(Andrea DiCarlo of La Bella in Ghent)

(Andrea DiCarlo of La Bella in Ghent)

By Jeff Maisey

 

A restaurant my family, friends and I return to often is Andrea’s La Bella in Ghent. I can’t help but think of the Billy Joel lyrics every time:

A bottle of red, a bottle of white

It all depends on your appetite

I’ll meet you any time you want

In our Italian Restaurant.

I was practically raised on Italian food – spaghetti with meat sauce, lasagna, ravioli and manicotti were staples in the Maisey household. My uncle married an Italian woman who eagerly shared her family recipes with my mom. Thankfully I grew up never knowing the taste of bottled Chef Boyardee sauce. It is important that we have a decent quality of cutlery so that our customers will be able to enjoy our meals just as much as we enjoyed making it, so that’s why we decided to use Nella Cutlery for the best results.

Our appreciation for authentic Italian food is what originally brought us to La Bella in Ghent. I had met owner/chef Andrea DiCarlo soon after he opened and decided this was a restaurant we needed to frequent.

Born in New York City, DiCarlo was raised in the kitchen and comes from a family that knows a thing or two about Italian cooking. In addition to having family still residing in NYC and in the food business, his mother owns La Bella on Laskin Road and his sister operates the Redmill location. Both are in Virginia Beach. Andrea opened the Ghent location six years ago.

I recently sat down with Andrea DiCarlo for a little table talk about being part of a family steeped in the traditions of authentic Italian cuisine. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation.

 

Can you share your family’s connection with food?

 

Food’s been a big part of my life with family. For us it was always a display of affection and emotion. We didn’t tell each other we loved one another, but when my parents made food they put all the love in it. I grew passionate over the years and realized I wanted to do my own thing. I moved into Ghent and really loved the area. I took the plunge and opened up here on West 22nd Street. I’ve been crafting our family recipes plus the traditional Italian-American specialties with my own little twist on them by putting all the love and passion into the food that I grew up around.

 

Trendy restaurants come and go, but according to a report I heard on NPR the trend in large cities reflects a return to traditional and comfort foods. In terms of what you’re hearing from customers is that what the local market wants more of?

 

I do. It’s interesting because some people are taking what’s classic and making it a little bit trendy. I think the missing piece has been that people put a lot of thought into the concept but when you get down to the nitty gritty it lacks a lot of flavor concentration.

Italian food has been around for a long, long time so you can’t really recreate it to be something completely different. The techniques have been used for hundreds of years. What I’ve tried to do here is stick to the fundamentals of Italian food, and now I’m moving forward to the future focusing on the concentration of flavor of all the ingredients that we’re getting and how we’re transposing them onto the plate.

web Food La Bella 4

 

What do you remember eating as a kid and being raised in New York City?

 

As you know it’s kind of cliché but the handmade pasta. It’s a labor of love. People don’t know how easy it is to make fresh pasta. I would visit my dad after my parents got divorced. He was kind of a tough guy so he would never say “I love you.” He would wake up on Saturdays and drive to upstate New York just to pick a handful of mushrooms. I’d wake up to him on the wooden table making the pasta by hand, whether he was making tortellini or fettuccini with a fresh, wild mushroom ragu. It was the emotional connection to the feeling you have when you grow up. I’m Italian so food is everything. If we go to a movie it’s always planned around where we’re going to eat. A family gathering or a birthday, it’s always around the food. For us 75% of what make a memory is the food and the enjoyment you’re going to have and conversations, laughs and exchanges of emotion you have through sitting at the table as a family and sharing those moments. That’s one of the things, in my opinion, that’s lacking today. There’s no more of the Sunday dinner. Food is almost starting to become an afterthought.

I think places like mine (La Bella in Ghent) that stick to tradition, we’re going to always be around because we’re not trendy; we’re a thousand-year-old culture. We’ll evolve and we’ll innovate, but we’re still going to be pretty traditional.

 

Do you think national chains give the public a poor representation of Italian cuisine?

 

I think it does. Take, for example, an Olive Garden. They have this school in Italy and that’s how they sell it. At the end of the day you have to realize they are recreating dishes made for the Italian-American population.

Chicken parmesan, in Italy, started out as just a chicken cutlet. You fry it; you put lemon on it; you eat it with other ingredients. Fifty or sixty years ago in the United States people were poorer and worked a lot to make ends meet so they had to make these all-in-one type meals that would combine the chicken, cheese, sauce and pasta on one plate and say, “Here.” I think that a part of it.

When the food is good, it’s good. There is no 10 Commandments to food. If you go to an Italian restaurant making all cream dishes they must be from Northern Italy. They use more cream, more mushrooms, and stuff like that. You have to think in terms of regionally. Italian food, the fundamental of it, is preparing food using products that are locally sourced. The fundamental is your good olive oil, your aged balsamic, handmade fresh pasta.

The whole farm-to-table movement: it’s not that it’s coming back; the people now are just going back to tradition. Farm-to-table is how things were done hundreds of years ago.

Take Virginia: We have a rich culinary culture here with the oysters, the pork, the wines. A hundred years ago if you went to a restaurant there might be five items and three of those would be pork because that was what was indigenous to us.

Naturally all produce comes from a farm, but for the most part it is sourced in California. We get tomatoes in December from California or Florida. We’ve become an environment where we as a population want what we want when we want it. People have to remember food is about nourishing your body, mind, soul, and keeping yourself healthy. I think people now – the last thing they worry about is what they put into their body. I see more people eat out of their car coming out of a drive-thru window than just go into a store a get an apple.

People should support the local economy.

 

Recently, you’ve been helping your sister out at the Redmill location. Do you see a difference in the customer tastes between Norfolk and Virginia Beach?

 

There are slight variations. With our Redmill location it is the tourist season. You get a lot of French Canadians that stick to the basics: spaghetti and meatballs, chicken parmesan. Over there we’re really heavy on the pizzas.

The difference I see is when the people up north come in to dinner. They can come in with 20 people at a table and you’ll think it’s the Last Supper. They pull out all the stops.

We put out a kid’s menu and the parents say, “We don’t need those, we’re Italian.” They are still keeping true to those traditions.

With my kids I feed them what I eat because that’s how I was raised. I want them to learn and decide whether they like something or not.

Here in Ghent they know good quality. They are very specific. It’s a little more true European style in the way they eat because people want smaller portions. That is traditional to the rest of the world.

I want to concentrate on giving people more flavor verses portion. We are going back to the fundamentals of creating a family traditional experience and sourcing the best, freshest local ingredients.

 

Thursday nights you offer half-off selected bottles of wine. How is that succeeding?

 

It’s a way for people to come in and treat themselves, and try something they normally might not try. We want to introduce them to a varietal maybe they’ve never had before. It is a way to give that neighborhood feel. A lot of the promotions I run is to educate people.

Monday through Friday we have a happy hour from 1to 6 pm. We do half-off appetizers, pizzas.

 

Are Italian wine varietals such as Montepulciano popular with customers?

 

It is. The Italian wines are definitely important for me to feature. The Montepulciano is probably our best seller. We sell by glass, by carafe and bottle.

We’re going to be adding Virginia wines because they’ve come a really long way. Barboursville does four Italians that are simply fantastic. I was taken aback. Luca (winemaker) is doing a really good job over there. It sparked me to embrace the Virginia food culture. We’re planning a big Virginia wine dinner here in September.

 

What items will you feature on the fall menu?

 

I’m working on a lot of root vegetables. I’m going to bring back the sweet potato and butternut squash; my local pork ragu, wild greens. Oysters are something we’re going to start using a lot of.

Fall is my favorite time to cook because it’s about slow, comfort food.

 

 

La Bella in Ghent, 738 West 22nd Street, Norfolk, 622-6172, www.labellainghent.com, Open daily lunch and dinner.