Tag: Novel

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Armando Gagliano’s path to becoming a chef

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Porcini mushroom ravioli from Michael Donahue on Vimeo.

Armando Gagliano’s path to becoming a chef

Armando Gagliano’s mother blindfolded him when he was five or six years old, but it wasn’t to play Blind Man’s Seek.

“She would blindfold me and give me different things to eat and taste, and I’d have to tell her what it was,” Gagliano says. “She’d even let me taste wine — just a little sip — and she’d ask, ‘What nuance of the wine do you see? What do you taste?’ She was training my palate. Not on purpose, but because she saw that I took an interest in food and flavors.”

Gagliano loved hanging out in the kitchen. “When my mom would be cooking when we were younger, I would be the only one in the kitchen just staring at her. Like ‘What are you doing? What is that?’ I guess she picked up on my interest.”

The tables have turned — literally. Now when Gagliano is in the kitchen cooking at Libro or Ecco on Overton Park, his mother, Sabine Bachmann, who owns both restaurants, often stands by asking similar questions.

Gagliano, 28, is executive chef of Libro, the restaurant in the new Novel bookstore in Laurelwood, and at Ecco.

Growing up, Gagliano was interested in architecture. He loved drawing, sketching, and painting. When he was 8 years old, he told his mother he wanted to own a restaurant named Silly Wolf’s. He remembers “drawing plans of the building. So, there was a little bit of the artistry, then some of the architecture, then the food, all in one deal. I was like, ‘I want to design my own kitchen and the front of the building, then the menu.'”

His first job was making sandwiches and pasta salad when he was 13 at his mom’s former restaurant, Fratelli’s. “It was long hours, but it was fun.”

Gagliano thought of becoming a nurse practitioner, but before the final day to register, he told his mom, “I’m not going to register for class. I’m going to save that money and go buy a knife set, then go get a job at a restaurant.”

He got a job as a prep cook at Sweet Grass. His idea was to work his way up in different kitchens and one day become a chef de cuisine. But six months later, Bachmann opened Ecco and asked Gagliano if he could run the kitchen. “She said, ‘I’ve always eaten your food and loved it. You just come up with the menu. Do whatever you want back there.'”

Gagliano decided on a Mediterranean menu, but he uses ingredients from all over — Italy, southern Spain, Germany, Israel, North Africa, Asia. “I like the flavors that just punch you in the face. We used to do this steak dish that was marinated in guajillo chiles and soy sauce. So, it was like an American steak with a Mexican and Asian marinade. With French beans. Why omit all the other ingredients and flavors that you can zest up your food with or expand upon by trying to keep it a set cuisine when you can be global? Global cuisine.”

Gagliano spent four months last year in Italy at the Italian Culinary Institute. He came back with “more of an appreciation for how much time and effort people will put into food. In the type of food that I love, which is mainly Italian.”

Two weeks after returning to Memphis, Bachmann was asked by his mom to become the chef at Libro.

Trying to get him to keep the same menu as Ecco, a family friend told Gagliano, “Don’t fix something unless it’s broken.”

“I say, ‘I like to break things purposely so I can fix them in a different way.'”

“My mom says, ‘We’re not trying to do fancy Michelin-style food here, okay? We want to do a nice lunch with some dinner items, homemade bread. We use clean, fresh ingredients. And then, every once in a while, if you want to to a special with your little crazy crap on it, do that.'”

Says Gagliano: “I didn’t want to do any super-eclectic stuff here in East Memphis. We have some typical American items, like a BLT. Chicken salad.”

But he also serves Mediterranean-influenced items, including porcini mushroom ravioli.

And, he says, “We do our own house-made Italian sausage here with baked beans. But it’s not like American-style baked beans. It is and it isn’t. They have some sweetness. We put balsamic vinegar in with the beans and molasses and some honey and brown sugar. So, it’s got a little twist in there with the Italian sausage and the balsamic. Then, also, with my roots in the South, the baked beans.”

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News News Blog

Novel Opening in Booksellers Space

CREDIT: Booksellers at Laurelwood, Facebook

Booksellers at Laurelwood, Facebook

Book lovers, rejoice. Plans for a new book store in the old Booksellers at Laurelwood space are going forward. It will be called Novel.

A lease was signed yesterday, according to Cory Prewitt, chief operating officer and marketing director of Laurelwood Shopping Center.

A group of local investors, including John Vergos, stepped up in March to open the new store. The other investors are Matthew Crow, Christy Yarbro, Wilson Robbins, and Frank Jones.

Novel will be roughly half the space of the 25,000-square-foot Booksellers. Prewitt says that while the layout will be different, the new store will be similar to the old store with a magazine section, a children’s section, a local section, and a cafe. The CD section has been skeddadled, and the sidelines (everything but books) has been narrowed down.

Prewitt also says they’ll be rehiring much of the old Booksellers’ staff, including longtimer Mark Frederick.

Archimania will do the design, and the University of Memphis architecture department has donated its services as well.

Opening date for Novel has been set for August 1st, just in time for school.

Prewitt says Novel will be a smaller but upgraded version of Booksellers, a store that “our city deserves.”

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Book Features Books

An Undertaking

David Kurzweil isn’t the “suggestible” sort — the sort to believe in the supernatural, the paranormal, and the otherwise inexplicable. A hypnotist who couldn’t hypnotize him once said as much. Kurzweil says so himself: “Logic is what holds it all together.” And by “all,” Kurzweil means the world as we know it, the world “as it is,” the observable, testable, verifiable world of cause and effect.

Which doesn’t mean Kurzweil isn’t searching — searching for “something unseen behind common experience, some totality” to be glimpsed between the “cracks,” as in that crack between the worlds of the living and the dead.

But what is Kurzweil to do when, alone inside the funeral home where he works, he sees, one day at dusk, a vapor exiting (or is it entering?) the body of a dead woman? More than a vapor, Kurzweil claims, but how to describe it? It seemed to him alive. It had “intelligence.” It looked at him. Seconds later, it was gone.

Not for long. The memory of it haunts him, and when news of a “ghost” reaches outside the funeral home, a newspaper reporter hounds him about it, a psychic researcher tests him on it, and scientists at the local university ask him to deny it. But no denying the life-changing effects of Kurzweil’s vision on the man himself and those closest to him: his co-workers, his girlfriend, his ex-wife, and his widowed mother. Where are the words to describe the effects? In Alan Lightman’s new novel, Ghost (Pantheon).

Lightman, a native Memphian, is a theoretical physicist by training, but he’s also a science writer, essayist, and best-selling author of the novel Einstein’s Dreams and National Book Award finalist in fiction for The Diagnosis. He is also the first person to receive a dual faculty appointment at MIT in science and the humanities, which puts him in the perfect position to pose David Kurzweil’s questions and our own — questions about the limits of science and religion, about the powers of reason and faith, and about the present, which is fleeting, and the past, which is faulty with memories. Questions too about the passing of time itself: Is it the ticking of a clock, or sunlight crossing a room, or the ripples from a stone tossed in a stream?

What are we to make, though, of David Kurzweil, a 42-year-old man who served nine unambitious years working at a bank (he’s a wiz at numbers), only to be downsized right out the door? Mortuaries “repulse” him, and yet he applies for a job in one. He lives alone and comfortably enough in an unremarkable apartment. His reading, however, is anything but commonplace: Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations), Antoine Lavoisier (Elements of Chemistry), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), and Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man).

He’s also divorced, but his ex-wife of 12 years still has hold of him emotionally, to the distress of his girlfriend, who is otherwise the essence of understanding. His widowed mother is something of a cold fish, and yet he admires her, while it’s his father who lays claim to one of Kurzweil’s fondest childhood memories, and yet he’s a father dead now for decades. Add to these plot points Kurzweil’s metaphysical speculations and his run-in with an apparition, little wonder that when Ghost opens, the man is one step from a nervous breakdown. But it puts him in good company with his funeral-home boss, who suffers from a panic attack after venturing into the unpredictable, sometimes violent outside world.

That’s a lot of plot points to fold into this narrative, which is, on the one hand, a family drama and, on the other hand, an extended meditation on what Kurzweil calls “the world underneath” — the extrasensory spirit world. You can take that to include a world of ghosts, a world for some of us true enough. Or is it the equally mysterious world of the imagination, unmeasurable by the standards of science but true just the same?