February – the shortest month of the year – is jam packed with days celebrating foods various and sundry. The days marked as “national food holidays” include tortilla chips and clam chowder, soup and pancakes, chili and pizza, tortellini and bagels & lox … among many, many others.
The day that intrigues me the most is National Fettuccine Alfredo Day on Feb. 7. Not just because it’s a notably tasty dish – and decidedly fattening – but also because the tales of its creation are pretty much pasta without sauce. Alfredo di Lelio, an Italian restaurateur, is credited with creating the dish in 1908, but the dish is his only if you’re willing to accept it on the sort of faith found at the nearby Vatican.
Consider: The recipe for fettuccine Alfredo – called “Roman pasta” at the time – first appears in a 15th-century cookbook by chef Martino da Como. It’s essentially the same as our modern version – pasta cooked and then, while still hot, coated with butter and “good cheese,” which evolved into parmesan.
Technically, it’s called “pasta al burro e parmigiano.” But when fledgling chef di Lelio began cooking at a restaurant owned by his mother, he added extra butter for his wife, who didn’t have much of an appetite after giving birth to their first son.
In 1914, he opened a restaurant of his own called Alfredo’s, where he referred to himself variously as “The King of Fettuccine,” “The Real King of Fettuccine,” “The Magician of Fettuccine,” “The Emperor of Fettuccine” and “The Real Alfredo.” For a guy who had claimed a recipe that was some 500 years old as his own, he had no lack of vanity.
Indeed, he eventually upgraded the name of the dish on his menu to maestosissime fettuccine all’Alfredo – “Most Majestic Fettuccine, Alfredo Style.”
He also got downright performative. Di Lelio started using gold cutlery to prepare the dish in a style described as a “spectacle reminiscent of grand opera.” It was prepared table-side, where the chef “bends over the great skein of fettuccine, fixes it intensely, his eyes half-closed, and dives into mixing it, waving the golden cutlery with grand gestures, like an orchestra conductor, with his sinister upwards-pointing twirled mustache dancing up and down, pinkies in the air, a rapt gaze and flailing elbows.”
The show transcended the roots of the preparation. American restaurateur George Rector described the preparation as being “accompanied by violin music.”
In 1927, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks dined at Alfredo’s. Jimmy Stewart ate there. So did Bob Hope, Anthony Quinn, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Jack Lemmon, Ava Gardner, Tyrone Power, Sophia Loren and Cantinflas. The restaurant covered its walls with photos of the celebs.
And, here in America, fettuccine is everywhere. Even at Olive Garden, where it’s combined with chicken into chicken Alfredo; and shrimp, which makes it seafood Alfredo. Olive Garden also uses cream and garlic.
Alfredo sauces can be found at supermarkets across the land. You’ll even find versions out there that are reasonably close to the original. I haven’t come across any sushi with Alfredo sauce, but I fear it’s out there.
Where do I go when my soul cries out for a plate (served without gold cutlery, thank you)? Let me tell you…
Cafe Gazelle
191 La Verne Ave., Long Beach (Belmont Shore); 562-438-5033, cafegazelle.top-cafes.com
Cafe Gazelle is so easy to miss, to overlook, to just not see – even though it’s hidden in (almost) plain sight. It sits just a few feet off the happy chaos of 2nd Street in the heart of Belmont Shore, with frenzied crowds crawling from sports bar to sports bar just a glance away.
It’s on narrow, one-way La Verne Avenue, an almost nondescript bunker of a building, hardly large enough to house a hot dog stand, least of all a much-loved Italian restaurant. But then, there it is, a restaurant that surprises on so many levels – location, size, food and the assured joy of landing a table, which is no easy thing to get, especially since reservations aren’t taken.
If you show up with a crowd, you better get there early – or at least with lots of patience. With just nine tables – seating for all of 18 – having dinner at Gazelle is an exercise in ultra-restaurant logistics. That the staff maintains their wit and patience speaks volumes to how amazing this shoebox of a pasta shop is.
The menu is a greatest hits collection of old school Italian favorites, all done very well, served quickly, filling the small room with the wonderful aromas of true home cooking. Indeed, if your imagination allows you to blot out the world that surrounds Gazelle, it’s easy to imagine that you’ve meandered into a mama-and-papa eatery in New York‘s Little Italy, or San Francisco’s North Beach – or Rome’s Trastevere, for that matter.
It’s the sort of little neighborhood restaurant we’re all seeking, the Holy Grail of pasta. And pasta there is, in quantities to spare.
Pastas take up a big chunk of the menu, cooked just right, sauced to perfection; if we had real Italian mamas, we’d have eaten like this every night. (My own mama cooked Buitoni out of the box, then flavored it with butter and ketchup, which was not unknown in The Bronx.)
If you feel like spaghetti with meatballs, there they are, as good as ever – the meatballs hand-crafted in the tiny kitchen, a complex yet light mix of meats and spices, and a minimum of breading. Get the spaghetti just for the meatballs – and the meat sauce as well. (Or cut to the chase, and get the appetizer of rosemary flavored chicken meatballs in a nifty sundried tomato cream sauce. I don’t like the texture of the chicken as much as the meat, but I still gobble them with joy.)
If you’ve been longing for the cream and cheese of high-test Italian cooking, there are such nostalgic favorites as spaghettini carbonara (made with lots of bacon and cream sauce), and fettuccine Alfredo (parmigiana and cream). The fettuccine Michelangelo is a bit like a child of Alfredo, with the addition of chicken, mushrooms and pork capicola.
Chicken is a big part of the menu as well, with nearly as many chicken dishes as pasta – dishes that take us on a lovely journey through near forgotten descriptives like piccata, cacciatore and marsala. Veal and beef dishes abound, seafood leans toward the big plate school of pescatore and frutti di mare.
Though there’s a very good caprese, this is not really a salad restaurant; arugula may be rarer here than any Italian restaurant in town. What it is, first and foremost, is a place to be – a restaurant in which you feel the life of the neighborhood, in which you can pretend to be not here, but there.
Phil Trani’s
3490 Long Beach Blvd., Long Beach; 562-426-3668, www.philtrani.com
Forgive me the cliché, but they sure don’t make restaurants like Phil Trani’s anymore. Not with its large dining room, brightly lit, where family groups gather to pass dishes of calamari fritti, mozzarella marinara, fried zucchini, fettuccine Alfredo and veal parmigiana around, with nary a pizza in sight. Not with its dimly lit bar, with locals and regulars on the stools, many of whom know each other on a first-name basis, drinking and eating – but mostly drinking.
The Trani family has been in the restaurant business since 1925, when Filippo Trani opened his Majestic Café in San Pedro – a decade after arriving on Ellis Island with $20 in his pocket. The Trani name has long been synonymous with classic Italian cooking – both at J. Trani’s in San Pedro, and Phil Trani’s, which opened in 1990, just north of the 405 on Long Beach Boulevard. (Which is not where you’d expect to find a restaurant that feels very much as if it should be near the Harbor, like the other Trani restaurants.)
This is not to give the impression that everything at Phil Trani’s is from yesteryear. There’s pan-seared ahi on the menu, along with a seafood and sausage jambalaya – neither of which are found in the canon of Italian cooking from back in the day.
But this is also a restaurant that’s nostalgic enough to include such oldies-but-tasties as baked sausage topped with mozzarella, shrimp Louie, and spumoni for dessert. It’s hard not to dive deep into the world of dishes remembered so fondly.
The garlic bread is covered with more than enough melted parmesan and roasted garlic. The aforementioned fried zucchini is a fond reminder of the sort of fried food that used to dominate our diets, back before we discovered the joys of sushi.
As a reminder of the family’s fishing roots (Filippo Trani wasn’t in San Pedro by accident), there are some terrific steamed clams, made with Eastern littlenecks. They call them Trani’s Steamers, and that’s what they are.
There’s linguine with clams, angel hair with seafood marinara, halibut, sand dabs and more as well. But if anything, along with the pasta, of course, it’s beef that dominates the menu.
The restaurant takes great pride in its pot roast, slow-cooked for seven hours, served very unexpectedly with a Caesar salad, in a lunchtime sandwich, and with mostaccioli. I guess that’s why the menu tells us this is “Creative Cuisine.” And goes on to offer to make any of the entrées “to your liking.” (Always a risky offer, considering the many dietary eccentricities in Southern California.)
And so, along with the fettuccine Alfredo, I go here for the halibut, crusted with bacon and bread crumbs; it’s a nice piece of fish, well-cooked, but perhaps with a bit too much going on around it.
Closer to old school simplicity are the lightly breaded pan-fried sand dabs, a reminder of why we love sand dabs so much. The veal in the veal dishes is tender and tasty, the steaks are actually a pretty good deal, considering that they include bread, soup or salad, and yes, pasta.
The Crooked Duck
5096 E. Pacific Coast Hwy., Long Beach; 562-494-5118, www.thecrookedduck.com
The story behind the restaurant’s name is found on their website, where we’re told, “As a young boy, [owner] Joseph Rooney was told the legend of ‘the crooked duck.’ … About a man who accidentally hit a duck while he was out water-skiing on the lake. Everyone on the boat was horrified, staring at the water in disbelief.
“And what they thought was a dead duck … started to move, [swimming] toward the shore in a very peculiar manner. When it reached the lake’s shore it waddled away, but … the duck’s neck was now crooked – an acknowledgement to the resilience of a duck. Joey never forgot about the legend, and ‘The Crooked Duck’ is his tribute to that duck!”
The duck lives on as a cartoon character on the menu, sort of a Daffy Duck gone weird. And the duck’s dilemma also can be found in the headings on menu – Duckling Starter Plates, Crooked Burgers, Crooked Sandwiches and Crooked Libations. Which in more than a few cases really are.
As neighborhood restaurants go, The Crooked Duck does not stick to the straight and narrow. It’s an oddly configured old cottage, with rooms here and there, which plays very well with the “crooked” nature of the place. There’s a patio that looks out on the neighborhood, which has enough deciduous trees to be worthy of New England.
Show up Tuesday through Friday, and there’s a happy hour with reduced prices on drinks, and “crooked” snacks like the pulled pork and roast beef sliders, the fine fish tacos (good cilantro-lime sauce), the various Buffalo chicken wings, the artichoke and toasted cashew dip, the fried green beans and the “Yokohama” sesame chicken nachos – a Japanese-Italian dish that pretty well defines things at The Duck.
Come in during lunch and dinner, and the happy hour snacks expand into Southern-fried chicken egg rolls, fried mac and cheese wedges, coconut prawns with Thai chili sauce, even baked brie in puff pastry – a dish that dates back to the great age of cheese fondue and California dip (a blast from the past that still pleases).
Indeed, there are enough retro preps on the menu for the food at The Duck to qualify as a hotbed of culinary nostalgia. There’s a Swiss cheese patty melt on grilled rye, a French dip au jus, a Monte Cristo, fettuccine Alfredo (trad style, and non-trad with gorgonzola as well), a chicken fried steak with country gravy – and are we surprised to find meatloaf with caramelized onions and red eye gravy. Or coconut cream pie for dessert.
Dining at The Crooked Duck is like pulling on a much-loved pair of jeans. It just feels so right. This is not to say everything is old school. But you’re definitely not gonna find any sushi on this menu.
What you will find is a thick, rich chili made with (yes!) duck that’s been cooked in Chinese five-spice powder. You’ll find a sandwich of Hawaiian-style kalua pulled pork that’s been roasted in coffee and sea salt, then topped with mango ‘que sauce. You’ll find a roasted portobello mushroom and fresh mozzarella sandwich. And a gorgonzola and bacon burger with caramelized onions and sautéed mushrooms. Which is a world apart from fettuccine Alfredo. But then, that’s what makes The Crooked Duck…so crooked.
Domenico’s
5339 E. 2nd St., Long Beach (Belmont Shore); 562-439-0261, domenicosrestaurant.com
Domenico’s takes great pride in being, “Long Beach’s oldest restaurant … serving the Shore since ’54.”
And though the menu does have some modernist moments on it (pepperoni mac and cheese! kale and spinach salad!), at least some of it is as it was back in the day, when Domenico Spano opened as a pizzeria, one of the first, serving eight pre-set pizzas, and two salads. Also spumoni.
You can check out the early menus, posted on the walls, and on the website; they speak of a style of dining that’s vanished. Even at Domenico’s, where the number of pizza options is many (chicken Alfredo pizza!), as are the number of pastas, salads, soups and so forth.
Still, there’s something about the Domenico’s experience that speaks of times gone by, and much missed. You sit down, you get a basket of several breads to chew on, and both olive oil and balsamic to dip the breads in.
Order just about anything on the menu, except for the pizza of course, and you get a choice of soups – though the tomato bisque and French onion sound nice, minestrone cries out as the soup of choice. And it’s a good thing too; this is as good as minestrone gets, as much veggies as broth.
Order a sandwich, and you also get a pasta salad, reminding me that pasta salad can be a really wonderful thing, if prepared with care, herbs and spices, and not just tossed together as a “thing” to fill out the plate.
This pasta salad is worth a trip here all by itself. And so, for that matter, is the sandwich called Pizza on a French Roll. It’s a delicious mishmash of stuff – a choice of any two pizza meats (meatballs and pepperoni are a fine combo) on an open-faced roll with lots of sauce, mozzarella, onions and mushrooms. I guess there’s a way to pick it up and eat it. But it strikes me as a road to droopy, saucy disaster. A fork and knife do just fine. And to your surprise (mine at least), the whole thing disappears.
The sandwiches are classics – meatball, sausage, chicken parmesan, submarine. The fried calamari is crunchy as could be. The pastas remind us of the joys of lasagna and fettuccine and penne and ravioli and, yes, spaghetti, dear old, good old spaghetti.
The pizzas are thin-crust, and mostly non-gimmicky – the chicken Alfredo and the spicy barbecue chicken are as wild as they get. But mostly, this is pizza like we ate pizza back in 1954 – tomatoes, garlic, basil, sausage, pepperoni, salami and cheese, lots of cheese.
There’s a photo on the website of Domenico sitting with a bevy of Wilson High School girls around 1958. They look like girls from the ’50s. He looks like a modern film star, with a goatee and a black shirt. Like the food at Domenico’s – old school, but fresh and new at the same time.
Pike Restaurant & Bar
1836 E. 4th St., Long Beach; 562-437-4453, www.pikelongbeach.com
For newcomers, it takes a bit to absorb all the elements of Pike. There’s an amazing old-school jukebox near the entrance – that alone is worth several hours of study, and lots of coins. (On one page, The Grateful Dead sit next to Duran Duran, right across from Willie Nelson and ZZ Top!)
The beers on tap are many; the beers in bottles are many more. There’s a section of souvenirs – t-shirts, trucker hats and the like. There are several rooms, packed, jammed with … stuff. So much is on the walls, it’s easy to miss the fact that the place is painted aquamarine. Or what I think is aquamarine. Like a proper joint, the lighting is limited.
There’s a calendar for live music, which goes down pretty much every night; when your owner is a musician, you better expect live music. You also better expect food that’s downhome, tasty, not fussy in the least – this is not a quinoa and kale type of place. This is road food, the sort of chow much loved by a guy who spent more than a little time on the road. It ain’t fancy, but it’s good.
There are, of course, the burgers or, to be more precise, the Famous Burgers – ranging from the basic (on a “freshly baked French roll”) through models topped with bacon and bleu cheese, whiskey marinated mushrooms, bacon and barbecue sauce, jalapeños and Swiss, guac and of course, chili and cheddar.
They come with sides of well-crisped fries, alone with coleslaw, refried beans, spuds and, for a little more, onion rings or a cuppa soup. I guess.
There are many tacos as well. Classicist that I am, I lean toward the steak taco, and am properly surprised to find a lobster taco on the menu, which seems a tad fancy for a place that proudly makes its onion rings with Pabst.
The chili cheese fries come closer to my sense of the chow, along with the Buffalo hot wings, served with thick-cut fries, just in case you need more. (It’s the food equivalent of the amps in “This is Spinal Tap,” which go up to “11.”)
There are numerous pastas, including a heart-stopping fettuccine Alfredo, and a lobster mac and cheese. And then, there’s the bar food of the fish and chips, shrimp and chips, and the 15 sandwiches (hot pastrami always sounds good to me).
It led me to look for the Jefferson Airplane spinoff Hot Tuna on the jukebox. I didn’t find it. But I did find Loretta Lynn, Led Zeppelin and steel guitarist Jeremy Wakefield – three artists who have probably never been mentioned before in a single sentence.
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
