a hill.

• And from the annals of airline cutbacks, have a look at this business-class meal on Japan airlines.

• Think you know your pasta shapes? How many of these 80 shapes can you name? (Thank you Annabelle Mei for the link!)

And finally …

Speaking of pasta and Cacio Pepe, watch this amazing short film on making 29 different pasta shapes. Careful. It’s 26 minutes long—and I found it impossible to turn off.

Thanks for reading, as ever! Feel free to comment or *heart* this post or share it if you know someone who might like it!

—Michael