Scoot discusses his favorites. I think people are mistaking the numbers for the yardstick of quality which is a real problem because if a film only makes however many millions dollars before midnight made, 6 million, we all loved it, but because its only made 6 million doesnt make it a failure or bad movie. So as critics we have to remember that were not analyzing the box office and that were analyzing whether a film is worthy and whether it has value. Bruni food and movies next. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Bruni welcome to the program. Im frank bruni sitting in for charlie wloz is off this week on assignment. About a decade ago, i began a fiveyear stint as the chief restaurant critic at the New York Times. At the time there was a discussion about the dominance of italian food in upscale dining. The trend was observed in new york and other major American Cities as well. There was also a question would this last . Well, if anything, italian is even more dominant and triumphant today. Three guests join me to talk about the root of its appeal and the direction its heading. Michael white is the chef owner of new yorks restaurants marea and costate. Hes a leading italian chef. Mario carbone is a chef owner of three of the hottest restaurants in manhattan, or the reesesy italian specialties, parm, and the brand new carbone. And kate krader is the restaurant editor of food wine magazine. Im pleased to have them all. Kate, i want to start with you. You have been a new york restaurant observer for as long as ive known you and an incredibly knowledgeable one at that. When did you look around in this city and say wow. Italian food has stolen the stage from french . Well, i think when italian food really started it just seemed like a tidal wave in the city is when a restaurant opened in tribeca, the chef is Andrew Cremilini and he made his name at cafe boloud which is a french leaning restaurant, in fact, Mario Carbone worked there. But he was known as a french chef and then he went down to tribeca and took over a sort of failed restaurant space and opened la canda verde and served food everybody wanted to eat and there were super important Italian Restaurants in new york city before then but i think that sort of changed the way that everybody all of a sudden wanted to do italian style Roast Chicken and pasta. Bruni michael, would you agree with that or set it at a different date, restaurant, chef . I think for the new wave of restaurants as kate is speaking of Italian Restaurants that are very, very, if you will italian shabby chic, somewhat of a trat rhea but more americanized, that wave started four or five years ago. The real wave of italian food that i started with in 2002 and previous to that as bobo in early 98, i think thats another turning point of italian food. How we thought about it in the levels. But all this if bobo wouldnt have been there and the restaurants proceeding that, locondo, it evolved into a with american sensibility, an Italian Restaurant with american sensibility. A big restaurant, fantastic products and italian ingredient thought process. Bruni why for so long is french seen as the cuisine you had to do if you were serious about cooking. You had to train in france. Was that a fair assumption for people to make or were we according french too much respect, mash owe . I dont think we were giving it too much respect. I think it was totally in line. Probably what happened was that they were awardwinning restaurants. They were the star winning restaurants. They were the restaurants that were en vogue. They were the restaurants being named on wall street where they rattle off the names like the big boy french restaurants of the 80s were the talkedabout places. That was what was in. That was the trend. Thats whats winning awards, those were the celebrities chefs of the moment. Rose . Bruni and italian didnt have the respect it had today. It was a cheforiented cuisine but i think italian was seen as a grandmother cuisine and french was a cheforiented cuisine. I think more than anything i think french because both mario and i and chefs of our peers, we were ought taught in the french brigade system where there is a you know theres isou chef, the preparation. But the whole way of going about to go to school, whether its the Culinary Institute of america, its based on the french way of cooking and leadership . The kitchen if you will. So that had something to do with the not rustic ingredients but using very expensive ingredients such as a few gri, duck and caviar. So we came to a point as we touched before that its kind of slowed down to a certain point that italian is this food that is the ethnic food of choice all around the world. Bruni when did you have your epiphany that italian could be as rigorous, as impressive as french . That it wasnt a secondrate, it wasnt just olive garden. Apologies to the olive garden. When in your life was what meal was it, what age was it when you said italian is worth my energy and effort . I grew up in the midwest and when went out for dinner it would either be cantonese cuisine or fantastic italian cuisine. Those were two ethnic choices that were there. Now theres so much more. It was that time when i went to work and i knew this but i went to work at a restaurant called spiagia. Bruni in chicago. In chicago. Very Ground Breaking restaurant that started cooking italian food. When i talk about italian this is a very large discussion about whether its italian, Italian American, so on, so ft it was the end of knew vessel cuisine in the late 80s, i started in 1991 so it was risotto and bell general endive and it was an amazing experience for me and i got the bug there and never left it. Kate, you were mentioning these ingredients and we talk about the respect for and purity of ingredients. Do you think there are ways we eat right now that are so consistent with ma what makes italian food special that thats the explanation for why its so enduringly popular and now sort of the default upscale cuisine of choice . Well, i think that its such a were so addicted to comfort food now and chefs are having so much fun with it. I think one reason its so exciting to eat italian food now and has been for a couple years is that chefs have discovered things like pasta extruders and theres a chef in st. Louis at a restaurant called pistoria who is making his own alphabet pasta. Its so great that you have an opportunity to do Something Like that and like wise i think chefs are having fun with pizzas and theyre geeking out on what kind of flour they use or they have, like, these pizza ovens that are you know, like theyre cars. They sort of deck them out like that. And so i think that. Bruni theres almost a whole fetishism to it. Exactly. Fetishism is a good word. But i also think that that chefs like these two great chefs are pushing the boundaries and doing cool things with them. Like i remember i think you were playing around with ramen and doing peppe ramen and i think michaels done extraordinary thing first at marea and now at costate and its fun to see the boundaries being pushed. For a while it was so purist oriented. Bruni one of the reasons i wanted to have you two gentlemen on i knew that was why. Bruni i have to say, its disappointing to be sitting at a table near each of you and not be eating food that youve cooked for me so youve let me down a little bit. Youve opened many restaurants recently, both of you. You opened these restaurants chat italian have been popular for a while. Lets talk about torrisi italian specialties which you opened in the last days of 2009. How high was the bar to do Something Different and how did you come up with an Italian Restaurant that was going to do Something Different from this bevy of Italian Restaurants already having swept through manhattan . Well, my oorjnal business partner, or the reesesy, we set the bar, i think, for ourselves. We had amazing mentors, daniel, mario, wily, we had the best mentors you could possibly have and then all we knew was we had this need inside of us to do something on our own and we pretty much set out to do that before figuring out what that was. And we learned and taught ourselves what that was along the way and the first set of menus we sat and wrote were pretty much directly related to our old bosses and wed look at them and it would be our first default and then wed realize, wait a minute, we werent born in italy. This isnt our food. We started writing this regional italian food that i know so well through mario and so on and so forth and we had this epiphany that hey, were from new york. Were Italian Americans and for so long that was looked down on during this tidal wave of just the italian title wave. Right, are we going to do piedmont, poulia . It opened my eyes to it when i was working with those regions and restaurants. But we came to this kind of Italian American epiphany that thats who we were and to do something, whatever it was that was really true to us. Bruni you wanted to do food that could be called italian but not be called in italy. Food of downtown manhattan. So we said were going to stop bringing in ingredients outside america. Were going to make it with american ingredients and we believe thats the truest sense of italian cooking or any sort of regional cuisine. Use what you have around you and the techniques that youve learned from that country and make something new. Bruni but you also did something that always captured my imagination. You decided the whole concept of terwar was wrong. It didnt need to mean a patch of soil but the neighborhood. Youd grown up in nakdz that had chinese next to italian, jamaican beef pattis in a pizzeria. Talk about a ditch that was the fruit of imagining that sort of conjoining of two ethnic traditions that, in manhattan, do occupy the same terrer. We were envious of these chefs that had gardens in the backyard and they could sniff the greens and they had free range animals and you look at renee and things he has around him that hes forced himself to use. Well, were on prince and mull bury. Will lets force ourselves to use the neighborhoods. Okay, well, cant go pick anything but i have chinese sausage down the block and i can go down into the Lower East Side and get mat sew that got made this morning and teach yourself mow to make new food. And it was exciting. And i remember we did a dish was that was curry cavateli this was jamaican beef patti ragu. I rather liked that dish. laughter i grew up in queens where the lunch ladies were jamaican so we were eating beef patties for lunch as kids, thats what they were serving us in Public Schools so i remember falling in love with the beef patti and it was always served if you go and buy one like golden crust is a great one, you get has been narrow sauce. So you have cur reed cavatelli, then the curry goat aspect, the other side of it. There was three parts of this dish, curried get to, beef patti it was my childhood. There was like three Different Things that happened. Bruni i can say as someone whos eating it, i feel like someone eating something italian. At the end of the day thats what you get. Hopefully you get as a customer is this dish of just heartwarming food, its a new flavor profile but itss no stall jim at the same time. It pulls at you in several Different Directions and thats when something successful at stories zi. Bruni not so longer after that you opened marea which is an italian Seafood Restaurant which, like torrisi, is a remarkable place to eat. As you put that together, how did you say to yourself, okay, italys all over the place, i need do something distinctive. Whats the thought process behind marea . What mario does and his team is very much italian thought process. You know fact that youre using ingredients. At marea we we do many, many dishes that are very italian but could you couldnt find in the italy because we talk about the flavors that we do, whether it wiese the cruda, well saute eschar role with garl lick and chilis like you have in the rome but then well blend it with extra Virgin Olive Oil and well call it oyster crema and serve wilt artichoke, shaved artichokes so if you put this in your mouth you have a sensation of eating this kind of you know, the flavors of escarole and burned garlic and anchovies as well. Things you think of as italian but you could travel italy all over and you would never see Something Like that. But at marea we would never go outside of the bounds of what is available in italy, if you will. Bruni youre mostly focusing on the north of the country this. Well, we do things from sicily. Theres so much coastline. Bruni marea means tide. Tide in italian. So all the way down to sicily and the fact of using cous cous and all these separate ingredients, people that think italian food of being one type of food and thats really what we grew up with. I grew up with Italian American as well but if you go into the austrohungarian empire and we Start Talking about it in that sense of wienerschnitzel, mil, these are italian but they are also austrian, also german and its the same thing. At marea we use fantastic italian ingredients, we use local ingredients. But we really stay true to the thought process of italian to a certain point. For example, we use cheese with seafood which is considered a faux pas to some extent but at marea we push the boundaries of what italian can be but we would never use coriander or cilantro. It has to exist in that area. Bruni do you think italy is an inexhaustible lardner terms of the country . I think people are very interested it. When i got to meet michael it was when we did a story in food wine about a region that id never heard about before we covered an earthquake there once. So you know it. But it was i feel like its you find these different regions you dont know about and they provide you with all these, like, great sounding dishes and cool ingredients and so, yeah, i feel like just when you think off sense of southern italy you get to deep go deep on some part of sicily. One of the things important with mario and myself is we didnt grow up in italy and therefore we dont take the italian food for granted. We think about in the different ways. Bruni nor are you slaves to a certain tradition. Exactly. I am more of a slave to a region in the north of italy where we do do tortellini, all these things are not so conducive for hot summers. Bruni lets turn to your newest restaurant, carbone. I feel almost bad were talking about it because viewers will think i want to go and its one of the hardest tables to score in mat hat tan. You are actually doing the food you grew up with. The Italian American food that italians almost had to move past to get respect youre say nothing, we dont have to move past it, we just revisit it with greater standards and more ingenuity, right . Youre making a caesar salad for 17, 17. Yeah. And its the restaurant that i wanted to build that is carbone is the fancy restaurant i grew up going to, right . Theres a handful of them that still exist and theyre fabulous and i love to go to them. Bruni but not as good as yours. I wanted to make a newer one because i wanted to make sure this thing stood the test of however much longer because im not sure how long these are going to be open when the generations get passed on again and again so my partners and myself wanted to open a new one and we got that great old space in a restaurant that used to be there for a hundred years and the bones of the building are amazing and we started in a great place and i had roccos. Like a red and white you almost expect to see sinatro r. A. In the corner booth when you walk in. We walked in and we were like this is it. Were going do this place. And i had a vivid memory of those joints that i went to for confirmation, communion and you get the big menu and youre in the fancy and that means serving certain dishes. But how do you make the dishes special enough to be worthy of regard and be worthy of you start with the dishes that you say have to be on this menu. Were like okay, chicken scarp has to be on this menu and we have to figure out how to make it great. You care about each one of the ingredients and care about how each one of them is prepared and treated. Thats what we do at carbone is that i dont stray. Its not torrisi. Its completely inverted. I dont stray from the box. We play inside the box. Heres the box, its Italian American fine dining. If mrs. Wilson in the dining room orders a chicken scarp yellow and theres an odd ingredient in it this is something people have eaten all the time. Curry cavetelli has never been eaten before. Bruni so mrs. Wilson has to recognize it and understand why shes paying 30 for it. That seems like a tough needle to thread. It was not easy. I realize how difficult it was when it opened and i was like oh this is really hard. Im giving people food that theyve eaten hundreds of times before. I was surprised when i went there i think its rigatoni vodka. I think of any pasta allah vodka which i dont recall ever finding in italy, do you . We both live there and i think of that have as a pasta dish although americans who know nothing make and i thought it was a guilty pleasure. Then i go to carbone, its a fantastic dish. What are you doing to rigatoni vodka to elevate it to that level . We do very little and a lot at the same time. We care enough about it, thats an extruded pasta. Youre also playing with spices. Thats a spicy, spicy it is a spicy dish and at carbone as opposed to torrisi we do import ingredients because its important so we use a calabrean chili paste that im infatuated with. Its a fresh tomato compote, chunky tomato sauce. A french technique of cooking onions called sued have where its just sliced white onions cooked low all day in butter and that goes in with tomato and the chili and i think of you to two guys i think of these sorts of efforts to bring Italian Restaurants to places they havent been. You opened i fiori, now you have an italian stea