I shared a lovely dinner tonight with my new friend, Sara.  At first, we planned to meet in Manhattan but the weather reports were calling for rain and driving into NYC in the rain is bad enough when you are a New Yorker – but for a visitor, it could make for an unpleasant experience.  Instead, we opted to meet in the Hudson Valley.

Sara and I met for dinner in a well-established local restaurant two towns from my house in Lw:st="on">Suffern, NY.  Suffern is located on the New York/New Jersey boarder about 45 minutes North/West of Manhattan. 

Marcello's is a long-time local favorite.  The owner/chef, Marcello, is a native Italian that cooks with a combination of Abruzzi and Neopolitan style.  He makes all his own pasta (in fact, he has a pasta-centric cookbook) and tends to use a combination of imported Italian and local Hudson Valley ingredients.

First, I would like to take a moment to talk about the outstanding service and old-fashioned Italian hospitality (like the kind I grew up with) that everyone at Marcello's extended to us. They treated us like family.  It didn't hurt that our waiter informed us, "I love redheads, and tonight I have two at one table."

We started our evening at the bar with a glass of Le Volte 2003, a "Super-Tuscan" made up of 50% Sangiovese, 35% Merlot, and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon.   Both smooth and gravel, smoky and black-currant, this wine perfectly accompanied the light chill of the evening and set a comfortable mood that carried through the meal.

Sara and I found ourselves talking for quite some time before we made it to the table to eat.  Having finished our first glass of wine, we moved into a bottle of Cantina Zaccagnini 2003 Montepulciano d' Abruzzo, which came from Marcello's hometown.  

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Growing up, my mother had a dear friend from Abruzzo, Mrs. DiLorenzo, she and her family lived most of the year in New York and part of the year in Italy.  One day, my mother took me to visit her in the Bronx and she decided to teach me how to make "homemade" tomato condemento (sauce).  We must have poached 50 plum tomatoes and set them to stew for about two days. She also taught me the art of "drunken cherries," but alas, that is a story for another day.

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Sara and I decided to share everything and as such, we began with two appetizers.  Our first appetizer was a lamb sausage served in a bed of lentils.  The lamb gave off a building heat that the sweetness of the lentils counter-balanced in a delightful and delicious way.  The second appetizer was truly divine; the most tender—- melt-in-your-mouth— warm octopus salad with cubed potatoes, cherry tomatoes, capers, saffron and olive oil (a highlight in the meal).

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Next, we received a classic Italian salad with house-made vinaigrette, followed by two pastas that we ordered to share.  We began with a new twist on an old favorite, eggplant with rag pasta and peas in a red sauce sprinkled with a sheep's milk ricotta cheese.   

I grew up eating "Baked Ziti Sicilian-style," which consisted of very thin sheets of eggplant cutlet served atop of a bed of ziti in a tomato-based sauce, tossed in ricotta, topped with Mozzarella cheese, and baked.  Marcello took the basic tenets of this dish and re-cast it into a lighter, more elegant, flavorful meal.

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Our next pasta was a Penne with in a brown reduction that consisted of porcini mushrooms, prosciuotto, and truffle oil.  A more powerful impact on the palette, than the previous dish, the penne satisfied and sated us as we continued to drink our wine.

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We paused in-between courses to drink and talk, then conveniently resumed with dessert.  Sara indulged in the silky-smooth coconut sorbeto while I gave in to the coffee gelato. Before we knew it, the carpet cleaners were working in the other room and we had closed the place.  We never would have noticed until Marcello came to apologize for the disruption of the cleaning crew.  

Overall, a wonderful evening.

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