When the Downtown restaurant where I went every day for lunch closed for remodeling recently, I was cast adrift. It came to me then how important lunch is. It is a respite from the morning and preparation for the afternoon, an opportunity to catch your breath before you return to slug it out until quitting time. What went with the restaurant's closing was my comfort zone.
Yes, of course there were other places to go, and I went to them, but none offered the ideal combination of view, space to read the paper, and the soup and salad meal that was both satisfying and modestly priced.
And so it was that I listened more closely when my friend Bruce May, a banker and oenologist, mentioned the place he likes for lunch. I went the next day. The food was good, and the portions were generous. The place was clean and neat. The waitresses were young and pretty and peppy and polite. To describe Buon Giorno Cafe, 6 Smithfield St., Downtown, you would have to use the word happy.
It is a business from which the staff wants more than profit. Being nice people, they want pleasure for themselves and, not incidentally, for you. If you're downcast, it plays havoc with the general mood. The sober groups of judges, lawyers, bankers, real estate agents and brokers -- men, and in close to equal numbers, women -- who come here have the opportunity to shift their burden. Here everything is rosy.
You want your coffee now? You've got it. You want a side salad, not risotto, with your chicken? No problem. You want whipped cream on your homemade rice pudding made by the owner's sister Cheryl? Glad to do it. What arrives is not just an ample serving but one with a baroque loop of heavy cream with one fresh strawberry in each arch. It's a picture Wayne Thiebaud might like to paint.
I thanked Bruce for his recommendation. Nothing would serve but that we should go together so that I could meet Lou Martorella, the owner, and Michele Trautman, his assistant, and be introduced to Shauna Reilly, Bruce's favorite waitress.
At Buon Giorno Cafe, Bruce is one of the suits. Most often he hangs with a bunch of other suits from the same bank. In the brown bag he often carries is a bottle of wine. Wineglasses immediately appear on a table upstairs. If you are Bruce's friend, you can look greedily at the bag because out of it will come a wine that you will wish you had been smart enough to buy when it was available. On the day of my visit, it's a DeLoach estate bottled zinfandel, O.F.S. (our finest selection), 1997.
Shauna Reilly takes our order for lunch. You can get as accustomed to a waitress's ways as she can get to you. She and Bruce are happy to see one another. They have become friends. He introduces me and explains that the notes I'm taking mean I'm writing a story. Together we discuss the menu, gripe a bit about the weather, and consider the advantages of working at Buon Giorno. "The tips are good, but it's the place that makes the difference," Shauna says. It's what Michele Trautman repeats.
Michele is like the singer in a band. She's the chick up front who keeps the beat. She's pretty, smart and full of life. She is all over you with kindness, and her mission is to please.
"We're a family here," she says. "Come in the second time and someone is sure to remember you. It's important to us that you feel welcome."
Not to say that she doesn't sometimes sweat it. Though they've made an odd choice of restaurants, some customers want to be left strictly alone. The challenge is picking them out. Another source of the jitters are the occasions when Buon Giorno caters for a new customer. Lou says he's done it enough to know how to do it right. Michele wrings her hands. Nothing, she says, calms her nerves like that second order.
The reason for Lou's confidence may be his devotion to product. In New York every year for the food show, he walks the streets of Little Italy intent on finding the best mozzarella, the best prosciutto, the best pecorino cheese.
"If a customer wants something and can provide me with a resource, I'll have that item in the kitchen within two days," he says.
For a little kitchen, they put out a lot of product, much of it grilled, not a lot of it fried. A dozen different sandwiches (from $5 to $6.25), a half-dozen salads ($4.75 to $7), quite a few pastas ($5.75 to $7). On the day I was there the specials were wedding soup ($3.25), Chicken Buon Giorno ($7.75) and grilled vegetables with gorgonzola ($8.25). Desserts range from a homemade chocolate chip cookie ($1.25) to homemade chocolate souffles ($4).
You can eat to the rhythm of a Frank Sinatra vocal or a Luciano Pavarotti aria. If there were anything that could have made lunch taste better on the day I visited, it would have been the presence of those two guys in front of the mike singing their hearts out.
A nice rich rice pudding:
Rice Pudding
1/2 cup uncooked rice
2 cups light cream
2 cups milk
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1/2 cup raisins
2 cups heavy cream
2 tablespoon vanilla
Dash nutmeg
Mix rice, light cream, milk, sugar and salt together in the top of a double boiler. Cover and cook over boiling water about 1 hour. Stir occasionally.
Beat eggs in a bowl. Slowly dribble rice mixture into eggs, beating constantly and vigorously all the time. Return mixture to top of double boiler and continue cooking (still over boiling water) until mixture coats a spoon. Cool completely.
While pudding cools, soak raisins in 1/2 cup water.
Beat heavy cream until it holds a definite shape. Fold cream gently into cold rice mixture, along with drained raisins and vanilla.
Spoon into serving dish. Sprinkle top with nutmeg, and chill in refrigerator until pudding is firm. Serves 8 generously.
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