As the lunch business in downtown Palm Springs gets more active, Sammy G’s Tuscan Grill has entered the fray. I was alerted to the fact by a call from an old friend, chef Dave Schy, whom I know from Cooking with Class, from his frequent stints demonstrating at the farmers markets and from his helpfulness towards the local chapter of the slow food movement. Also his blog, newtaste.com, is one of the places I like to browse for recipe ideas. He was acting as consultant on the lunch menu and he invited me to their rehearsal lunch last Monday (they began serving lunch officially the following day.)
How do you set about creating a lunch menu in a kitchen where dinner is already well established? Did he go through the dinner menu and see what could be adapted? No, he said. The first thing was to go through that kitchen and find out what ingredients they already used on a regular basis. Once he said it, it sounded self-evident. It avoided putting any extra strain on the kitchen and also ensured that whatever items he decided on, they would still be in the same spectrum as the evening food.
He then came up with a list of suggestions and sat down with the owners to thrash through the final selection.
It’s a fairly simple, basically Italian grill menu but from the selection I tasted that doesn’t mean that the items themselves, straightforward as they may sound, are simple. From the starters/soups list I got an order of garlic bread — and how straightforward is that? I thought I was almost bored by garlic bread. It turned out I was wrong. This garlic bread had a depth of cheese flavor that I had never met with before — Schy had experimented with several different approaches, trying to capture a taste that one of the owners remembered but couldn’t name or analyze. The experiments finally paid off — the owner was satisfied and I was more than surprised.
From the salad selection I went with the Southwest “broken” crostini salad.
“Oh, that’s my favorite salad!” one of the young women behind the bar exclaimed when she saw it arrive.
“I know it doesn’t sound so Italian,” Schy laughed. But it does have crostini, substituting for croutons. One taste and it became my favorite salad too. Broken crostini are a terrific crunch factor in a salad, more delicate than croutons, and they add a distinctly Italian-American touch to the mixture of tomato, avocado, bacon, roasted corn, black beans, red onion and honey mustard dressing.
The Caprese croissant sandwich, (which I also tried), met with a similar reception from the other young woman behind the bar. “That’s my favorite sandwich,” she said enthusiastically. I could understand why — the croissant is from L’Artisan Bakery, arguably the best croissant in the valley, and maybe in Southern California. The mozzarella, tomato and basil filling, with a touch of pesto, olive oil and a light dash of balsamic syrup, is fresh and satisfying.
It was the pizza, though, that really took me aback. How can a Margharita pizza hold anything new? It’s one of the most classic pizzas in existence. Yes, but… I begged Schy to explain why there can be such difference in pizzas. After all, it seems like a simple thing — but he has already demonstrated that simplicity can be a complex matter.
“I think it’s a matter of timing,” he said. By that he didn’t mean timing the cooking, he meant watching the amount of time the pizza dough was left to rest before cooking. He wasn’t being doctrinaire; I got the impression it was the result of a lot of trying things out. But it worked.
Suffice it to say that this suddenly became a contender for my favorite pizza in the desert. It’s a contest I can’t resolve because my other possible contender is only served at dinner time. It would be impossible by some miracle of timing to arrange to eat them simultaneously, hot out of the oven, side by side. I’m just going to have to live with uncertainty.
Written by
Henry Fenwick
Special to The Desert Sun
