My son took me out for my Mother’s Day dinner to Nancy Silverton’s Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles..
In the culinary world, Nancy is best known for opening La Brea Bakery with her then husband, the late Mark Peel. She had limited experience in bread making as a pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago. She used grapes, which have natural yeast, soaking them in flour and water. Nancy mixed the dough, shaped them by hand, and let them rise twice over a two-day period.
After six months and hundreds of loaves of bread, she finally was happy with her product.
Adjoining the bakery, Nancy and Mark opened Campanile, where she was the head baker at La Brea and the head pastry chef at Campanile. She would bake bread all night, sleep briefly, wake up at mid-morning to start preparing pastries and desserts for the restaurant and nap again before dinner. Her hard work paid off as Nancy won the James Bread Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef. Then in 2001, an Irish investment group, IAWS, purchased La Brea Bakery for between $56 million and $68.5 million.
There are three restaurants that take up the whole block of Melrose Avenue and Highland in Los Angeles. Opened in 2007, Nancy partnered with Joseph Bastianich and his family group to open Pizzeria Mozza. The restaurant was so successful that they opened Osteria Mozza next door, “with the emphasis on fine dining and highlighting traditional cuisine with an emphasis on Californian seasonality.”
A year after their opening, Osteria Mozza received its first Michelin star and has maintained that distinction today. A third restaurant next to Osteria Mozza, chi Spacca, opened in 2013, with the thought that Nancy liked the idea of an Italian butcher cooking for himself.
We were seated in the restaurant, and you can’t imagine the thrill when Chef Ming Tsai and his family sat at the table next to us. Of course, they had a special menu as the chef selected dishes that were sent to them. Nancy Silverton did come to talk to Chef Tsai and as she passed out table, she said “hi” to our table also. I felt like a paparazzi trying the take pictures of the two of them behind us without being so obvious.
I had the baby kale salad, which was excellent. Burrata, which is a ball of mozzarella formed into a pouch and then filled with a creamy mixture of soft curds and cream, was served with roasted tomatoes, or anchovies and crispy dried tomatoes.
I have a cherry tomato plant at home that is currently producing, so as soon as I got home, I roasted them to eat with burrata and mozzarella cheese.
Slow-Roasted Cherry
Tomatoes
The Mozza Cookbook
One pound or about 36 tomatoes
Two 9 ounce packages Sunsweet tomatoes on stems or one pound sweet small cherry tomatoes
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Adjust the oven rack to the middle position and preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
Place the write rack on top of the baking sheet. Gently lift the tomatoes out of the boxes, taking care to keep the tomatoes attached to the stems as much as possible. Brush the tomatoes with the olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place the tomatoes in the oven to roast until their skins are shriveled but the tomatoes are still plump, about 1-1/2 hours. Remove the tomatoes from the oven and allow them to cool to room temperature. Use the tomatoes, or cover with plastic wrap for up to three days. Bring the tomatoes to room temperature before serving.
The Pizzeria serves the slow-roasted tomatoes, caprese style.
Mozza Caprese
The Mozza Cookbook
Serves 6
1-1/2 pounds fresh burrata
Maldon sea salt or another flaky sea salt, such as fleur de sel
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons basil pesto
30 to 40 slow-roasted cherry tomatoes
Finishing quality extra-virgin-olive oil
30 to 40 fresh micro or 6 large fresh basil leaves, for garnish
Cut the burrata into six equal-size segments and lay each segment, cut side up on a salad plate. Season the burrata with sea salt and spoon 1 teaspoon of the pesto over each portion of the cheese. Use scissors to cut the tomatoes into clusters of one, two, or three tomatoes. Carefully lift the tomatoes by the stems, and gently rest one cluster atop each serving of cheese, choosing the largest clusters. Stack another cluster on top of the first, with the stem at an opposing angle, and then stack the remaining clusters on top of the first, creating a small pile of tomatoes two to three stacks high, with about five to seven tomatoes per serving. (The idea is for the tomatoes to look pretty and like they are comfortably nestled into the burrata.)
Drizzle about 1/2 teaspoon on the finishing-quality olive oil over each salad, scatter the micro or miniature basil leaves or use scissors to snip one large basil leaf over each salad, and serve with the fett’unta on the side, which are sliced bread that is grilled and then drowned in olive oil.
Nancy’s Caesar’s salad was very tasty, as well as the fish duck ragu and the gnocchi. It was a very special Mother’s Day dinner, and the thrill of seeing two famous chefs really was “icing on the cake” for me!
