The Fall Eating Season III: Fifteen Years! Fifteen Years! She had one of my kids, got me for fifteen years

November sixth was my fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifteenth. Fifteenth anniversary. Why would I say fiftieth? It doesn't feel like....time isn't dragging...don't feel like we're seventy-five...um....

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November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. Fifteen years...well, not in a row. That is another story for another time. Shit, my wife reads this blog. She is going to be pissed off that I even alluded to our marriage having its rough patch.

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November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. We celebrated. Twice.


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November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. For years now, we have given each other token gifts -- fragrance, or a book, or movie (or two). Our wants are small. We do like to have a nice meal together somewhere. This year, it was at Cafe Borgia, the Chicago southland's famous northern Italian trattoria.

Recently, Cafe Borgia moved from it's digs in the old Lansing House of Pizza location to an airy new building in neighboring Munster, IN. I would love for House of Pizza to go back into the Lansing location, as that was the kick-ass thin crust of my youth. House of Pizza in Hammond, IN, is pretty similar to the old Lansing HoP; but, by the time I bring a pie home from Indianapolis Boulevard, it's cold. There are various Zuni's HoP and Dante's HoP locations around the area, supposedly (I have my doubts) owned by the same family as the old HoP, but the pie is different.

Wedding anniversary? Cafe Borgia? House of Pizza? Sentence fragments? WTF?


I do not know Karen and Mike Jesso, the mom-and-pop of Cafe Borgia. There is a story that goes around town about how they met. The story holds that in their youth, they first met while they were waiting in line at Lansing House of Pizza to pick up their carry-outs. After their marriage, after culinary school, they found that Lansing House of Pizza had closed and that the very place they met was available for lease just as they were about to open their own restaurant. Serendipity! Kismet! Fate! Karma! Interjections meaning luck!

Now the old Lansing House of Pizza is the old Cafe Borgia, and the old Cafe Borgia is empty. The new Cafe Borgia is built across from the Munster dump. Like every dump in America, this is called Mt. Trashmore by the locals. Munster has been developing the area around Mt. Trashmore: exhibit-style veterans memorial, shiny new park, pricey subdivision downwind of the dump, and Cafe Borgia.

We went for lunch. This was our first time at Cafe Borgia since it moved.

There is a fine line between ambiance and pretense. Cafe Borgia treads upon that fine line like Karl Wallenda (Google it, kiddies).

Just inside the front door, appearing at first to be a narrow corridor, the bar juts off at a right angle. The quick peek I gave the bar told me it was fashioned after a club-car in Rat-Pack chic (remember the bar in Phil Smidt's?). We were seated immediately in the main dining room. This new building fosters the impression that it is a converted warehouse -- high clattery ceiling, duct-work to nowhere. The large open kitchen is on the same side as the bar, with a yards-long order-up window that had me worried that Mel Sharples was going to ash his cigarette on my food before passing it to Flo or Alice. Our waitstaff could not have been more attentive if they had chewed our food for us and fed us like nestlings.

The menu was short but varied. The usual Italian suspects were present: pizzas and pastas, chicken vesuvio, risotto, calamari, veal, lamb this, eggplant that. Not-so-usual fare includes: cubanella peppers with four cheeses and marinara, duck ragout and polenta, and a salad of apple and mixed greens with gorgonzola and pine nuts in a raspberry vinaigrette. The daily-specials menu was nearly as long as the regular menu.

We started off with the marinated olives and the baked goat cheese.

• Marinated olives were a great appetizer: starting off a meal in a classy joint by spittin' out pits, ptooey. The lightness of Cafe Borgia's favored olive oil cannot be overemphasized. Other places, an appetizer of marinated olives looks and tastes like an unchopped version of the olive salad in a nice muffuletta; Cafe Borgia's olive marinade did not overwhelm, so that the different flavors of the different olives (kalamata, cerignola, galega, and castelvetrano) were distinct.
• Goat cheese was served as something of an Italian version of brie en brioche. Baked to gooey bliss in a thin pastry crust and surrounded by marinara, the goat cheese was the kind of good that makes me roll my eyes and smile as I chew. On rounds of the warm house bread, or by the forkful, we couldn't leave it alone until it was gone.

The herb and raspberry tea was strangely appealing. Even though a small carafe of tea was left on our table for self-service, not a sip was taken that was not immediately refilled by the staff. If the service at Phil Smidt's ever really was the way Dad bragged that it was, it would not have beaten this.

Our main courses came just as we were finishing the last bites of out appetizers. I ordered the pork scallopine limone. My wife, a pecso vegetarian, had an ultra-thin (Roman-style) pizza off of the daily-specials menu.

• My pork scallopine limone consisted of thin triangles of pork tenderloin that had been sauteed in olive oil with garlic, artichokes, mushrooms, and lemon. A lot of lemon. A lot a lot a lot of lemon. I love intensely sharp acidic flavors, so I was pretty okay with this, but this is not for everyone. This extreme acidity, however, was only evident in the pork, so I think it must have been marinated in a strongly acidic solution. As much lemon as I like, this was a little much even for me. I would have liked to cut the sour a bit with a little salt. Here is where the pretentiousness of this wonderful trattoria comes in. There are no salt-and-pepper shakers on the tables. Of course, ask and ye shall receive -- as the service is beyond reproach. The pretense is that the chef knows just the right balance of seasonings, all seasonings -- even salt and black pepper -- so no possible correction should be necessary. There's the tiniest of social stigmas attached to asking for the salt and the pepper you pissy little cretin...No soup for you! I have already given more space to this than it deserves. The only other thing I'll say on the subject is that the alleged Italian Christopher Columbus braved the uncharted Atlantic to bring back black pepper from India but found America instead, so maybe an Italian restaurant in America should consider having some black pepper -- and its longtime companion, salt -- on every table, like every other restaurant (see my blog entry The Fall Eating Season I: ...and since Columbus discovered India in the Dominican Republic, we use precious cinnamon to make elephant ears. for more on the spice trade). I digress. I do not think I was ever told what my side dishes were, but they appeared to be a large-grained couscous in a tomato sauce and some grilled green beans of the spindliest variety in the world. Both were unexpected, unusual, and excellent.
• The daily pizza was a Roman-style ultra-thin crust with eggplant, arugula, and cherry tomatoes. This was large enough to feed two and somehow tasted alive...almost like is sparked when eaten. I assume that this was because of the exceptional freshness of the produce used. This was the greatest pleasure in a dinner of many pleasures.

With no empty space in our stomachs and half of a pizza to take home, we still managed to share a desert and have coffee. The coffee came with real cream and real sugar. I might be tempted to burst into a tirade here about the waitstaff not supplying artificial sweeteners with the coffee, like my earlier tirade about salt, but this is different: anyone who is willing to eat even half of a high-calorie dessert and then worry about the 16 calories in one teaspoon of sugar, well, that person is a nut. Great coffee. If you aren't hungry, just stop by for coffee. Great coffee. Thick and strong, not even the slightest bit bitter. I usually drink my coffee straight black, but when it is really excellent coffee, I like to add just a drop of cream and about half a spoonful of sugar to really bring out the complex flavor. Who's being pretentious now? It's me, bitches.

If you take a ball of white chocolate mousse with pistachios, wrap it with chocolate cake, slice off one half, and serve it -- apparently, that is called zucotto. The zucotto was plated with a pool of chocolate sauce and a pool of raspberry sauce. This was a lot of wonderful competing textures and flavors. This was the fireworks after the home run.

If it sounds like I had a foodgasm at Cafe Borgia...well, a gentleman does not kiss and tell. Outside of a brief lemony leg-cramp, this was the consummate anniversary dinner -- food I loved at a restaurant I loved with the woman I loved...love...the woman I love.

Yeah, yeah. Awwww, right back at you.

Next time: more hi-jinx, and how to be a good little orphan.