Welcome to Cafe Capriccio

Cafe Capriccio
Culinary Memoir

For almost a decade, I have written a menu each day for the evening's offerings at Cafe Capriccio in Albany, New York. Cafe Capriccio is a "little Italian Restaurant," fifty seats, decor circa 1950, located three steps below the sidewalk, in the old section of the Albany's once thriving Italian neighborhood. Many people say it reminds them of places on Mulberry Street before the Asian migration. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the Cafe is that it is simultaneously regarded as a good place to eat, a good place to hide, a good place to be seen, and a good place to be left alone. This apparent contradiction is consistent with all of the other inscrutable aspects of the restaurant business which I do not understand. I am content to know that Cafe Capriccio is enjoyed by many Albanians and visitors who pass through town for reasons known best to them. As a restaurant owner, it is important to know when to be comfortable with ignorance, especially your own. 

Each day the menu has followed the same three-part outline: 1. Appetizers and Side Dishes; 2. Pasta and Risotto; and 3. Entrees. Within these categories, I usually suggest six choices in the first section, seven pasta dishes, and five entrees.

On any given evening at Cafe Capriccio the menu thus appears quite succinct and relatively brief. However, over the course of a month, a year, or a decade we offer just about every preparation imaginable, albeit in small daily rations. Voluminous menus in restaurants intimidate me, except of course in Chinese places where I judge the quality of the food always by the extent of the choices. Once I was in a tiny city on the western coast of Aruba which consisted of an oil refinery and a Chinese restaurant operated by a gentle octogenarian who, it was said, leaped from a slave ship sixty five years earlier and immediately established a restaurant in the deserted city. 

When I arrived the city remained deserted, no one was in the restaurant, but I noticed the menu offered three hundred exotic choices. Our party selected six of the exotica to be shared by four persons, lest we be served some unhappy surprise. Mirabile dictu, we were overwhelmed by six extraordinary preparations. So, it is axiomatic, the bigger the Chinese restaurant menu the better the food. Not so Italian, or French, or Spanish.

Just last week, in fact, I visited a celebrated Italian restaurant in the "north end" of Boston whose menu totaled seven pages. Curiously, there was no pork, lamb, duck or game offered. There were, however, fifteen varieties of boneless chicken breast, twenty- two variations of veal scallopini, thirteen shapes of pasta, four kinds of garlic bread, strip steak broiled, grilled, or pan fried, and a special of breaded, deep fried, sea scallops. 

Gazing at the menu, the children were numb; I was catatonic; my wife impervious. Only my sister Andrea, who knew the place and selected it for its valet parking services, saved us from humiliation and starvation. She ordered, the food arrived clean and hot, without a trace of familiarity or taste. We applauded the friendly servers, marveled at the rococo ceiling murals depicting The Last Supper (L'Ultima Cena) next to a scene from La Dolce Vita, enjoyed the vino di tavola, but could not detect the difference between young Franco's linguine Bolognese and Anita's linguine with pesto.

In contrast, some years ago when Anita, now thirteen, was nine months old we visited the Sun Coast of Spain with Walter, Mary Ann, and Julia Donnaruma. Julia was about two. On our way to Cadiz by car one fine afternoon we stopped at a small roadside restaurant too late for lunch and too early for dinner. Greeted by the proprietor's wife and three small children who understood our circumstances, we were easily persuaded to remain. Father was summoned from his nap, and without benefit of a menu we were treated to a splendid meal of local fare expertly prepared: the day's catch from the sea visible from our table on the terrace, ripe tomatoes picked for us by the children, tender greens graced with potent olive oil and native garlic, fruit from a nearby orchard. I was then a novice restaurant proprietor and knew I had learned something valuable about hospitality and about food service.

And so, like many other paradoxes attendant to the life of every restaurant, Cafe Capriccio's menu may be described as among the briefest or, if you chose, the most expansive in the culinary history of the world. Then again, the menu may be otherwise described. In any event, this small volume will contain a fair sampling of the most popular dishes we have prepared over the years, organized, like our menu, under the categories Appetizers and Side Dishes; Pasta and Risotto; and Entrees.
 

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