- 2 hours ago
Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with chef Salvatore La Rosa at Salvo’s in NYC. What started as Sal making sandwiches in his home kitchen, delivering them himself, has now evolved into a brick-and-mortar shop making 100+ sandwiches a day. From eggplant parm and fried mortadella to slow-cooked Neapolitan ragù, see how a one-man operation became a neighborhood favorite.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00So at first I was making sandwiches out of my home kitchen, delivering them on a
00:04montoape, and then finally made the move to a brick and mortar. On my own, I was making
00:11about 100 sandwiches a week. Now we do that number in about a day. We have a different menu for
00:18dinner. It turns from a sandwich shop into a Neapolitan restaurant. I'm learning to manage
00:23my front of house, back of house team, distributors, our bakers, repairing things.
00:29I guess that's what being your own boss looks like.
00:35Hey, welcome back. I'm Sal of Salvos. We have quite a bit to do. You guys can come on in
00:41and follow me.
00:46This is our dining room. We fit 26 people in here. We have our bar and the kitchen's over here
00:52in the
00:52back. Prior to the restaurant, it was cobblers. So we put all this stuff in brand new. It's the
01:00first industrial kitchen I've ever built. So it's definitely a step above my home kitchen. We
01:06definitely needed a big meat slicer for this kitchen. I had a smaller one at the house and
01:12definitely wouldn't cut it for the restaurant. So this is our big guy.
01:21First, we're going to prep the Neapolitan ragu, which is meat and tomato based with ziti,
01:29a very typical Neapolitan shape. It's just going to cling the sauce really well.
01:33So we just started our day, but we're already prepping our dinner. And that's because this sauce
01:39is slow cooked and it requires many hours of time. Traditionally, families would take home some of
01:48the more undesirable cuts of meat. It required a long cook time just so it could tenderize.
01:56This pork sausage we get from Valentino's, the local market. We brown the sausage,
02:02we brown all the meat because we get a lot more flavor that way. Hope's here. Welcome.
02:10We don't have like the most typical hierarchy. Team comes in, we check out what we got to do for
02:17the day on the whiteboard there. It's a lot of overlap, a lot of collaboration between the staff.
02:23Hope, I figure I'm making the ragu. And if you want to get the lunch stuff, that would make sense.
02:30So the next thing we're putting in are our short ribs. Short rib would definitely be a luxury in a
02:36Sunday ragu from back in the day. But by the end of the cooking, it'll all fall off the bone.
02:42And the
02:43meat almost like disintegrates. It's just super delicious.
02:46So we pair the Neapolitan ragu with the ziti. Ziti means partner or lover or like fiancé in Italian,
02:55and became popularized because it was served at weddings a lot of the time.
03:03So when we were thinking of a vegetarian sandwich, the parmigiana came to mind.
03:09So this is sunflower oil that we're going to use to fry our melanzane, our eggplant, for our eggplant
03:16parmigiana. All the bread for our sandwiches comes from Otway Bakery in Brooklyn. In Italy,
03:22it's not something you would throw into a sandwich. That's more of like an Italian-American
03:26interpretation. We don't bread it or fry it, sauce it up. We're not even cooking it entirely right now
03:33because we're going to throw it in the oven and bake it. The origin of the name is a sort
03:38of
03:39misinterpretation of the Sicilian dialect. It translates to shutters in Sicilian. When we're
03:45assembling the parmigiana, you'll see how we're laying it out in a similar pattern. And it's sort
03:50of reminiscent of a shutter in a window. We're going to layer it with Scaramorza cheese,
03:56a cheese that has less moisture so when we bake it, it doesn't goo up into nothing. A lot of
04:01basil.
04:02Grated parmesan cheese and we'll bake it for about 10 minutes and it'll be ready to go for service.
04:08The Neapolitan ragu is really special to me and I think special to the city of Naples. This smell of
04:15braising meat reminds me of Sunday mornings. As a kid, I would wake up to this smell. My mom would
04:20get
04:21started on dinner first thing in the morning. So now it's time to add our sofrito, the Holy Trinity
04:27carrots, onions, celery. This is going to be the base of our sauce. Pancetta, our herbs. And lastly,
04:35our salsa sica. At the end of the season, when all the tomatoes are fully ripe, they're preserved
04:43by making tomato sauce, passata. A way to even further preserve the passata is to dry it of all of
04:50its moisture. This passata is planed out on boards in Sicily and the sun takes care of the rest. It
04:57dries up into salsa sica, which is this flavor bomb of tomato. Deglaze with a little bit of our white
05:04wine.
05:06Give the alcohol a minute to evaporate before we throw in the meat again and our passata now. Keep an
05:13eye
05:13it throughout the day. It's got about eight hours to cook. We'll tuck it in for its nap. I just
05:19want
05:19to check my phone to see if we have a notification from our bakery. We still get our bread delivered
05:26by an Uber courier. Otway sends it over from Fulton Street in Brooklyn every morning. This is my sister
05:34Sabrina. Hello. Sabrina now works here. She's the front of house. We've kind of always been doing stuff
05:40together. We're like really tight-knit family. I'm actually building a wall in the basement with my
05:45father, so he's my contractor. Anyway, we do have a notification from Sam over at Otway. Curbside by
05:541035. It is 1035 on the dot. There it is. Wow. Look at that. Thank you, man. I appreciate it.
06:02One more.
06:03Thank you. This is a focaccia, punch of shabbat underneath, baguettes here, and we also have a
06:10loaf of Pullman that we use for our grilled cheese. Back when I was making sandwiches in my
06:16home kitchen, I would order about this much bread for the day, and it's this much now, so it's gotten
06:23a lot larger. We still use Otway because I think that they're the most delicious bread in the
06:28neighborhood. I've tried dozens of bakeries, and I just think that their stuff is exceptional. They make
06:35bread better than I could ever, so I quickly let the pros handle it. We have about 15 minutes before
06:43we break for family meal. Hope and I are just gonna get jamming on that.
06:52All right. Time for our staff meal. In a half hour begins lunch service, so we're gonna relax a bit,
07:01have something to eat, chat, and then put our aprons back on.
07:09So we just finished up staff meal, keeping an eye out on the ragu. Now we're kicking off our service.
07:16On our busiest days, we'll do over 100 sandwiches in three hours service. Johnny, what's up? So I used to
07:24do delivery. I used to ride around the neighborhood. It's much more human to have people coming in here
07:29with the people who cooked their food. It kind of forces people to take a beat and hang out in
07:35the
07:35space for a little bit. I just wanted to try to make it as intimate and personal as possible.
07:41So the next bit of prep we're gonna do for dinner is the Genovese pasta sauce. Braised beef, onions,
07:49and carrots with our rigatoni. So it's definitely on the partier side. So we have our beef here that we're
07:56gonna braise, butter and oil, carrots, and plenty of onion. Let that simmer. We'll add our spices as
08:02we go on. But this is also a longer cook time. The Genovese are the people from Genoa who moved
08:10to
08:10Naples to get a lot of jobs at the ports. It's said that they brought over with them this dish,
08:16which the Neapolitans claimed as their own. I'm gonna let this cook for a few hours. In the meantime,
08:22I'm gonna jump in and help Hope with the lunch rush. We got eggplant parmigiana. We bake the trays
08:30during prep. When we get them per order, we just cut it out a little square. We throw it in
08:34the oven,
08:35so it's a lot quicker during service. While that's doing its thing, I'm gonna assemble one of the fried
08:41mortadella. Fried mortadella sandwich, thing popularized by the late Anthony Bourdain. We're frying
08:48the mortadella on the griddle here, adding provolone cheese. Mortadella is considered fancy bologna.
08:54Very pretty meat, marbled. It's from the city of Bologna. It's the same spelling as the word bologna,
09:01so that's where bologna gets its name from. So we figure out which loaf of bread is best for
09:08which sandwich. The shabbata is pretty delicate because it's got like these big air pockets.
09:14We used to run the roast beef genovese on the shabbata, but it was getting a little too soggy
09:19with the jus that we used for that sandwich, and it was falling apart, so we can put on a
09:24baguette now.
09:25Throw in our lemon aioli. We sort of thought of this because we use a lot of lemons and we
09:31had a lot
09:31of juice left over, broccoli rabe. We had gotten broccoli rabe delivered on accident from one of
09:39our vendors, so we were trying to figure out a way to get rid of it, had to put it
09:42on the menu,
09:43so this was our solution. We add some hot chili flakes to this, a little kick. All right, our fried
09:50mortadella. Yeah, it gets like super crispy on the edges. We have one grilled cheese with cotto,
10:00one grilled cheese, no cotto. The grilled cheese sandwich, something that I thought would be
10:04really fun to include. We use fontina cheese, parmigiano cheese, and prosciutto cotto.
10:10I have an order for Isabel. You have the eggplant, the genovese, and the special. All you. Thank you.
10:16We have a chalkboard menu, and I think that is a metaphor for what we put on the menu. Oftentimes,
10:22we'll run a sandwich for a day just based on what we have in the kitchen, what we want to
10:28make. At the
10:29end of the day, we're, you know, we're making sandwiches. I think we're having fun.
10:37Okay, so we just finished our lunch service. It is 4.04. We have about an hour and a half
10:44to prep
10:44everything we need. First thing I'm working on is the pesto for the chimiti rapa, broccoli raw pesto.
10:51We pair it with a bugatini, whipped rigotta with lemon and some herbs. And then we top that with the
10:58florets from the broccoli raw pesto, which we blanched for a second. Broccoli raw pesto is delicious.
11:03It's, like, got, like, a nice amount of bitterness, sweetness, almost buttery. So in there goes olive
11:09oil. We sort of, like, put this on the menu as an introduction to springtime.
11:16Olivia is prepping right now. She's going to work through a dinner service. She's a line cook. She
11:21is an ex-park ranger. She's very cool. Last weekend was the first feature of this pasta. This weekend
11:28will be its second. So I just added pecorino, which will take care of that acid. Before that,
11:34we hadn't added anything. And then I just added some salt. I feel like no matter how much salt you
11:40put,
11:40it's not enough. But I think we're there. So the sauce is finished. We are looking good for service.
11:48I'm floating around during dinner service. I'll be, like, front of house. I'll be peeking my head back
11:53here in the kitchen, transitioning from making sandwiches all day to making salads and a lot of
11:59pastas. It transforms from a sandwich shop into a restaurant. You know, setting the dining room,
12:07put out the candles. It becomes, like, a real nice, soft, intimate place. So we got about five minutes
12:14left before service begins. You guys have been awesome to hang out with. Great guests. I'm just
12:20going to have to have you guys move out now. Yeah, see you next time.
12:25I'm going to have to have you guys move out now.
12:27Bye.
12:28Bye.
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