Growing up Italian is special enough in my book. Growing up the granddaughter of Mary Vigilante Nicosia from Calabria, Italy was the cherry on top. I loved everything about my visits to Queens where I would find my grandmother in the kitchen. I loved the smell of her kitchen, the grandness of her pots on her miniature stove, her devotion to her family and the meal that would make us happy. I loved the empty chair ready for the friend who may stop in at dinner time. I loved the way she and my grandfather would spar over silly little things all day long but all would be forgotten at the table. I loved the tired smile that would come across her face once seated when she looked around her table and realized she did it again – she gathered her family and made us happy with what was on our plates. Visiting with my Grandmother was like a warm blanket on a cold day, every time.
At 48, Mary Nicosia opened a “deli” in Queens in the midst of the depression. The Mother of five children, an 8th grade education and a passion as valuable as in ivy league MBA, she set out to fulfill her dream and make ends meet. What is now commonplace was then cutting edge: a place where you could pick up dinner on your way home from work and feed your family reasonably with a homemade Italian dinner. Lasagna layered with care, pizza dough hand pressed, meatballs that made you swoon. When she had to close her doors, regular customers lined the sidewalk with signs that read “Mary please don’t go”. I well up each time I say that out loud. What a gift she was, what a gift she gave.
I didn’t learn this about my grandmother until she was no longer with us, until I was writing my business plan for my own cafe. To me, she was just my grandmother. Two daily trips to the local supermarket or butcher to get what was needed to spend the day in the kitchen. I’m not sure she really did much else….that is how I knew her. She taught me what can’t be taught in college, culinary school, or anywhere else; she taught me the passion that I feel for food – buying it, creating with it and mostly sharing it. It became my dream to open a place of my own where I could prepare and share great food made from the heart.
So, I headed off to the University of Georgia, then straight to the business world in Boston where I spent seven years exploring different career paths, all the while dreaming of doing food and my “cafe”. Everyplace I went that resembled what I wanted would become a sketch in my journal. Over the next two decades I filled that journal of places I loved, what I loved and what I would do better. I collected menus, postcards, and cookbooks and found my way into kitchens to meet chefs and owners, all to ask even one important question that seemed essential to me finding a path to my dream. After traveling to Europe with my sister and eating our way through Italy on $30/day, I quit my job and enrolled in culinary school. I just had to do it.
As life seems to happen, two jam-packed decades passed including marriage and a baby carriage – three toddlers in tow, and my dream of a cafe still nagging at me at every turn. I baked for and with my children and recorded as much as I was learning while doing so. At times it seemed impossible to imagine a time when I would make it happen, and then the opportunity presented itself. One morning when peeking into the window of the vacant space now housing Sweet Mimi’s Cafe, my son, Charlie, then 11 said to me “Mom, if you don’t do it now, you never will. Promise me by the time I get off the bus you will have figured it out. ”And that’s how it began. Just like Mary Nicosia, at the age of 48, I made my dream come to light.
During the years of planning Sweet Mimi’s Cafe, I kept coming back to the smell of my grandmothers kitchen when she was preparing French toast on our weekend visits. It’s funny that I tend to remember this, as she, like me, was the savory chef who did Italian feasts well. But there was something about her French toast that I wanted to create when I decided that Sweet Mimi’s would be a breakfast cafe. Back in the 60’s her French toast was a way to utilize every nugget of leftovers and prepare an inexpensive meal. The Italian bread leftover from dinner was left out uncovered overnight to prime it for its custard bath the next morning. Sliced just right; not too thin, not too thick, it was soaked for precisely the right amount of time. A cast iron pan was prepared to be just hot enough. Olive oil would coat the pan just right so it wouldn’t fry the toast but still allow for some flavor to absorb. The bread, soaked, would be dipped in pure white sugar then dunked into the simmering pan of olive oil. What happened in that pan was magical….the sugar caramelized just enough to be slightly crunchy and nutty and the olive oil did its trick by imparting a hint of undetectable flavor. The result was something I cannot describe. But now, 47 years later, in the kitchen of my own cafe, I can still smell it cooking on the stove, and can taste the slightly bitter crunchy sugar encasing that gorgeous leftover Italian loaf.
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