Dino’s Foodshow

          In my crowd (the foodies) we're already calling it Dino's. DDL Foodshow? I mean really… it is Dino's. A $3.5 million ice ring circus of gastronomia. Edible show biz. Dino himself handing out bread samples on opening day. (Cool heads talked him out of bringing King Kong out of storage to preside.) With its arched Lexan vault letting in the sky, the gleaming copper rotisserie and warm oak echoing terra-cotta tile, Dino's is probably the most stunningly handsome grocery in the world, certainly in New York.

          "This place is hot," cried the suave man-about-town sipping espresso at the sandwich bar. "Everyone is here. I think I'll come here every morning for breakfast."

          He's right. Limousines double-park on Columbus Avenue north of 81st Street. A Mercedes is aced out by an aggressive BMW, provoking howls of outrage. Ed Koch is here. James Beard. Perry Ellis. Even Zabar's Big Cheese, Murray Klein, got a tour of the astonishing 5,000 square feet of kitchen. "Of course I went there. Didn't I read Mein Kampf? I'm a Jew. Hitler is my enemy. I should know what he's doing. Not that Dino is my enemy. It's the best thing that could happen to Zabar's. The pushing here makes people want to buy. At Dino's it's 'Don't touch me, I'm too beautiful.'" Dino tried to hire Klein. “On a Saturday he came to Zabar's. I should take time to talk on a Saturday?" says Murray, flabbergasted. "I said, 'Buy Zabar's and you can have me.'"

          So Dino De Laurentiis lured Bill Hyde away from Balducci's. Now, one numbing week after the opening, Hyde has bitten the dust. He's through. Pale, dazed, he stands in the Saturday swirl, exhausted from trying to cope with "this monster": the air-conditioning blues, the disappearing mops…"I want to get back to food, where I belong." Would he stay as a food consultant? "Dino doesn't think he needs a food consultant. "Hagen von Burchard, recruited to run Dino's super-deli in Beverly Hills, steps into the breach. That leaves Memo Ambrosi, hard-driving Bolognese lieutenant ("Bologna, a center of good cooking already 400 years"), in knock-down-drag-out philosophical warfare with Neapolitan Dino, the spaghetti-maker's son.

          "Dino admits there are times you must use butter instead of olive oil," says Ambrosi.

          And the family. Dino is a seductive patriarch. He would make everyone else into a son. I've spent only fourteen minutes with him and I'm wishing he would adopt me. It seems as if there are sons-in-law everywhere. That is only because Jean Pierre Viale is so charming, and Pepe Escriva is so earnest. Daughter Francesca rules the gift baskets. Daughter Reffaella is a moviemaker on the Coast."

          This is like the twenty-first century," marvels a sightseer."

          These people look like they belong here. Like they deserve it," rails a wild-eyed man. "Me, I'm a homeless person. What am I doing here?"

          "Stevie, stop whining," an anxious mother begs. "I wonder if I could please have my chicken. He has to go to the bathroom. No bathroom? Beautiful."

          "Yecch. Why do they call them white truffles?" a sightseer asks. "They look dirty to me. At $30 an ounce I'm grateful I don't even have to try them."

          "You've changed your ridiculous cash system," a customer observes.

          "Yes," says the clerk with a smile. "It was a pain in the ass for everyone."

          Changes every day. Designer Adam Tihany stops by to discuss the changes. Checkout counters are going in near the entrance after all. Take-a-number machines are a must, so far resisted. Ditto credit cards. "It will take a while to get the pricing figured out," says Walter O'Neal, the treasurer. The Italian cooks, the bakers from Motta (the giant Italian confectionary that owns a substantial minority interest in Dino's soon-to-open shop at Trump Tower, a smaller interest here) will go home. New ones will come. "They give us the technology for the bread, the pasticceria, the gastronomia," says Dino, sipping an espresso at the stand-up bar.

The crowd gasps and parts, making way for the two-yard-long pizzas borne aloft on a board you could surf on. What a delightful production. Matinée at Dino's.

          Dino's landlord stops by for chocolate truffles ($22.50 a pound). Sold out. Real estate developer Robert Quinlan hunted long and hard to find a classy food tenant for the Endicott's prized "palm court," the final touch in his conversion of a shabby hotel to slick co-opdum. But deals fell through twice. Then a mysterious stranger wanted to see the place at 7 A.M. He was persuaded to wait till nine. It was love at first sight, a dizzying state in which to negotiate. Quinlan and his lawyer met with De Laurentiis and his sextet of consiglieri. "Let'sa signa the contract, Bob," said Dino. The lawyers objected. Every five minutes, Dino would say, "Bobba, I love you. Let'sa signa the papers." Finally that's just what they did. They signed, leaving the lawyers to work it out. To soothe the residential tenant's jangled nerves, Dino promised to keep fresh flowers in the lobby for a year.

"Everything is gracious," says Quinlan. "We want them to succeed." After all, this is the man who produced Bitter Rice, La Strada, The Nights of Cabiria, Serpico, Death Wish, Hurricane, leaving behind a $6-million hotel on Bora Bora built to house the crew.

          Movie men put $15 million into film and if it flops they move on to the next. Will Dino have the patience with a low-budget (by comparison) grocery if it fails to win the mouths of food-obsessed New Yorkers? Are we seeing a new ego here? A more passionate commitment? Two more DDL Foodshows are already in the works. De Laurentiis wanted more. "He would have opened ten if we hadn't stopped him," says ex-son-in-law Viale. And Dino nags after the tiniest detail, scouting airport delicacy shops as he flies the world on movie business. Ten days before opening, he phoned designer Tihany from Milan at 7 A.M. and then three times again before noon with the latest "must" inspired by still another visit to Peck's, that town's epicurean mecca.

          It's too soon to predict a boffo long run. This is still shakeout time. Rumor has it 30 people were dismissed last week. The American interns in the kitchen are learning Italian as they absorb the Peck and Motta sensibility. Serious catering will not begin till January. Prices fluctuate. Most of the very young clerks are sweet and enthusiastic-- some are even impressively knowledgeable. A few are pills. One or two seem hopelessly lost. On the hottest day of December the coolers quit and everyone suffered. No instructions are given for reheating food, and the promised hot line to kitchen-wise Teresa is not yet in full operation, but someone will take your number and Teresa will return the call, will even type recipes if you want them.

          There are no cheeses exclusive to Dino's yet. Soon the staff hope to make their own mozzarella and ricotta. There is no attempt to compete with the discount prices at Fairway, seven blocks south on Broadway. Dino's big wheels of splendid aged Parmesan sell for $9.50 a pound (Fairway's are $7.98). And a comparison of a dozen other items showed three-quarters of them higher at the DDL than at Zabar's and/or Fairway. (Pommery mustard, for instance, was $4.65 at DDL, $3.29 at Zabar's, and $2.79 at Fairway.) We are paying for wide aisles, bare brick, copper, and vaulted ceilings -- some of us perhaps cheerfully. In the fish department, Scotch salmon is sadly inferior to Zabar's, and less prettily sliced, and more expensive. Dino's own terrines are good, but not as good as Les Trois Petits Cochons' best -- priced lower.

          For now, cooked and layered pasta (rich, oozing lasagna, $5.95 a pound; lush agnolotti alla béchamel, $5.75 a pound) as well as braised grandmother's cooking (rabbit, $4.75 a pound, and a homely but tasty roast turkey, $4.25) seem to be the kitchen's strengths. Moist and flavorful roast chicken ($5.95 each) is a best buy, though highly salted inside. Garlic-studded eggplant ($4.50 a pound) is wonderful. And there is a pretty Russian-salad-filled little vol-au-vent, topped with a large shrimp, that would make an impressive hors d'oeuvre for a fancy dinner (if only someone hadn't oversalted the minced-egg-and-parsley garnish). Seasoning is wildly erratic, either shy or overwhelming, as in the brasata ($9.90 a pound), dry and rather toughish beef in an intensely salted wine sauce. A square of rather pale polenta with a mean little sausage reclining at one edge is sold as finger food ($2.95 for two). A lovely but tasteless forcemeat mosaic fills the boned breast of veal ($8.75 a half-pound). And the whole boned and stuffed suckling pig romana ($7.99 a pound) is dry and lackluster, too. Soggy cauliflower ($4 a pound) is a serious mistake.

          Green cannelloni wrapped around spinach and ricotta ($5.95 a pound) is a bit more lush on the second tasting, but still not as good as the lasagna. Red pepper stuffed with a melt of cheese and macaroni ($4.25 a pound) is something I'd eat, but not crave. Tortas of spaghetti, macaroni, and green and white egg noodles, cooked in a crisp cake and sold by the slice ($6.20 a pound), may be an acquired passion. I make pancakes from leftover pasta and risotto all the time. Mine have more flavor, but some of these are good anyway. The vegetable pies can be insipid, too, although the thin, nutty pastry is good, best complimented by a lovely light quiche ($6.20 a pound). The zucchini frittata is spongy and skimps on zucchini as well as on taste.

          The fierce spiny lobsters from Sicily clawing one another in the window are the showpiece of the cold table -- with its wondrously fussy aspic glazes and mayonnaise fluting, mingled with homelier items: plain-Jane pears poached skin-on in red wine (a ridiculous $5.90 a pound), odd sweet-and-sour fennel with plumped white raisins ($4.50 a pound). The house mayonnaise is thick and rich and extravagantly applied, elevating a rather impoverished salade russe -- too much potato -- ($5 a pound), almost overwhelming a chicken-and-celery-root salad ($22 a pound) with an embarrassing shortage of chicken, producing a highly unusual coleslaw ($5.50 a pound on opening day, now down to $3.50), and prompting a clerk to boast, "Diana Vreeland brought in her Tiffany tureen to fill with our coleslaw." Really. "Just kidding," he confessed. "But she could have."

          No one seems tempted by the grapefruit studded with pistachios and glazed with Maraschino liqueur ($1.50 the half). And the jelly-glazed salmon mousse with a filling of chopped egg, red pepper, black  truffle, and parsley -- highly recommended -- is another taste I don't respond to. Half of a small lobster carries almost it's own weight of salade russe and a ruffle of lush mayonnaise ($12.25 a pound). And flat, flaky, pizzalike bread under lovely waves of buttery salmon and tuna mousses is rich and delicious, but perhaps best in small doses.

          The bakery department is astonishing, turning out odd breads I've never seen anywhere else -- wonderful nut breads, rich, eggy bread perfumed with rosemary, a tomato-and-cheese loaf smelling like pizza, pumpkinseed-paved rye, corn bread studded with olives or raisins, good crusty little rolls, bottoncini in two sizes ($7.59 a half pound). Everything is available by the pound (mostly $2.50 to $5, $7.50 for chocolate bread), including strips of pizza ($5.50 a pound) -- odd…authentically Italian, one must suppose, but seriously underseasoned for my pizza-parlor taste. So sad, too. The crust is extraordinary, but eggplant pizza ought to be lush and pungent. Unlike any pizza imagined, and therefore immune to preconceived notions, is a wonderful crisp crust that's sprinkled simply with oil and rosemary ($3.50 a pound).

          The Motta look rules the pastry department. A masterly hand sets fruit jewels on a crust that travels sturdily and tastes tender -- strawberries, figs, big black grapes, banana slices, and gooseberries in a nicely tart glaze ($10 a pound). There are perky little butter cream tarts, a lush napoleon, homely custard torte by the slice, and a large cookie glazed with strawberry and maraschino liqueur ($1.25 each). Cakes are sold by the pound or portion. Rich, not-too-sweet chestnut-and-chocolate cake is $7.50 a pound. A chocolate-and-zabaglione confection costs $1.25. A delicate pastry swan with a fluff of whipped-cream "feathers" ($1.25) did not survive the voyage home. Cookies ($7.50 a pound) are merely serviceable…good but not brilliant.

          There seem to be more sightseers than shoppers on the weekend. And it isn't easy to put together a dinner-to-go and get out the door with any speed. Anyway, it's a luxury to pause at the bar and catch the action…to sip an espresso ($1.50 to $2.25), dark and intense…to sample the tramezzini--tea sandwiches ($4) designed to show off the house salmon and prosciutto, moist with a bit of mayonnaise or salade russe. If he's not too busy, the sandwich man will put together turkey tonnato to order on any bread your heart desires (he promised)…even half a sandwich, if you wish.

          You won't see King Kong, but you may brush shopping bags with the landlord or share the counter with a suave man-about-town…or even Dino himself. How long…how good…how profitable remains to be seen.