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So, at first I was making sandwiches out of my home kitchen, delivering them on a Moto Ape, and then finally made the move to a brick-and-mortar. On my own, I was making about 100 sandwiches a week. Now, we do that number in about a day. We have a different menu for dinner. It turns from a sandwich shop into a Neapolitan restaurant. I'm learning to manage my front of house, back of house team, distributors, our bakers, repairing things. Guess that's what being your own boss looks like. Hey, welcome back. I'm Sal of Sal's We have quite a bit to do. You guys can come on in and follow me. This is our dining room. We fit 26 people in here. We have our bar and the kitchen's over here in the back.
Prior to the restaurant, it was a cobblers. So, we put all this stuff in brand new. It's the first industrial kitchen I've ever built, so it's a definitely a step above my home kitchen. We definitely needed a big meat slicer for this kitchen. I had a smaller one at the house and it would definitely wouldn't cut it for the restaurant. So, this is our big guy. First, we're going to prep the Neapolitan ragu, which is meat and tomato-based with ziti, a very typical Neapolitan shape. It's just going to cling the sauce really well. So, we just started our day, but we're already prepping our dinner. And that's because this sauce is slow cooked and it requires many hours of time.
Traditionally, families would take home some of the more undesirable cuts of meat. It required a long cook time just so it could tenderize. This pork sausage we get from Valentino's, it's a local market. We brown the sausage, we brown all the meat because we get a lot more flavor that way. Hope's here. Welcome. We don't have like the most typical hierarchy. Team comes in, we check out what we got to do for the day on the whiteboard there. It's a lot of overlap, a lot of collaboration between the staff.
Hope, I figure I'm making the ragu and if you want to get the lunch stuff, that makes sense. So, the next thing we're putting in are our short ribs. Short rib would definitely be a luxury in a Sunday ragu from back in the day, but by the end of the cooking it'll all fall off the bone and the meat almost like disintegrates. It's just super delicious. And we pair the Neapolitan ragu with the ziti. Ziti means partner or lover or like fiance in Italian and became popularized because it was served at weddings a lot of the time. So, when we were thinking of a vegetarian sandwich, the parmigiana came to mind. So, this is sunflower oil that we're going to use to fry our melanzane, our eggplant for our eggplant parmigiana. All the bread for our
sandwiches comes from Ottway Bakery in Brooklyn. In Italy, it's not something you would throw into a sandwich, that's more of like an Italian-American interpretation. We don't bread it or fry it, um sauce it up. We're not even cooking it entirely right now because we're going to throw it in the oven and bake it. The origin of the name is a sort of misinterpretation of the Sicilian dialect that translates to shutters in Sicilian. When we're assembling the parmigiana, you'll see how we're laying it out in a similar pattern and it's sort of reminiscent of a shutter in a window.
We're going to layer it with Scott Mortadella cheese. A cheese that has less moisture, so when we bake it, it doesn't goo up into nothing. A lot of basil, grated Parmesan cheese, and we'll bake it for about 10 minutes and it'll be ready to go for service. The Neapolitan ragu is really special to me and I think special to the city of Naples. This smell of braising meat reminds me of Sunday mornings. As a kid, I would wake up to this smell. My mom would get started on dinner first thing in the morning. So, now it's time to add our sofrito, the holy trinity, carrots, onions, celery. This is going to be the base of our sauce, pancetta, our herbs, and lastly our salsa sicca.
The end of the season, when all the tomatoes are fully ripe, they're preserved by making tomato sauce, passata. A way to even further preserve the passata is to dry it of all of its moisture. This passata is planed out on boards in Sicily and the sun takes care of the rest. It dries up into salsa sicca, which is this flavor bomb of tomato. Deglaze with a little bit of our white wine. We'll give the alcohol a minute to evaporate before we throw in the meat again and our passata now. Keep an eye on it throughout the day. It's got about 8 hours to cook and we'll tuck it in for its nap.
I just want to check my phone to see if we have a notification from our bakery. We still get our bread delivered by an Uber courier. Ottway sends it over from Fulton Street in Brooklyn every morning. This is my sister, Sabrina. Hello. Sabrina now works here. She's the front of house. We've kind of always been doing stuff together. We're like really tight-knit family. I'm actually building a wall in the basement with my father, so he's my contractor. Anyway, we do have a notification from Sam over at Oatway curbside by 10:35. It is 10:35 on the dot. There it is. Wow. Look at that.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it. One more? Thank you. This is a focaccia, bunch of ciabatta underneath, baguettes here, and we also have a loaf of Pullman that we use for our grilled cheese. Back when I was making sandwiches in my home kitchen, I would order about this much bread for the day, and it's this much now. So, it's gotten a lot larger. We still use Oatway because I think that they're the most delicious bread in the neighborhood. I've tried dozens of bakeries, and I just think that their stuff is exceptional. They make bread better than I could ever, so I quickly let the pros handle it.
We have about 15 minutes before we break for family meal. Hope and I are just going to get jamming on that. All right. Tutti a tavola. Time for our staff meal. In a half hour, uh begins lunch service, so we're going to relax a bit, have something to eat, chat, and then put our aprons back on. So, we just finished up staff meal, keeping an eye out on the ragu. Now, we're kicking off our service. On our busiest days, we'll do over 100 sandwiches in 3-hour service. Johnny, what's up? So, I used to do delivery. I used to ride around the neighborhood.
It's much more human to have people coming in here with the people who cooked their food. It kind of forces people to take a beat and hang out in the space for a little bit. I just wanted to try to make it as like intimate and personal as possible. So, the next bit of prep we're going to do for dinner is the Genovese pasta sauce. Braised beef, onions, and carrots with our rigatoni. So, it's definitely on the heartier side. So, we have our beef here that we're going to braise, butter and oil, carrots, and plenty of onion. Let that simmer. We'll add our spices as we go on. But, this is also a longer cook time.
The Genovese are the people from Genoa who moved to Naples to get a lot of jobs at the ports. It's said that they brought over with them this dish, which the Neapolitans claimed as their own. We're going to let this cook for a few hours. In the meantime, I'm going to jump in and help hope with the lunch rush. We got eggplant parmigiana. We bake the trays during prep. When we get them per order, we just cut out our little square, we throw it in the oven, so it's a lot quicker during service. While that's doing its thing, I'm going to assemble one of the fried mortadella.
Fried mortadella sandwich they popularized by the late Anthony Bourdain. We're frying the mortadella on the griddle here, adding provolone cheese. Mortadella's considered fancy baloney. Very pretty meat, marbled. It's from the city of Bologna. It's the same spelling as the word baloney. So, that's where baloney gets its name from. So, we figure out which loaf of bread is best for which sandwich? The ciabatta's pretty delicate cuz it's got like these big air pockets. We used to run the roast beef Genovese on the ciabatta, but was getting a little too soggy with the jus that we used for that sandwich, and
it was falling apart, so we can put it on a baguette now. Throw in our lemon aioli. We sort of thought of this because we use a lot of lemons, and we had a lot of juice left over. Broccoli rabe. We had gotten broccoli rabe delivered on accident from one of our vendors, so we were trying to figure out a way to get rid of it. Had put it on the menu. So, this was our solution. We had some hot chili flakes to this, a little kick. All right. Now, fry the mortadella. Yeah, it gets like super crispy on the edges. We have one grilled cheese with cotto, one grilled cheese no cotto. The grilled cheese sandwich, something that I thought would be really fun to include.
We use fontina cheese, Parmigiano cheese, and prosciutto cotto. I have an order for Isabel. Uh you have the eggplant and the Genovese and the special. All you. Thank We have a chalkboard menu, and I think that is a metaphor for what we put on the menu. Often times, we'll run a sandwich for a day just based on what we have in the kitchen, what we want to make. At the end of the day, we're, you know, we're making sandwiches. I think we're having fun. Okay, so we just finished our lunch service. It is 4:04. We have about an hour and a half to prep everything we need. First thing I'm working on is the pesto for the cime di rapa, broccoli rabe pesto. We pair it with the bucatini, whipped ricotta with
lemon and some herbs, and then we top that with the florets from the broccoli rabe, which we blanched for a second. Broccoli rabe is delicious. It's like uh got like a nice amount of bitterness, sweetness, almost buttery. So, in there goes olive oil. We sort of like put this on the menu as an introduction to springtime. Olivia is prepping right now. She's going to work through dinner service. She's a line cook. She is an ex-park ranger. She's very cool. Last weekend was the first feature of this pasta. Uh this weekend will be its second. So, I just added pecorino, which will take care of that acid. Before that, we
hadn't added anything. Um and then I just added some salt. You know, like no matter how much salt you put, it's not enough. But, I think we're there. So, the sauce is finished. We are looking good for service. I'm floating around during dinner service. I'll be like front of house. I'll be peeking my head back here in the kitchen, transitioning from making sandwiches all day to making salads and a lot of pasta. That's It transforms from a from a sandwich shop into a restaurant. You know, setting the dining room, put out the candles. It becomes like a real nice, soft, intimate place. So, we got about 5 minutes left before service begins. You guys have been awesome to hang out with. Great guests.
Um just going to have you guys uh move out now. Um yeah, see you next time.
