Our Heritage Wall

Next week will mark the 105^th anniversary of the date my Great-Grandfather Vitale Trovarelli last passed through Ellis Island and established his residency in the United States.  May 29, 1906 marked his 3^rd and final passage through Ellis Island (his first was in 1896) and he was eventually joined by my Great-Grandmother, my Grandfather and my Grandfather’s brothers and sisters.

Our Italian heritage is an important part of each of us at the Italian Club and to celebrate it we have created our Heritage Wall in the Club.  On the wall, our members can have their family photos displayed and the collection already has a lot of great stories behind the photographs.

One of the photos up on the wall is that of my Grandparent’s wedding party taken on June 25, 1925.  I had lunch in the Club this week and it was fun to walk my guests over to the wall and show them my heritage proudly displayed along with those of other members.  

Of course I get asked about how others can get their photographs up on the wall and it’s all explained here on our website.

Next time you’re in the Club, stop by and have a look the photos already there and if you have a photograph of your Italian heritage that you would like to share, please read the link about how to do so.

Cooking, NY, Toscana, Italy and Pasqua

It’s been a busy week for me and not much time for blogging so tonight is a catch up on all sorts of subjects!

Cooking Classes!

"Supervising" my daughter
at our cooking class
at Ecco la Cucina in Tuscany

I was in New York last week for business and I had dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in SoHo.  They had zucchini flowers on their menu which took me back to a cooking class I took in Tuscany at Ecco la Cucina with Chef Gina Stipo who has been a very good friend to the Italian Club.  In the class my daughter and I took she taught us how to make these wonderful delicacies.  This week we’ll be resuming our Cooking Classes at the ICD with our first one featuring Chef Morris Salerno.  The class is this Saturday, April 23 at 11am and I’ll be there!  In the coming months we'll be offering more cooking classes along with more wine tastings so keep up with us on our website or on Facebook to know what we're offering next!

New York!

Each Friday we offer our weekly five-course Cena (evening meal) and we have a rotation which includes our hugely popular regional Cenas on the 2^nd Friday of each month.  In 2011 we have 5 months with a 5^th Friday so during those; we’re exploring the menus from American-Italian cities during.   This month on April 29^th we’re covering New York!  One of the five courses will be Spiedies which I’ve blogged about previously so if you want to enjoy them before Taste Addison next month, join us at the Club on April 29^th to try them out!

Toscana (Tuscany)!

I mentioned our Regional Cenas during which we’re exploring the 20 regions of Italy with the wines, foods and entertainment from each of the regions and in May we’re featuring Tuscany!  On Wednesday, May 11 during our weekly Pasta Night, we’ll offer a Tuscan Wine Tasting featuring 1 white, 3 reds and a desert wine all from Tuscany.  On Friday, May 13 we’ll offer the Regional Cena which will feature the mentioned wines along with a 5-course Tuscan menu and a performance of Tuscan dance numbers by our dance troupe I Colori.  The regional Cenas always sell out but this one will likely be one of our most popular so book it early!

Visiting Italy!

I’m in the midst of planning my 15^th visit to Italy this fall and visiting Italy seems to be the subject I get most of my emails about.  We have two members of our Club who are professionals in planning trips to Italy who are located here in Dallas so if you’re planning a trip to Italy, I highly suggest you contact them.  You can meet Mary Stipo Potter and Roberto Agostini by clicking on their names!

Pasqua (Easter)!

This Sunday we’ll celebrate Pasqua at the Italian Club.  While we have a great menu planned for our brunch, I think it’s most important to remember the meaning of the day and in that spirit I wish everyone a Buona Pasqua, ¡Felices Pascuas!, Joyeuses Pâques, Καλό πάσχα or quite simply… a very Happy Easter!

What Exactly Is the Italian Club Dallas?

I was in two different meetings today and the Italian Club came up and in both I was asked what we really are.  

One friend best said what I often hear - “Oh, I thought you were something like the Rotary Club for Italians.”  The word “Club” is a hang-up for many people so allow me to clarify what the Italian Club Dallas really is.

By definition a Club is described as “a group of people organized for social, literary, political or other purpose.”  I guess in some ways we do follow that… we are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and we’re all about exploring, preserving, and promoting the Italian culture, language, history and traditions; performing charitable works; and fostering social interaction within the Dallas community.

But the reality is we’re a whole lot more than that too!

While our primary mission is promoting the Italian culture in Dallas, we are also an undiscovered restaurant, open to the public, and offering some of the best Italian cuisine in the Dallas area at an unbelievable price. 

We’re open to the public for lunch Tuesday-Friday and for lunch we offer a 4-course meal (soup, salad, pasta and entrée) for only $14.  You can see our full lunch menu here.  As a restaurant we’re also open to the public on Wednesday and Friday nights.  On Wednesday’s we offer antipasti & pasta or pizza ($13 members/$16 non-members) and on Friday’s we offer Cena (Italian for evening meal), an incredible 5-course meal ($18 members/$25 non-members).  And soon we’ll be expanding our weeknight offerings to add weekly wine nights and other weekly evening functions, again, all open to the public.

Aside from our restaurant business, we offer many things related to exploring and promoting the Italian Culture:

• We are an Italian Language school offering 5 different levels of courses detailed here
• We offer lectures which you can read about here
• We arrange tours related to the Italian culture which you can read about here
• We have a Book Club which explores books related to and about Italy which you can read about here
• We have a Bocce League which you can read about here
• We have an Italian Dance troupe which performs regionally and which you can read about here
• We offer cooking classes which you can read about here
• We conduct wine tastings and our “Battle of the Bottle” series pitting Italian wines against others which you can read about here
• We perform charitable outreach which you can read about here
• We rent our beautiful facility out for private functions which you can read about here

And those are just some of the list of what we are and the rest of the list is on our website!  So while our name says “Club”, hopefully you can see that we are so much more than that! 

I was actually asked by someone at Taste Addison last year if we were the clubhouse for where the Italian Mafia meets in Dallas!  The answer is a resounding NO… we are an open to the public hybrid of a restaurant, cultural and educational organization who wants to help everyone with a passion for Italy experience that passion as much as we all do… right here in Dallas!

So stop in and say hello or join us for a meal… I promise you that you’ll feel like you have discovered the best kept secret in Dallas!

Ciao!

Mike

What’s A Spiedie? Find Out at Taste Addison!

Chances are if you know me you’ll already know something about this subject.  I mentioned this in my blog yesterday and a couple of my friends have already asked me about it so I thought I’d expand it a bit and talk about one of my favorite foods ~ the Spiedie.

A Spiedie is a food that is native to my hometown of Binghamton, NY and its origination comes from the Italian spiedini or cubes of marinated meat cooked on a skewer or a spit and served on a slice of Italian bread.  

While there are variations around the world, the Spiedies from Binghamton are thought to have originated in the Abruzzo region of Italy which is also where my family is from.

In Binghamton you can’t go far without running into a bar or restaurant that serves them.  They are so popular to the area that there is even an annual Spiedie Fest held each summer that draws 100,000 people and where they have cook-offs searching for the best recipe. 

The funny thing is though that they are so regionalized that you can drive an hour from Binghamton in any direction and they’ve likely never heard of them.  About the only publicity they’ve gotten outside of Binghamton was when the Food Network did a profile of them which you can watch here.

For years I have ordered them online from a restaurant in Binghamton and had them shipped to me in Dallas.  I’ve introduced many of my friends to them and I’ve got one group of guys that I go camping with each year who won’t let me come now unless I bring Spiedies with me!  They aren't alone.  The Facebook page for Spiedies has over 17,000 followers from around the country all craving them.

So why all the talk about Spiedies? 

The Italian Club Dallas is once again participating in Taste Addison, a great event held May 20-22 and this year in our booth we’ll be serving up Chicken Spiedies.  Our Chef Tomasso has been working on perfecting them and we’ll be introducing the Taste Addison attendees to this great regional treat, originally from Italy via Binghamton, NY. 

While it’s still a month away, just thinking of the smell of them grilling and the taste of them gets my mouth watering.  A fun aspect of my job as the Club’s President is having a great chef to work with and getting to introduce many new people here in Dallas to something very dear to me.  So mark your calendars now – May 20-22 – and come try out this delicious food while you enjoy the music and family fun at Taste Addison!

My Daily Thoughts for Monday April 4

In my professional life I work in marketing and through that I get to work with a lot of very talented and creative people.  Being surrounded by such talent daily always gets my brain going and since I've taken on the role as the President of the Italian Club, my brain works daily on things related to the Club and its success.  Since I get my own blog as part of the job, I thought that tonight I'd use it to simply spew a day's worth of the things that ramble around for me...

~ Our reservation system is acting up tonight.  If you made a reservation today for our Regional Cena this coming Friday featuring Liguria, chances are you got a confirmation response from me... in Spanish!  Trust me, it's a glitch in the system and no, I'm not changing our language!

~ We're preparing for Taste Addison on May 20-22.  This will be our 2nd year as part of this great event and this year we have both a great booth location and our Chef Tomasso has been invited to participate in the Taste Showcase.  The fun part of this job is having a great chef to work with.  My hometown of Binghamton, NY is famous for Spiedies, a variation of Italian spiedini from the Abruzzzo region of Italy (where my family is from) and I'm working with Chef Tomasso to teach him how to make them!  So if you know what a spiedie is, you'll want to visit us at Taste Addison in May and try them out!

Spiedies

~ I often get emails from people in Dallas that have never visited Italy but are planning a trip this year and would like to learn more before their trips.  To help them, we are creating a series that will run during our 1st Wednesday Pasta Nights from May through September where we will share with attendees the cumulative experiences many of us have after having visited Italy numerous times.  I'm not sure yet if we'll call it "Italy 101" or "Ciao! Italia" but this is one of my personal projects and I'm having fun with it!

~ Our very good friend Giacomo Butera introduced us to a really great wine during our Sicilian Regional Cena and wine tasting.  It's from a Sicilian wine maker named Firriato and the wine is called Harmonium.  You can purchase it at Jimmy's Food Store and trust me... it's delicious!

~ I'm working with our marketing committee on producing a radio spot for the Club.  More details to come on that.

That's it for tonight.  Congrats to the University of Connecticut for winning the men's NCAA basketball championship (yes, I was multi-tasking) and I hope to see you at the Club sometime soon!

Mike

The Bocce Pace of Life

I did something yesterday that I hadn’t done since I was a child in my Grandfather’s back yard in upstate New York, I played bocce.  On a beautiful Saturday afternoon at Bent Tree Country Club in Dallas we played our annual Bocce Tournament ~ the Anthony Mungioli Memorial Bocce Club Championship.

While I didn’t even come close to getting my name inscribed on the Club’s Championship trophy, it was a marvelous Saturday afternoon spent with some really wonderful Italians enjoying some of the simple pleasures in life ~ good friends, good food, a spirited competition and a lot of laughter.  While the event was a competition, it was really something more than that to me.

Living in Dallas is this day and age, life can get pretty chaotic.  Family and business commitments can and often do consume my time and for as often as I’d like to just relax, I usually find myself on the run to some meeting or event or commitment.  Taking just a few hours out of the day to go back to a part of my childhood was a really nice break.

My grandfather was a hard working barber who immigrated from Italy.  While he worked hard 6 days a week, he would always take a day to relax with his family.  His backyard was beautifully maintained, his garden was always full and when the bocce balls came out for a game on his manicured grass it was always memorable. 

Playing yesterday took me back to the peaceful times spent with him and it reminded me once again that we should always take time to simply enjoy life and friends and not let “life” wrap us up so much.  I think that’s why I’m enjoying my time as President of the Italian Club so much… whether its food and wine over a meal at the Club or an afternoon spent playing bocce… I am surrounded by people who have a passion for life… and for simply enjoying it and not just living it or letting it live us.

Anthony and Luigi Mungioli (left) with Club Champions Luigi Carleo and Nick Bonvino

Now of course as the Club’s President I have to congratulate our Club’s Champions Nick Bonvino and Luigi Carleo.  They won a hard fought and spirited final match over the runner-ups Anthony and Luigi Mungioli.  And for me, I certainly learned that I need some practice which I can get through the Club’s league held at Bent Tree on Thursday evenings so when we play our next tournament in the fall, I’ll be ready!  Congratulations Nick and Luigi!