There’s a certain sandwich being sold from a booth on Mulberry Street for the Feast of San Gennaro that is far more than pork sausage and bun. It’s the product of an intense competition straight out of an episode of “The Apprentice.”
The sammy in question is the FuggedaBAOdit, a Little-Italy-meets-Chinatown mash-up featuring sweet Italian sausage with black-pepper agrodolce (an Italian sweet-and-sour sauce), pickled fennel and Sriracha mayo — and it’s being sold from a 60-foot tent in front of Torrisi Italian Specialties and Parm.
Sure, some local businesses dread the annual feast, with its artery-clogging street-fair food and touristy, street-clogging crowds, but Torrisi Italian Specialties and Parm — a pair of popular Mulberry Street restaurants known for recasting Italian-American staples — have embraced it with increasingly open arms. “We feel that the more quality items we can provide at the feast, the better for everybody,” says chef-restaurateur Mario Carbone.
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The past two years, Torrisi and Parm offered some more modern dishes, but at this year’s event, which runs from now through Sept. 23, they pushed the envelope. Carbone, along with his fellow chef and partner Rich Torrisi, their business partner Jeff Zalaznick, and pastry chef Dana Kovalsky created a handful of dishes specifically for the event. And for more inspiration, they held a competition among their entire staff, from servers to sous chefs, to see who could create the “ultimate” San Gennaro dish to be sold from their festival tent.
After months of recipe testing, two rounds of judging, and hours of tasting, two winners were declared in July from among 20 entries. “The in-house competition was both fierce and hilarious,” says Carbone. “The team really came out hard against each other.”
One winner — the FuggedaBAOdit — was created by two of Parm’s top toques, executive chef Rob Reinsmith and sous chef Mark Barbire.
The other winner was more of a surprise. Kristin Bedinger, a soft-spoken 27-year-old cook, has only worked at Torrisi for nine months, but her polenta corn dogs were a sleeper hit. “I liked that it was an interesting and delicious play on a traditional carnival food,” says Zalaznick. “I thought it had strong marketability and portability.”