Food is about belonging, community
I can never remember the name of the place.
In Italian, Sprezzatura roughly translates as “studied carelessness,” or making great craftsmanship look effortless, like the way my dad said Joe DiMaggio played center field.
But I can only remember the name has Zs, so I wind up Googling “Italian restaurants in Millvale.”
The owner, Jen Saffron, is an old friend. She opened Sprezzatura only last December in the old Moose Lodge on Sherman Avenue. The Moose left decades ago, and there was a custom drapery shop in the building before the restaurant. But this is Western Pennsylvania, where we like to say something “is in the thing that used to be the thing,’’ Ms. Saffron said. So a sign proclaiming “Moose 68” still commands the entrance of the Millvale Food and Energy Hub, where Sprezzatura makes its meatballs.
I had an errand to run farther up Route 28 in Blawnox the other day, so I called Ms. Saffron to make a pickup order before I left. Like a lot of people, I’ve been worried about my favorite restaurants during the pandemic. I’ve spread my takeout orders among them, which is another way of saying I haven’t done enough to make much difference to anyone.
But Ms. Saffron and I had kept in touch.
“One of the last things we did in the cafe [before the state-mandated shutdown] was host my Aunt Diana’s 80th birthday dinner,” she wrote to me in an email a month ago. “My family came in from other parts of the country, unbeknownst to her, and we had lasagna, roasted chicken, braciole, fennel salad, and then our family gave remarks to the entire cafe, whoever was there, and all of us sang ‘Happy Birthday.’
“Now we are all wearing nitrile gloves and bleaching the front door every time we come in and out and bringing food to people’s trunks,” she said. Yep, and now “Happy Birthday” is a way to time how long we should wash our hands. But she’s speaking for many restaurateurs and amateur cooks these days when she says, “People need comfort, and we make comfort.”
Spikes in the cost of ground beef have made it tough for Sprezzatura to make its average 1,000 meatballs a month, but it has managed to fill every request. The first week of curbside pickup, Ms. Saffron said, a third of the orders were for entire 10-inch-by-12inch pans of the lasagna. At $60 for nine generous pieces, she figures people are recognizing a good deal.
Italians understand the importance of a family meal as well as (and they would say better than) anyone. She hears, “That braciole was just how my godmother used to make it” or, more often, “This reminds me of my grandmother.” She also heard from a late-life vegetarian who broke bad and ordered an entire roasted chicken dinner, telling her he and his wife needed the protein “to fight the zombie apocalypse.”
When I asked if she saw any permanent changes coming out of these past six weeks, she turned the question around.
“What will never change is that people have a need to congregate and belong. Food is not about food. It’s about belonging and community.”
These days, she’s been cooking for the borough’s Northern Area Boys & Girls Club, which has been distributing grab-and-go meals, and Second Harvest in Sharpsburg. Meals have been underwritten by others. Hers is hardly the only restaurant taking calls from people who want to help others feeling the pinch. She had a long list of donors, some of them family, including her older brother, Joe, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who drove a tank in the Gulf War almost 30 years ago. He bought his sister’s pasta for the Millvale Police Department.
Some people were asking last year why Ms. Saffron didn’t open in one of the hot markets across the Allegheny River, Lawrenceville or the Strip District. She’d answer, “I don’t think they need me.” In Millvale, she’s part of the Triboro Ecodistrict with Sharpsburg and Etna, which was trying to figure out sustainable ways to meet the area’s food needs long before the crisis. Ms. Saffron believes in buying local, getting beef from Aldo’s in Aliquippa, organic eggs from Jarosinski Farm in Buffalo, Butler County, and greens in season from the organic Tiny Seed Farm in Hampton.
At the twin kitchen in her building, 412 Food Rescue also makes hot meals. COVID-19 only added to the food insecurity in their valley. Ms. Saffron knows the need for healthy, affordable, accessible food won’t end with the pandemic, and “the solution is, yet again, relationships.”
State restrictions on Western Pennsylvania business need to ease soon. When that happens, we should come out of this with a better understanding of where we live and how much we depend on one another.
Ms. Saffron gave me a lot to take in, and by that I mean the Sprezzatura fare I purchased. On the way home, I bumped elbows with her under the Moose sign and left with a bag holding an order of shells stuffed with beef and escarole, another of cheese-stuffed shells, a chick pea salad, a lentil/Kalamata olive/mint salad she recommended, Italian bread and some biscotti for the next morning.
I loved my godmother, God rest her soul, but she never made anything that good.