The Money of Power

WHENEVER I LAMENT the lack of cultural awareness across the U.S., I point to the support given to the arts in Europe, where it’s generally understood that opera and dance, theater and classical music will never draw enough paying customers to provide a livelihood to anyone who professionally sings or dances or otherwise writes or performs. Every nation needs its cultural identity to be buttressed by the fine arts, as they’re (unfortunately) snootily known, and smart government entities come up with money in support.

Sir Simon Rattle

If, in the U.S., it splits across party lines, that’s no surprise. Cultural literacy goes hand-in-hand with education, and education encourages liberal thinking. That’s why so many conservatives weaponize their lack of smarts and attack the institutions and traditions of education. Thus the book-bannings, the arts-money cuts, the general hostility toward universities. When Republicans seize enough power in Washington, DC, these days, one of their first targets is the National Endowment for the Arts, whose already minuscule budget is dwarfed by such precious commodities as defense spending. But Republicans are fighting for their own survival. The smarter you are, they understand on some smart-ass level, the more likely it is you’ll vote for someone else.

You Don’t Say!

I DISLIKE speaking with strangers. In fact, I resist speaking with almost anyone, but circumstances rarely allow such silence. Pandemic isolation was glorious, as most of my conversations were conducted through electronic means and allowed time to reflect and time to answer or ignore. Two problems typically arise: I have no wish to engage in a conversation about trivialities – weather conditions, sports scores, Presidential indictments – and, when you get right down to it, I usually have nothing worthwhile to say.

I recently wrote and performed a one-man show as Sydney Greenstreet, the brilliant stage actor who made his movie debut in 1941 in “The Maltese Falcon” and had eight more years of film stardom. Many of the lines I put into his mouth resonate deeply with me. For example: “At heart, I am a bashful man. I approach social gatherings with trepidation. My thoughts, my emotions, are wont to gallop into untoward areas. To speak without forethought brings the risk of betraying myself.”

In the company of my wife, with whom I’ve lived for forty years, I have a chatty buffer. She loves to talk. She offers herself, fully and honestly, to friend and stranger alike. Where some are tongue-loosened only after a couple of potent cocktails, she’ll be the life of the party after only a single cup of tea. This gives me the chance to fade into the background, to hide in an armchair and silently study the fireplace.

Star-Crossed

THE WORLD OF OPERA taught us that when a couple falls into a duet, they are in some way bonding. Usually it’s love. Sometimes it’s hate. It’s a powerful device that now informs all manner of musical theater. But when you’re looking for powerful examples of the power of duet, go to Charles Gounod. He packed four of them in his “Roméo et Juliette.”

Duke Kim and Magdalena Kuźma
Photo: Evan Zimmerman/
The Glimmerglass Festival

He was driven by desperation. Gounod’s “Faust” was a huge success, but he followed it with three flops. “Roméo et Juliette,” which premiered in 1867, turned it all around for him, and when you hear these duets in the current Glimmerglass Festival production, you’ll be just as enthusiastic as those Théâtre Lyrique audiences were in Paris way back then.

You need authoritative voices that convey this sudden, time-stopping passion, and that first duet, which begins with Romeo sighing about his “adorable angel,” is something of a warm-up piece. The couple is just getting to know one another, as yet unaware that their families are caught in that wearisome feud. Duke Kim and Magdalena Kuźma engage in a childlike back-and-forth. We’ve already heard each of their voices in solo spots, but it’s here, as their voices twine and meld, that we are treated to the richness of a pair of voices – their voices – in harmony. A different approach is required of the singers, each of whom must tune in to the other to make the blend become something approaching a single voice without losing individual identity.

The Beasts of All Possible Worlds

THE EXPERIENCE OF SEEING Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” has changed in recent years. I’ve seen a variety of productions – that variety aided by the fact that this opera, or show, or whatever category-defying label you wish to give it has gone through a dizzying variety of iterations during its 67 years of existence. (It’s got to be the only piece that lists both Dorothy Parker and Stephen Sondheim as lyricists.)

Brian Vu and Katrina Galka
Photo courtesy the Glimmerglass Festival

At its heart, of course, is Voltaire’s timeless, digressive tale of a good-natured naïf whose pursuit of love and a promised happiness takes him across a couple of continents and through a succession of violent conflicts, laced with improbabilities and coincidences that would make Baron Munchausen blush.

What’s happened recently, however, is that world events have caught up with the piece. What may have seemed like overblown satire in Voltaire’s time (indeed, he got himself kicked out of both France and Germany at various times) doesn’t seem so incredible any more.

So here’s Candide, gormless but game, a-burst with the optimism he’s learned from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, and conceiving a passion for the lovely Cunegonde. All that stands in the way of this romance is the matter of birth. She’s an aristocrat; he’s a bastard. Ejected from the castle Schloss Thunder-ten-Tronck in Westphalia, he wanders through a succession of horrors while clinging to an eroding optimism. Tenor Brian Vu informs this role with a wide-eyed, gung-ho spirit.

Soft Be Her Tears

EVERYTHING THAT MAKES Puccini’s 1896 La bohème one of the opera-loving world’s all-time favorites is on display in the current Glimmerglass Festival production. Killer arias sung by incredibly skilled artists; ensemble pieces so stirring that your body will spontaneously increase its white-blood-cell count; stage movement and choreography that spurs the pacing when needed and enhances the poignancy when that’s needed, too. 

Joshua Blue and Teresa Perrotta
Photo courtesy The Glimmerglass Festival

It goes without saying that the music has its most fervent champion in the Glimmerglass orchestra, but I’m saying it anyway because it bears repeating for the sheer fun of repeating it. Puccini’s score sweeps with romantic gestures galore, of course, but there’s also much within it that begs for nuance and shading, and conductor Nader Abbassi not only showed a thorough understanding of the score’s demands but also the deft ability to support both the singer and the song.

But what’s happening, as you sit in the darkened theater and let the experience draw you in, is a confluence of these elements that uses your eyes and ears as entryways to your tear ducts. Or, to put it less cutely, as a direct avenue to your emotions. Puccini masterfully wields the tools that result in expert manipulation. Prepare to be manipulated.

Party at the Schumanns’ House

MUSIC GIVES A SOUL TO A PARTY. Not recorded music; that’s a cop-out which has become all too normalized because we’ve gotten so far away from making our own. I’m talking about putting that piano to use, or hauling out that guitar. Playing chamber music is a rich form of conversation, richer than party chatter. You listen to your fellow musicians in a manner that invites each instrumental voice to inhabit yourself even as you subsume yourself to the music you’re making.

The Schumanns – Clara and Robert – knew this. True, they were in the business of writing music, but when their musical friends stopped by, pleasant sounds were heard. This is the premise of “An Invitation at the Schumanns,’” a recording by the Paris-based Trio Dichter, an ensemble made up of pianist Fiona Mato, violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte, and cellist Hanna Salzenstein.

As we expiate our sins of a patriarchy that demanded we celebrate Robert Schumann’s works and ignore those of Clara, his wife, we are discovering that she was a dab hand at composition herself, even as she was tasked with raising the children. Two of her works grace the program: the first of her Three Romances, Op 22, for violin and piano, and a Notturno for solo piano drawn from her Soirées musicales, Op. 6. These are beautiful performances – but they also convey the sense of intimacy you’d enjoy in the music salon of an accommodating home.

Taking Opera Seriously

From the Vault of the High Cs Dept.: Thirty years ago I reviewed a pair of NYC Opera performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and correctly predicted that the opera company’s residency soon would end. What didn’t end was the horrible amplification inflicted on mainstage events – although I should note that I haven’t been to that venue in many years, discouraged by the number of drunks who began showing up at Philadelphia Orchestra concerts. I assume the management was papering the house, but why pass out tickets at the city’s gin joints?

                                                                                          

THE TRUTH ABOUT the New York City Opera's short, pre-summer visits to SPAC is that they’re a satire. A spoof. When a production is done reasonably poorly, as was the case with “Carmen,” it’s a poor joke. When it’s a reasonably good production, like “The Mikado,” the joke gets merely depressing.

Richard McKee

You could say that the joke is also a riddle: how many people will pay for amphitheater and lawn tickets to see what we call opera until they realize it’s actually not even as good as television? And can we fool them next year, too?

Unlike music and dance, which are appreciated viscerally, opera is a theatrical experience that engages a complicated combination of the senses. It requires an immediate involvement from the audience. But New York City Opera, like many another pretentious company, shuns the use of the English translations. And they’ve suckered the audience into accepting distracting supertitles as a compromise.

Opera is also a celebration of the human voice, a celebration entirely negated by the fact that even the amphitheater audience hears the singers amplified through a hardly-adequate speaker system (the SPAC techies boast that it’s the same thing they use for rock concerts, man, and management turns an obviously deaf ear to the problem).

At the Table

THERE’S A RECEIVED NOTION that American food is exemplified by the blandest of processed inventions, those rubbery slabs of “American” cheese being the epitome. By altering the standards by which the cuisine is judged – keeping the geography, but extending the history and re-coloring the inhabitants – we discover an impressive variety of foodstuffs and recipes.

Falafel from Michigan? Turns out that there’s an Arab population near Dearborn that started to boom in the early 1900s when Henry Ford told a Yemeni sailor about job opportunities. How about Marionberry Pie from Oregon? That celebrates a berry created at Oregon State University in 1948, a berry that grows in Marion County during the month of July and is too soft to export but snapped up by locals. A recipe from Montana for Bison Meatballs with Huckleberry Sauce celebrates the animal that was slaughtered to near extinction for racist reasons, now enjoying a more boutique presence as the meat is recognized as a healthy beef alternative.

Smithsonian American Table travels through time and geography to present a historical narrative that goes way beyond the standard bounds of imperialist tradition. It’s part social narrative, part recipes, interspersed with fascinating illustrations and sidebars. The dividing line for this country’s history is, of course, European colonization, but the book suggests another, later dividing line, noting, “a movement – that of food sovereignty – seeks to reclaim and return to those holistic and culturally significant foodways.” Meaning a return to the cultivation of local produce and well-raised meatstuffs.

In the Family

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.

There’s still a little enclave of Italian restaurants there, with a newcomer Polish eatery down the street, but Pepe’s has long and quietly dominated the scene.

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.

Glenn Miller and Me

MY MOTHER WANTED ME to move back in with the family. It was 1974. I was eighteen and already had been living on my own for two years as I finished high school and sought work. I was in Connecticut. The family lived near Chicago, a relocation brought on by my father’s change of employer. During a visit I made that year, Mom played a clever trump card. She knew that what I sought most was a girlfriend, and reasoned that if she could provide one, I’d stay.

Knowing also that I planned to see a concert at Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony’s longtime summer home, she proposed that I escort a young woman I’d never met, one who worked as a nurse alongside my mother at an area hospital. “But I’m not going to see the Chicago Symphony,” I confessed. “I’m going to a Glenn Miller concert.” “I’m sure she’ll like that,” my mother assured me. How I wish that had been true.

To be a Glenn Miller fan as a teen in the 1970s was difficult. You were aligning yourself with a generation that came of age during World War II – my parents’ generation, in other words, and the teen-aged me didn’t suffer those fogies very generously. One persistent piece of high-school-aged bitterness sees me hurrying, one Saturday morning, to the home of a classmate who could not have been bettered in beauty, and who suddenly noticed me in school one day. (I remember no names attached to this story, which is a kindness.) Because of my oddball taste in music and other realms of the arts, I was accustomed to being shunned. But she invited me to her house. “I know you’ll have a good time,” she declared.

Cooking with Cool

From the Jazz Vault Dept.: As noted elsewhere in these pages, I’ve been a Scott Hamilton fan since I discovered him at Eddie Condon’s on West 54th Street back in the mid-1970s. So it was a treat to catch up with the group when they performed at the State University at Albany in 1988, and here’s the review I wrote.

                                                                                                   

REPLACING A SAXOPHONE REED takes a few moments; you moisten the new one in your mouth,   unscrew the ligature on the mouthpiece, line up the reed, replace the ligature...

Scott Hamilton

Tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton had occasion to replace his reed during a concert Sunday evening, and he did it in no hurry, laconically performing the necessary action while pianist Mike Ledonne soloed. He’s that cool about it. In fact, all five of the players have such a laid-back aspect that you might worry whether they can cook at all.

They can cook.

This is a group that, with one pianist or another, has been working together for more than 15 years. John Bunch has been at the keyboard for many of the last few years, but Ledonne was an able and inspiring replacement.

Guitarist Chris Flory, drummer Chuck Riggs and bass player Phil Flanigan are, like Hamilton, in their mid-30s. While it’s easy to see them as mainstream, swing-oriented jazzers, they actually assimilate a little bit of everything that has informed acoustic playing since the ‘30s. Hamilton, in whose voice are the accents of Ben Webster and Flip Phillips, is a player with a unique sound who revels in the standards and counts Sinatra as another major influence.

Listening to Heifetz: Preface

Obsession with Heifetz Dept.: Here’s the Preface to Listening to Heifetz: A Biographical Survey of His Recorded Legacy, in which I very subjectively appraise the violinist’s vast catalogue of recordings.

                                                                                                

MY VIOLIN LESSONS BEGAN AT AGE TEN, because I loved the sound of the instrument, the varnished box that in my hands emitted only godawful shrieks. Yet when played by accomplished artists, it became (to my young ears) the purest vehicle for emotional expression. And it still sounds that way to me.

I investigated the repertory. I bought sheet music and squeaked my way through the Mendelssohn concerto. David Oistrakh’s recording of the piece opened my ears to the magic that lurked behind those dots on the page – preparing me for the life-changing sound that hit me when I was 13.

The Mendelssohn concerto played on a portable radio as I sat in the dining room of my parents’ house. But this violinist was different. This one played with an urgency passion I’d never heard from the instrument before. This one took risks, dancing up and down the fingerboard like a tightrope walker. And when the lively third movement kicked into gear, I got chills down my back. The violinist was Jascha Heifetz.

I needed to hear more of his playing. I joined the RCA Record Club when I saw an ad that offered four Heifetz records for a penny, never mind the obligation-to-buy commitment and the need to send them a damn postcard every month to cancel the automatic selection. But now I had my own record of the Mendelssohn concerto – and Beethoven, and Brahms, and Tchaikovsky – and even a Prokofiev concerto that I found a little hard to take at the time.

Tasting History

SOME BRAVE SOULS at the New York State Library have been rummaging through its cookbook holdings to discover how our attitudes towards have evolved during this young country’s history. They presented a brief tour of some of their discoveries during a livestream seminar on April 25.

The Original
American Cookbook

Josie Madison, managing editor at the NYS Archives Partnership Trust, moderated the event, which featured Elizabeth Jakubowski, a senior librarian at the NYS Library, and Heather Carroll, an archivist at the NYState Archives. Working around them means you’re liable to be tapped as a taste-tester, as their photos of intrepid colleagues attest. And what where they tasting?

Stuffed Peach Salad, from “Mary Elizabeth’s War Time Recipes,” a 1918 book by Mary Elizabeth Evans. Cottage cheese and salted chopped pecan bits go on top of a pitted peach-half, which is then topped with a “French” dressing that turns out to be a vinaigrette colored with paprika. “The overall consensus,” according to an illustrated Facebook post, “was that this was a little strange but edible.”

Using resources found in special collections in the library’s rare-books room, four eras of this American journey were targeted. The other World War I-era book, also from 1918, was Amelia Dodderidge’s “Liberty Recipes,” The book’s title page identifies her as “Formerly, Instructor of Cooking, Manual Training High School, Indianapolis, Indiana; and Emergency City Home Demonstration Agent, Wilmington, Delaware. Now, Head of Home Economics Department, Wooster College, Wooster, Ohio.” Which isn’t as overblown as it sounds, what with credibility having been so much harder to achieve for women back then.

Power Sturges

BETWEEN 1940 AND 1948, Preston Sturges had an unprecedented Hollywood run of (mostly) successes with ten films he wrote and directed. Only Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles had anything like this auteur status, although it took Chaplin over 40 years to make as many features, and Welles crashed and burned after only one.

Like those two, Sturges created nothing like Hollywood’s mainstream fare, but his films attracted enough of an enthusiastic audience to keep him employed – at least for a while. Some of those movies are among the funniest to hit the screen, and have kept their freshness long after the formulaic comedies of the period grew dated. Like Welles, Sturges had a fractured childhood. Born in Chicago in 1898, he shuttled between the U.S. and Europe as a boy. His free-spritied mother palled around with Isadora Duncan (and gave her the scarf that caused her demise), which exposed young Preston to France’s freewheeling artistic community.

Following his WWI service, Sturges worked for a few years at a New York store owned by his mother’s fourth husband. He was goaded into playwriting, so the story goes, while on an unsuccessful date with an actress. He made his Broadway debut as an actor in 1928; the following year, his play “Strictly Dishonorable” made him a small fortune and drew enough attention to him that he soon was working in Hollywood as a rewrite man, then contributing original screenplays. He proved versatile enough throughout the 1930s to allow him to talk his way into his first directing job, and at the end of 1939 began shooting “The Great McGinty” from an original screenplay. And it wasn’t all talk that got him the job. He agreed to sell Paramount the script for $10 if he’d be allowed to direct.

It’s a Gas

From the Theater Vault Dept.: Talk about a fairy-tale world. For a few seasons over thirty years ago, the Cohoes Music Hall was home to Heritage Artists, a professional theater ensemble heavy on musicals that guaranteed excellence. Talk about evanescence! Nothing at all comparable has taken its place in the Albany area. Even as trivial a piece as “Pump Boys and Dinettes” proved stellar.

                                                                                        

IN THE FAIRY-TALE WORLD of musical theater, characters are inclined to sing for what seems to be any reason. Sometimes they burst into song when you least expect it; sometimes they tire you with it; sometimes it seems that they’ll never stop talking get on with the singing.

“Pump Boys and Dinettes” features almost no talking. Short, and short on plot, it simmers from song to country-flavored song with a wit and sparkle that leaves you dazzled. As the season-closer for Heritage Artists, it’s been setting the Cohoes Music Hall rocking to the antics of a quartet of good ol’ boys at a gas station somewhere on Highway 57 in North Carolina – and the sassy sisters who run the neighboring diner.

Let’s put it on the line here: there’s absolutely no reason not to see this show. The performers, all of whom sing and play instruments and even dance from time to time, are the sort you wish would show up at your company picnic and take over the entertainment. The music, all  country-flavored, will appeal to anyone who enjoys good music and has no objection to laughing now and then.

The tickets don’t cost much more than what you’d pay to see a couple of movies, and this is an event that stays with you longer.

Hard-Working Bard

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to the late James Brown, I believe that the hardest-working man in show business is Bridge Street Theatre’s Steven Patterson. He co-founded the theater; he handles publicity and building repairs. Sometimes he takes tickets or sells concessions, or possibly both. Other times he’s onstage, taking on a remarkable range of roles, from ensemble comedy to solo drama, from contemporary classics to whatever you call Eugene O’Neill.

Jack Rento as Julian, Em Whitworth as
Rosemary, Andrew Gorhring as
Henry, and Steven Patterson as
William Shakespeare.

In the case of “Rude Mechanics,” world-premiering on the Bridge Street stage, he essays that dizzying range in one show, playing three roles ranging from the frantic to the ethereal, with (literal) Shakespeare in-between. And he’s playing these in the company of three other actors who help spin a dizzying web of confusion and intrigue backstage of a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that’s about to be performed before King James I and some royal visitors from Spain. It’s 1612. Cast members are succumbing to the plague infecting London.

That’s why Julian Crosse will be going on as Francis Flute, who plays the female role of Thisbe in the play-within-this-play. Julian is nervous, excited, terrified – a panoply of emotions that give Jack Rento, making his Bridge Street debut, a hilarious set of instant transformations.

The Big, Fat Lummox

Guest Blogger Dept.: We welcome back Booth Tarkington, whose 1916 novel Seventeen was, like most of the author’s books at the time, a best-seller. It’s fair to day that it hasn’t aged well; in fact, one wag observed that, if it were to seem relevant today, it should be retitled “Thirteen.” It offers the lovelorn William Sylvanus Baxter, pining with infatuation for the baby-talking Lola Pratt, a summer visitor to William’s midwestern town. The boy is about to join a number of his friends, all vying for Lola’s attention, on a picnic excursion.

                                                                                          

IN THE MORNING SUNSHINE, Mrs. Baxter stood at the top of the steps of the front porch, addressing her son, who listened impatiently and edged himself a little nearer the gate every time he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Willie,” she said, “you must really pay some attention to the laws of health, or you’ll never live to be an old man.”

“I don’t want to live to be an old man,” said William, earnestly. “I’d rather do what I please now and die a little sooner.”

“You talk very foolishly,” his mother returned. “Either come back and put on some heavier THINGS or take your overcoat.”

“My overcoat!” William groaned. “They’d think I was a lunatic, carrying an overcoat in August!”

“Not to a picnic,” she said.

“Mother, it isn’t a picnic, I’ve told you a hunderd times! You think it’s one those ole-fashion things YOU used to go to—sit on the damp ground and eat sardines with ants all over ‘em? This isn’t anything like that; we just go out on the trolley to this farm-house and have noon dinner, and dance all afternoon, and have supper, and then come home on the trolley. I guess we’d hardly of got up anything as out o’ date as a picnic in honor of Miss PRATT!”

Mrs. Baxter seemed unimpressed.

Fair Seedtime Had My Soul

 ADAM ALEXANDER, whose curiosity prompted travel all over the world collecting endangered vegetable seeds to grow and share, writes that

“Crammed into two fridges in the garage behind my study are jars and boxes filled with envelopes containing – at the time of writing – 499 varieties of vegetable seeds, sadly most no longer commercially available.” Adam Alexander grows some 70 varieties a year for food and seed-saving, something he started doing in the 1970s, although back then it was only about producing vegetables.

The seed-saving part of his book The Seed Detective starts in 1988, with a pepper. The author discovered it in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk; more specifically, in a farmers’ market stall, grown by a granny too poor to buy seeds and thus in the habit of saving them.

He doesn’t identify the woman except as a generic type, but notes that he “would always seek out this individual when scouring food markets around the world.” He’s extolling a generic grower, of course, but a grower of very specific produce: Vegetables that sprout from seeds uncorrupted by the chemical processes that have allowed Big Ag to copyright what once was a gift from Nature.

The “tennis-ball-sized sweet pepper with a fiery heart” kicked off Alexander’s search for other heritage and heirloom seeds around the world, many of which he than grows in his garden in eastern Wales. It’s a proving ground for his research as well, as he studies these vegetables to discover exactly what the word “heritage” means in relation to each.

Breaking the Curse

From the Food Vault Dept.: It delights me to discover that a restaurant I enjoyed visiting decades ago continues to thrive. Here’s one of them, in another twenty-year lookback. Although I dined at Lanie’s a couple of times after writing this review, I haven’t been back in a long while. A glance at the restaurant’s website confirms that the menu has changed and prices, you won’t be surprised to learn, have increased. So don’t be lulled by what’s listed below – those prices are mementoes of a fabled past.

                                                                                          

“THERE WAS A LOT OF TALK about how this spot had a curse,” says Lanie Lansing, “but I think the success of a restaurant really depends on what the people around it want. You can’t open a doughnut shop in an area that doesn’t eat doughnuts.”

This spot in Loudonville’s Kimberly Square hosted The Bistro most recently; before that, Olivia’s, Smoothy’s and Desperado’s, among others. Lanie’s vision, and it’s been quite a success during the restaurant’s nearly two years of operation, has been to offer a family-friendly menu that also features some fancy stuff, in a space that’s as suited for after-work relaxing as it is for full-scale dining.

But the emphasis is on casual. No white linen here, and you’re as likely to spot a pizza on a table as you are a complicated seafood dish. Lansing opened her restaurant with a well-focused vision, a vision that evolved during her many years in the business, which included 16 years as a bartender. “I worked at Ralph’s Tavern, J.T. Maxie’s, Thirsty’s, the Barnsider and many other places. But I always wanted to have my own restaurant. I love to cook. My whole family cooks. When we decided to go into this place, my husband gave up his contracting business to help me.”

In the Neighborhood

From the Food Vault Dept.: We look back twenty years to a Schenectady neighborhood (and a bit beyond) where the city’s Italian heritage was culinarily honored. But there have been changes since I wrote this piece. Garofalo’s closed in 2018, when an internecine family dispute led to its demise. La Gioia Deli closed in June 2022, but a niece of the founders reopened it four months later, so it’s still there to keep you stocked in Italian specialty items. Saddest of all, Cappiello closed its retail store in 2022, after 101 years in business. Perreca’s thrives, however, and Maria Papa not only opened a restaurant next door but also took over management of nearby Cornell’s, a restaurant at 39 North Jay Street.

                                                                                                

SCHENECTADY HAS AN AMBITIOUS REVITALIZATION PROJECT on tap that seeks to throw money at various parts of the city to see if magic beanstalks grow. Like the Jay Street pedestrian mall, Center City and the moat around Proctor’s, it probably looks good on paper. But no amount of fancy construction has created a downtown that can sustain a fine-dining restaurant. That’s because there are no people to support it.

A fresh Perreca's loaf emerges
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Schenectady’s strength has long been its neighborhoods and sense of family, cultivated when the city was a one-company town, now eroded into tiny pockets of such cohesion. One such pocket is the North Jay Street area, now targeted to become the city’s Little Italy.

In truth, it’s been that for a while, although shifting population centers have depleted the neighborhood. The Sons of Italy is headquartered nearby, but what really give life to the area are the markets.

Begin at a small storefront at 33 North Jay St., easy to recognize by the many bread loaves in the window. Inside, if you visit early enough in the day, you’ll be drenched in the yeasty aroma of the emerging batch. Breadmaking technology hasn’t changed much over the past centuries, and part of Perreca’s success is its simplicity: a couple of ingredients, hand-formed loaves and a trip through the coal-fired oven.