Appreciating the Taken for Granted

Co-owner: Mark Pascal, New Brunswick; Nonna Catherine Lombardi, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

Not long after launching their upscale American restaurant, Stage Left in New Brunswick, Mark Pascal’s business partner, Francis Schott, suggested they open a second restaurant, based on the cooking of Pascal’s Italian grandmother. Pascal was unconvinced.

“This was the food we had every Sunday,” Pascal says. “Didn’t everybody do that? I didn’t consider doing a restaurant along these lines.”

That was in the early 1990s, when gearing up Stage Left meant weekly trips into the city for the two young men, specifically to Brooklyn, in search of affordable restaurant equipment. It also meant stopping by Catherine Lombardi’s Bensonhurst house for a bowl of macaroni with gravy, and maybe some meatballs.
 “If you went to my grandmother’s house, no ifs, ands or buts, you were sitting down and you were eating,” says Pascal.

For Schott, who diplomatically describes eating the foods provided by his two Irish grandmothers as “a dissimilar experience,” visits to Grandma Lombardi’s were an eye-opener.

“I thought, This food is amazing,” Schott says. “I had seen all these foods on menus before, but nobody was making tomato sauce using tomatoes they canned from what they grew in their backyard, or basil from their garden, or buying meat from the local butcher.”

It took 13 years and the departure of upstairs tenants, but finally Pascal was convinced and in 2005 the restaurateurs opened Catherine Lombardi on Livingston Avenue, one flight above Stage Left. The second restaurant’s menu, its pace, even some of the china, all harken back to what Pascal considered routine but others found special: the Italian-American family gathering and eating.

Pascal, now 46, vividly remembers from his childhood the regular Sunday pilgrimage from Nutley to Brooklyn. “You walked into the kitchen, which wasn’t very large, but there was always a crowd of people there,” he says. “The gravy would be on the stove. Grandma would get up at 6 am to start the gravy.” Some of the other courses, like the ravioli, had been in the works since Tuesday.

“If you walked in at just the right time, the last things to go in the gravy were the black meatballs.”—so-called because they were browned in the pan and not mixed into the sauce—“You could steal one out of the pan—just one, otherwise you’d get your wrist slapped—and it would be hot and crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside. You’d try not to burn your fingers.” 

The black meatballs remain one of Pascal’s beloved dishes today, and a favorite of customers at Catherine Lombardi, though many aren’t quite sure what they are until they ask. Many of the meat dishes, and the simple garlic and olive-oil treatment of vegetable dishes, borrow from Lombardi’s recipes. The restaurant cans 8,000 to 12,000 pounds of tomatoes each summer to recreate her “gravy” throughout the year, and the pasta course goes by the name “macaroni.”

“I never heard the word pasta until I was 18,” says Pascal, who estimates that “96 percent of what’s on the menu are things I had in my childhood.”

The groaning board at the Lombardi rowhouse each Sunday was extensive. After snacking on cheeses, prosciutto, sopressata, roasted red peppers, olives, nuts and other antipasti, the crowd, typically about 25 people, would retreat to the dining room, where three tables stood end-to-end. As the youngest member of his generation, Pascal’s assigned seat was always “at the far end of the add-on to the add-on.” But with one tablecloth covering the whole stretch, Pascal says, “you felt like you were at the same table.”

The formal meal started with the macaroni course: ravioli, lasagna, fusilli, always served with red gravy, with meatballs and sausage on the side. Next came the meat course: turkey, capon, lamb, roast beef or ham, always accompanied by Brussels sprouts, asparagus, green beans and stuffed artichokes (though the cooks invariably forgot the artichokes.) After a lengthy breather, it was time for coffee—black (espresso) or brown (American style) and dessert, typically pastries from a nearby bakery. The entire meal might last five hours or more.

Nowadays, on his frequent trips to his grandmother’s homeland of Naples—she died in 1994 at age 88—Pascal can’t help but notice the contrast between the Italian tempo and that of Americans.

“The Italians are doing it better than we are,” he says. “They may not get as much work done in a day, but they take time to do the things that matter, to spend time with family and friends.” Which is the way it always was at Catherine Lombardi’s house.

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