Our Story
Lucia Ferraro left Ostuni in 1957 with a wooden board, a bag of semolina, and a husband who had been promised work at the quarry outside Harlow Springs. The quarry closed in 1971. The board stayed in the family. For fifty years she cooked out of a row house on Delp Alley, and on Sundays the table ran long enough that people ate in shifts.
Her grandchildren opened this room in 2009, in the building that had been Kramer’s Hardware since before anyone could remember. We kept the tin ceiling, the freight door, and the smell of sawdust for about a week. Then we lit the oven.
The orecchiette
Lucia made orecchiette with broccoli rabe, garlic, anchovy, and chili, and she finished it with toasted breadcrumb instead of cheese. That was not a technique she chose. In Ostuni after the war, breadcrumb was what you had. She kept making it that way for sixty years because she thought it tasted better, and she was right.
We shape it the same way, in the front window, starting at nine every morning. A dull knife drags the dough, a thumb turns it inside out. It takes about four hours to do a night’s service. There is no machine in this building that can do it and we have looked.
The family
Teresa Ferraro runs the kitchen. She cooked ten years in Philadelphia, two of them at a place she will not name, and came home in 2008 because her grandmother was teaching her the fava purée over the phone and it was not working.
Marco Ferraro runs the room and buys the wine. Thirty-one bottles, twenty-two from south of Rome, chosen to sit next to bitter greens and tomato rather than to win an argument. Ask him what to drink. He will ask you what you ordered first.
Gilda Sparano has shaped the orecchiette since the week we opened. She worked the line at the Harlow Springs school district for twenty-two years before that, and she is the only person here Lucia ever corrected only once.
What we will not change
The menu stays short. Six to eight pastas, whatever the oven can do well, and vegetables cooked hard with salt. When the rabe is bad we do not serve the rabe.
We close Mondays so the whole crew gets the same day off. Lucia’s chair still sits by the pasta window, and we still do not let anyone sit in it, and we know exactly how that sounds.
