From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s the restaurant review I wrote 30 years ago, offered now just to make me feel all the older. I had moved to NY’s Montgomery County in 1990, and was still getting to know the area when I discovered Pepe’s Restaurant in nearby Amsterdam. It seemed like one of those places that would live on forever, and indeed was run by family members for 77 years until it closed in April, 2000. Nothing has taken its place. (Nothing could take its place.)
THE NEIGHBORHOOD ON WEST MAIN STREET has changed considerably since Pepe’s opened in 1923. The ethnic character, certainly, is different – what was once a stronghold of Italian newcomers has melting-potted into something more homogeneous by becoming more diverse. The look of the area, too, has changed, simply by staying the same, aging and decaying, accepting only a few later buildings.
It’s a friendly place with a warm, simple look. Chances are that you’re going to be greeted by one member of the Pepe family and served by another. In the kitchen, Sam Pepe holds forth as he has done for the past half-century, following in a family tradition. In fact, there’s another branch of the family running a bakery in Amsterdam, which is where the cognoscenti go for the best loaves and rolls in town ... but Sam bakes his own bread for the restaurant.
“I use unbleached flour and I add an egg to every four pounds, so the bread is a little richer,” he says. He’s right. It’s a nice complement to the simple salad bar that’s included with each entree order. A modest-sized buffet table features mixed greens, sliced tomatoes and a selection of vegetable salads: white bean, beets, celery and carrots, garbanzos, cucumbers.
We visited a couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the week, late on a slow night. A TV spoke quietly at one corner of the bar; although we sat out of sight of the thing, the old black-and-white movie it displayed turned out to be American Movie Classics fare. This is my kind of place.
Susan started her meal with a cup of cream of broccoli soup, freshly-made, with a tasty chicken stock base. We both travelled to the salad bar, but with portion-control discretion: the entree plates at Pepe’s are generously filled.
Before getting to the entrees, let’s look at a side dish we were served. Although the policy is to try to vary the selections as much as possible, we’re such fans of “greens and beans” that we both elected to try the variation offered with dinner: greens cooked with sausage and peppers, served in a very small amount of flavorful stock. Good cooking is both a synthesis and celebration of ingredients, and it can be found in something as simple as this.
Broiled halibut, Susan’s entree, came out with a light coating of minced herbs in a butter and wine sauce. It’s a tough call on the cooking – I prefer to find it just warm in the center, while Susan (to whom the phrase “well done” isn’t at all as evil as I regard it) likes it drier and flakier. And so Susan was happy. The plate was nicely dressed with greens and fresh orange. Mine was an order of chicken marsala, given a traditional treatment and sauced very well.
“We sell a lot of chicken,” says Sam. “I used to break it all down myself but now I buy 40 pounds at a time, bone out, skin on. So I still have to clean it. And I still break down all the veal I use here, which can take four, five hours a day. I’m not crazy about doing it, but that’s the best value.”
The Pepe family originated in Normandy and journeyed from the north of France all the way down to Sicily. “It shows in the cooking,” he says. “I put a little French into it.”
Dinner for two, with tax and tip and two glasses of wine, was $40.
Pepe’s Restaurant, 218 West Main Street, Amsterdam, 842-xxxx. Serving dinner Sun, Tue-Thu 5-10, Fri-Sat 5-11. MC, V.
– Metroland Magazine, 10 June 1993
No comments:
Post a Comment