Chefs of the Future! This is the first of a three-part series examining how restaurants will work in the years to come.
Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, the two young chefs who run Torrisi Italian Specialties in New York's Little Italy, both have blue-chip resumes. They've worked in some of the best restaurants in America. But these two Italian-Americans guys have taken off their toques and instead set out, with an almost overwhelming sense of mission, to create a deli-restaurant that redefines Italian-American food — and, maybe, the way the next generation of chefs approach how they want to cook and do business. Both guys consider this small eatery, which just got a staggering 5-star review from New York, a supremely serious, personal mission
Torrisi only has 18 seats. There's one server. But what's happening there is monumental, once you get the idea behind it. Rich and Mario are cooking classic Italian-American food straight-up, but using the techniques, standards, and some of the advanced tools, that they learned from their years at the kind of big, expensive restaurant that today's economy has made untenable.
Take their turkey sandwich. Although word has spread quickly in New York food circles about their chicken parm hero, which is revolutionary because it actually tastes like chicken (juicy, salty, intense, pan-fried in good olive oil and served with handmade mozzarella that gushes salty-tangy milk onto the cutlet), the dish that will truly up-end your expectations is the turkey. I don't know about you, but I've never had good turkey. Not in sandwiches, not at Thanksgiving. It's bland and boring and bad. This isn't: wrapped up tightly in a plastic cocoon and bathed in a spa-like atmosphere for hours and hours in a CVAP moist-convection oven, it's more like a heritage pork roast than turkey. The roasted garlic and pepper glaze, and the rugged little pieces of fresh thyme that cling to it, are a nice little bonus.
To read the rest of this story, please go to: TIME.