That “drink after work” thing is not really about a drink. It’s an escape from ennui, stale air, the copier just ran out of toner, we didn’t like the tone of that last email from our biggest client, and there’s a personal text message on our cell phone we’ve decided not to answer until later. Much later.
We claw our way out of the office, desperate for a breeze and a cocktail, and begin the search for an outside venue, of which there are precious few, and those include curbside seating on busy streets and tables in parking lots.
But Artisan in the Delamar Hotel in Southport opens their back doors onto an open-air bar and patio where, if you pretend a little bit, you can think you are in Europe.
The hotel itself provides privacy from traffic on three sides, and the tiny street that abuts the fourth is private. Bicycles are lined up in sturdy racks, rattan furniture and Adirondack chairs are scattered in conversational groupings, and flowers hang from trellises and bloom in pots and boxes; hence, the name: the Pergola, Patio, and Garden Bar.
When Harry’s Liquor Store and the Fairfield Cheese Shop decided to tear down the wall they shared between them, customers could wander back and forth, tasting wine and snacking on crackers and cheese. It was the perfect symbiosis of oenophiles and cheesemongers. It couldn’t get any better. But yeah. It could. And it did.
Brothers David and Andrew Tavolacci, who sold fresh pasta and sauces at their little and much- loved store in Georgetown, made a smart decision to move to Fairfield and share the parking lot with Harry’s. Now we can shop for the trifecta of food – wine, cheese, and pasta – without re-parking the car.
Tutto’s is where you go to purchase fresh pasta and home-made sauces, Wave Hill Bread, pesto, soups, and a variety of specialty foods.
Since I attended a 2-hour olive oil tasting at Olivette, co-sponsored by The Fairfield Green Food Guide, I am deeply ashamed of my olive oil buying habits and I promise to be a better person.
I thank Alina Lawrence, co-owner and general manager of Olivette, an olive oil and vinegar tasting room and specialty foods store in Darien, for her inspired decision to invite professional olive oil taster Arden Kremer to host the tasting. I thank Ms. Kremer for her patience with my sweetly stupid questions, and I will change my ways before someone sees what I am pouring on my salad.
Historically, I have bought olive oil that comes in a bottle that has lots of Italian writing on it in squirrely script, maybe some pictures of olive trees. Also, sometimes there is a sale on industrial-sized cans of olive oil which I know will last me years because I live alone and do not use olive oil for any purpose outside of the kitchen.
If you are the type who scoffs at the red pepper flakes provided at the local pizza parlor, screwing off the top to be able to pour the maximum number of flakes on your slice while saying loudly enough for tables nearby to hear, “Ha! You call this hot?”, then you really need Tom Salemme.
Along with his extended Italian family residing in and around Cheshire CT – and to be fair, Brooklyn - Tom keeps the Salemme tradition going. It started a couple of generations ago, great-great-grandparents growing peppers for their own use, but friends and neighbors had to have some, too.
The tradition lived on long after the first and second generations passed away and the family farm was sold. Salemme peppers stayed, sowed and harvested on local farmland owned by T&D Growers, dried in nearby greenhouses, and, finally, the tiny peppers are plucked by hand from the dry plants at long tables in Tom Salemme’s backyard on an autumn afternoon.
We weren’t twenty minutes into our conversation when Adrian Pace took out his I-phone and showed me pictures of his freezer. “Look there,” he said, touching the screen and bringing up another image of the freezer from a different angle. “Right in the middle of Stew Leonard’s. Great placement! ”
Wow, I‘m thinking. Most people show you pictures of their kids.
But this is how excited Adrian Pace is about his product, Forte Gelato, a low-fat, protein-enriched gelato. He’s Italian – that explains the gelato part – but he’s also a lifelong heart patient at Columbia Hospital where he survived half a dozen major surgeries since the age of 5, literally hundreds of smaller procedures, endless medication, loneliness - and after waiting over seven months in the hospital for a donor heart - bouts of hopelessness. He was 37 years old.
I’ve never turned down a free sample. I’m shameless. I go back for seconds. I eat those stubs of hot dogs dipped in mustard at Stop & Shop, the weensy little mini-meals served in tiny paper cups at Trader Joe’s, curls of glamorous artisanal cheeses from a display of food and flowers at Balducci’s, chocolate at Garelick & Herbs, a taste of wine at my neighborhood liquor store. Especially wine, but they don’t usually let you go back for seconds and thirds.
This time I was snarking a free hunk of freshly-baked bread at Billy’s Bakery in Fairfield and a lovely young lady offered me a free spoonful of jam: strawberry-lemonade, blueberry-basil, or pineapple-kiwi. I chose the blueberry, primarily because I was intrigued by the basil, although they seem to be putting basil in a lot of things lately. I had a basil shortbread cookie last summer. Here is where the blueberry-basil jam became more than a free sample; it was the beginning of a beautiful culinary relationship.
