GINO'S of Lexington Ave
NEW YOK, NY
.
THE SECRET SAUCE
.
Tagliolini with Salsa Segreto. Secret Sauce? We lost our beloved Old-School Italian
Red-Sauce Joint Gino’s of Lexington Avenue a couple years back. Gino’s opened
in 1945 by Neapolitan Immigrant Gino Circicello was a Gem of a Restaurant loved
by its many loyal customers who kept the place packed and vibrant
night-after-night. The place was perfect; Great Food and good wine at
reasonable prices coupled with excellent service by friendly attentive waiters
inside a homey comfy dining-room that everyone loved, from its cozy little Bar
at the front of the restaurant, its Phone Booth (one of the last surviving in
New York), and the famed Scalamandre Zebra Wallpaper that is as much a part of
Gino’s as the tenured old waiters, the Phone Booth, and the popular Chicken
Parmigiano.
Among all the tasty dishes with the Pasta with Salsa Segreta, (Segreto) “The Secret
Sauce,” it was as tasty as can be, and a perennial favorite with Gino’s
legendary clientele, including the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Joe
DiMaggio, and a string of luminaries to long to name. Gino’s had many wonderful
dishes that were soul satisfy, unpretentious, but tasty as heck. They were all
the usual suspects of Italian Red-Sauce Joints everywhere; from Baked Clams
Areganata, to Shrimp Cocktail, to Spaghetti With Clam Sauce, Lasagna, the famed
Veal Pamigiano, “the entire menu.”
I used to go to Gino’s with my cousin Joe, my sister Barbara came a couple times, as
my brother Michael. But it was usually me and Cousin Joe, and if anyone else
was tagging along. Now I love my pasta as all good Italian-Americans do, but my
cousin Joe? He had me beat. The guy loves his pasta, and wanted it practically
every day. I believe we tried the Salsa Segreta (Secret Sauce) on our first
trip there. I think with Tagliolini, but you can have it with Spaghetti,
Rigatoni or whichever pasta you like. Well we loved it from the very first, and
would get it every time we went. Often we’d get Baked Clams and Shrimp
Cocktail, followed by a Half Portion each of Tagliolini with Salsa Segreto, and
as our main we might split a Veal Milanese with a “Nice Bottle of Chianti.”
We’d finish the meal with Espresso and a couple of Desserts, maybe a Tira Mi Su
and a Chocolate Tartufo.
So the Secret Sauce, what’s in it, you want to know? Yes I identified the Secret
ingredients one day, I made it, and it tastes exactly the same, and that’s as
tasty as can possibly be, a 10 out of 10, you can’t get any better. It’s quite
simple and you’d be amazed, but that’s the essence of all Italian Cooking,
simply tasty. The Secret of The Secret Sauce is, “I shouldn’t tell you but I
will.” I should be charging you $100 just for this one recipe but I won’t. “I
hope you know what a bargain you people are all getting; my Sunday Sauce,
Clemenza’s Sunday Sauce, my Lentil Soup recipe, Marinara Sauce, and so much
more.” I’m getting robbed. But here you
go, The Salsa Segreta (Secret Sauce) from the former Gino’s Restaurant on Lexington
Avenue across from Bloomingdales
is ......
"CAN'T TEL YOU HERE!" This is Too Public ... If you want to Know The SECRET INGREDIENTS in GINO'S SALSA SEGRETA, Secret Sauce, you're Gonna Have To GET a Copy of "SEGRETO ITALIAN"Secret Italian Recipes by Daniel Bellino Zwicke ... "It's in There for all to See." Basta
GINO'S Famous Secret Sauce
Get The Recipe
A Waiter, The Famed ZEBRA WALLPAPER
and a Table of Happy People at Our Boloved
GINO'S of Lexington Ave.
From The NEW YORKER ..... May 31,2010
BASTA !
By GAY TALESE
Italian restaurant called Gino, which opened in 1945 on Lexington Avenue near Sixty-first Street, has been known primarily for its moderate prices, its tomato-red wallpaper printed with three hundred and fourteen leaping zebras, and its determinedly uncreative chefs, whose regular customers are so amiably resigned to the kitchen’s limited and unchanging cuisine that it has never been necessary for these customers to consult the menu.
All the items on the menu appear on a single plastic-covered page and were handwritten in ink sixty-five years ago by the restaurant’s founder, Gino Circiello, a dapper and debonair trendsetter in 1945 who thereafter ignored all trends. Even a year after his death at eighty-nine, in 2001, when the restaurant was described in the Zagat Survey as “frozen in the 40’s,” the regulars liked to boast that, at Gino’s, nothing was new: within the zebra-covered walls of this place everything remained the same, including the fact that a stripe was missing from the rumps of half the zebras—a mistake made by the original designer which Mr. Gino, a superstitious Italian of Neapolitan origin, chose not to correct, because to do so, he feared, might bring him bad luck.
So the restaurant’s décor as arranged at mid-twentieth century extended into the twenty-first: the same twenty-seven wooden tables and seventy-four chairs, the same small kitchen (ventilation provided by a half-opened skylight). And, week after week, the same daily specials: on Mondays it was osso buco, on Tuesdays it was nothing special, on Wednesdays it was lamb shank, on Thursdays it was veal Genovese, on Fridays it was fish soup, on Saturdays it was the same as Wednesdays (lamb shank), and on Sundays it was lasagna.
Gino’s most faithful customers, creatures of habit, feasted on consistency and the devoted attention of a single waiter, who (as one of nine waiters sharing the afternoon and evening shifts) oversaw each of his assigned tables for the duration of the meal. In the interest of controlling the overhead, Mr. Gino regarded busboys as an unnecessary expense, and he felt similarly about floral decorations. While the cost of the fresh flowers at La Grenouille is three thousand dollars a week, the plastic flowers at Gino’s—tucked into a half-dozen pearlescent plaster cornucopias that hang from the walls between the zebras—cost six hundred dollars a year.
The responsibility for purchasing these artificial flowers fell to one of the restaurant’s two current owners, a Neapolitan of sixty-nine named Michele Miele, who is also the chef. He buys the flowers at a Wal-Mart near his home in Sullivan County, and he washes them in the restaurant’s kitchen three times a year. Right now, the cornucopias are filled with spring flowers—plastic daisies, daffodils, tulips, lilies—and during the holidays he replaces them with chrysanthemums.
But there will be no chrysanthemums at Gino’s this Christmas and no more lamb-shank specials on Saturdays. Mr. Miele and his seventy-year-old partner, a fellow-Neapolitan named Salvatore Doria—who came to Gino’s as a waiter in 1974, after a decade at Barbetta, on West Forty-sixth Street—revealed last week that, owing to an eight-thousand-dollar-per-month increase that would drive the rent to more than thirty thousand dollars, plus the health-care costs sought by its employees’ union, the restaurant will close after Saturday night’s dinner on May 29th.
The tenant who said he will replace Gino’s at 780 Lexington is a Beverly Hills bakery entrepreneur named Charles Nelson, who, with his wife, Candace, owns and operates Sprinkles Cupcakes shops not only in California but also in Texas and Arizona. Gino’s will vacate the premises in mid-June; Doria says that he plans to retire, and Miele says that he would like to open another restaurant nearby if he can find a backer—a big if in this economy, he concedes, given that he has already failed to attract new partners to confront the rising costs of operating Gino’s.
Meanwhile, Miele has abandoned his chores in the kitchen to his subordinates and has taken to sitting in the dining room exchanging greetings and condolences with regular customers, who, having got the word, are now coming in almost every day in anticipation of the time when there will not be a menu for them to ignore. In the crowd recently were the architect I. M. Pei and his wife, Eileen, who have been eating at Gino’s for sixty years. “Oh, I’m so sorry this is ending,” Miele said. “But we tried to listen to Mr. Gino, who told us, ‘Take care of the customer, don’t change anything, and Gino will never die.’ ” Doria added, “Yes, we used to say, ‘The world changes, but nothing changes at Gino.’ ”
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