Tag: bolognese

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A Quick Bite With Joe Cox

Joe Cox, President of the Ecotarium in Worcester, sits down with Mass Foodies to talk food culture!

Success Magazine claims that the biggest three traits to success are bundled into three basic life functions – food, sleep and exercise – but when you are the President of a nature and science museum, utilizing all three life functions in it’s needed proportions can be difficult. While food is the almighty glue keeping our minds and bodies in constant motion, it is also the one factor of life that successful people tend to overlook. Whether it is a busy schedule or a lack of interest in cooking a four-course meal, the food routine of successful people can shock the world of nutritionists and health enthusiasts.

“One of my former employees would joke and say that I could get by on one can of diet coke and a handful of tic-tacs – just enough sugar and caffeine to keep me going for the day,” says Joseph Cox, President of the Ecotarium. “I mean, does a cup of coffee and a biscotti count as a meal?”

“As a single man running the Ecotarium, I seldom find the time to cook one meal a day, let alone three. Most often I’ll grab coffee in the morning and lunch is either meeting with supporters of the museum or a working lunch with staff, planning our next great program or exhibit,” says Cox. While sitting down to eat a stack of pancakes, scrambled eggs and toast isn’t on the morning schedule for Cox, he definitely makes up for his short mornings by full investing in dinner. With Worcester’s food hub growing in advanced speeds, there is no shortage of fine dining in the city. “I am fortunate Worcester has so many exceptional restaurants that allow me to keep my kitchen clean,” he says. On his top favorites list is the impeccable deadhorse hill, “For me, dinner is really best enjoyed as a social event and over the past few months, deadhorse hill has become my new dining room. The fantastic team there create one flawless – and often unexpected – dish after another.”

Cox is a man full of world travels and a diverse work portfolio. With a start as a graduate from St. Mary’s University in London with a degree in environmental science and earning a master’s degree in museum studies from the University of Leicester while completing a residency at the Getty Museum Leadership Institute and a fellowship in the museum practice at the Smithsonian Institution, Cox set out on the path to museum success with an abundance of worldly exposure. Before joining the team at the Ecotarium, Cox served as the nature center director for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and the director of marketing for the Malta Ornithological Society, giving him the upper hand in seeing the full potential of the Ecotarium and giving him the one thing us foodie crave for – the ultimate taste palate. Traveling for work can be fun but the nights on the town, eating like the locals that are the best of times.

“I tend to stumble across local foods and enjoy the experience of the new tastes and sounds of a country. I am certainly more inclined to seek out a local spot than visit a chain restaurant. The best ceviche I’ve ever tasted was at a tiny bar on the side of a cliff in Mexico – we only discovered it because we rented a jeep to head off the beaten path,” says Cox. “I think I ate mofongo every day when I was in Puerto Rico and would certainly go back for that again.”

Growing up, Cox was raised on the Mediterranean flare. “My dad is English and my mum is Maltese so we grew up with a wonderful meals full of tomatoes, fresh fish, capers, olive oil and pasta – lots of pasta,” he says. “To me, that’s really my comfort food of choice. I do enjoy spending a few hours on a Sunday morning cooking up a giant batch of Bolognese sauce while listening to NPR. I’ll turn it into a spaghetti sauce, lasagna filling and even the basis for an old Mediterranean shepherd’s pie.”

“There is a delicious Maltese dish called “Hobz biz-Zejt” which essentially translates to “bread with oil.” It is a simple sandwich with crusty, sourdough bread slathered with tomato paste, chopped tomatoes, tuna, olives, capers and drizzled with olive oil. It is absolutely amazing and reminds me of home with every bite. My pantry at home looks a bit like that of my Nanna in Malta,” says Cox, reminiscent of his family traditions and Mediterranean heritage.

When Cox is not dining in his home away from home at deadhorse hill or making batches of Bolognese sauce, he is cruising around the city looking for the greatest dishes from the local top chefs. “I love the Cuban food at Cafe Reyes or the perfect tacos at El Patron. Since I am not a cook at home, I’d much rather go out to eat with friends and then go back to my place for cocktails,” he says.

He understands the foodie culture in Worcester and the food hub that is underway and not only does he appreciate every aspect of the variety of restaurants, but he is also encouraging his friends to come give us a try. Cox says, “With Worcester’s growing food scene coupled with our fantastic cultural institutions, I’m encouraging more and more friends from Boston, New York and further afield to pick us for a weekend foodie destination – and they are showing up in droves!”

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Nick Geraci and Tim Russo Elevate Volturno Way Past Pizza

If ordering pasta in a pizza place conjures images of wan baked ziti and past-its-prime lasagna languishing in metal sheet pans then you don’t know Volturno – and you certainly haven’t sat down with the restaurant’s chef and sous chef, Nick Geraci and Tim Russo. In the Volturno kitchen to the right of the wood burning ovens that serve up the restaurant’s signature Pizza Napoletana, a Bucatini Bromance has been born.

Making fresh pasta is a key to Volturno in Worcester (Photograph © 2015 by Alex Belisle)
Making fresh pasta is a key to Volturno in Worcester (Photograph © 2015 by Alex Belisle)

Okay, yes, the menu at Volturno, which changes regularly and seasonally, often offers ziti (most recently in a traditional bolognese) and lasagna (a bianco made with a creamy bechamela) but also dishes with shapes far less familiar like cencione and malloreddus. But this is much more than Nick and Tim’s effort to broaden their customers’ vocabularies beyond Barilla. Just as a pasta shape is really a vehicle to deliver its sauce, pasta dishes at Volturno are the vehicle driving the chefs’ desire to expand expectations of what Italian cuisine means in Worcester and beyond.

This synergy in semolina started when Nick and Tim began working together in 2014. Not that Nick ever saw himself as a chef. He did go to Johnson & Wales but for computer graphics and new media. He took a job as an art director at a printing company after graduation but spent his days “staring out the window dreaming about what I would be cooking later that night.” To make some extra cash, he worked part time as a dishwasher at Farmstead in Providence where he rose quickly to the rank of sous chef. He ended up staying there for six years, leaving to travel to Italy and across the United States to learn as much as he could about Italian food, especially the pasta, he had fallen in love with. He returned home and fell into a “pasta making frenzy,” which is when he met Neil Rogers who gave him his shot at Volturno.

Nick met Tim in the Volturno kitchen and their connection was instant. “Tim is my rock. Everything I know how to do, he knows how to do if not better,” says Nick, “The only thing I have on him is obscure knowledge of pasta”

Volturno in Worcester's Fire Brick Oven (Photograph © 2015 by Alex Belisle)
Volturno in Worcester’s Fire Brick Oven (Photograph © 2015 by Alex Belisle)

Which was fine with Tim. He was happy to explore something beyond the traditional red sauce Italian-American fare he grew up with in Worcester where he attended “The Voke” for culinary arts and cooked at Maxwell Silverman’s. Following high school, he worked in Providence got a degree from Johnson & Wales before decamping for Nantucket and eventually ending up back in Worcester at Armsby Abbey as executive sous chef where learned the importance of supporting local farms, the need for quality ingredients, and the potential for something different in Worcester.

Together with Nick, he now tries to realize that potential at Volturno, which they both admit has been a challenge. Unlike other cuisines, Italian in Worcester leans chicken parm and spaghetti and meatballs – good and comforting but not what Nick and Tim are interested in. Food in Italy is generally seasonal and market driven and the chefs strive for that at Volturno even if a lot of their clientele are used to red-sauce classics.

Making Pasta at Volturno in Worcester (Photograph © 2015 by Alex Belisle)
Making Pasta at Volturno in Worcester (Photograph © 2015 by Alex Belisle)

“They will come in looking for spaghetti and meatballs and instead find a vegetable ragu tossed with cencione [a large, oval, and flat pasta with a rough texture so sauces cling to it],” explains Nick. “You make it by dragging dough across the table by hand, and some people just don’t know what to make of it and don’t understand why it doesn’t come with meatballs. When I first came here, I made gulurjones [a Sardinian ravioli filled with fresh cheese] for people to try and those who did were blown away. When you get used to it, none of it is crazy. It is just another ravioli, just another pasta shape. But people look at the menu and say, ‘What?’ We have people who come in and look at the menu and get up and leave.”

Nick understands why: “If you come in here with a preconceived notion of what you want and have come to expect and you don’t see that, it is understandable that you might feel a little let down. The challenge for us is to get people who are let down to stay and think a little outside their comfort zones. When we did a fritto misto, we fried lemon slices with the fish and vegetables and snuck them in. People would put them in their mouths and say, ‘Wow, that’s really lemony what was that?’ When we explained it was a deep fried lemon and very Italian, we satisfied their expectations and gave them something new.”

Orrachetti with broccoli rabe, sausage, and chilies from Volturno on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, MAThat said, being sneaky is becoming less necessary: “We have had great success with our customers just ordering things that they don’t know,” adds Tim. “What’s most fun is when we give people an experience to remember by satisfying and exceeding their expectations. That’s the coolest thing when one person orders something really different at a table and just changes everyone else’s mind.”

With a menu that often changes, Nick and Tim constantly experiment to see what will work, and what’s worked has even surprised them at times.

A beef tongue bruschetta, for example, has been a hit. The tongue – brined for two weeks, smoked, sous vided, and sliced super thin – is served with onion jam and cruculo (an Italian Swiss-like cheese). Alas, pasta with chicken livers and caramelized onion and sage butter fell flat. “We ran it as a special. It was one of the best pasta dishes I’ve ever had. But everyone else rejected it. Tim and I looked at each other and said, ‘Why are people not buying this? We are going to be eating chicken livers all week,’” says Nick.

Both chefs agree, that’s the hardest thing about their jobs: Dealing with their own egos. These guys want it to work for their customers: They want to tell people, “This is delicious just try it!” And disappointments aside, they will continue to play with their food whenever they can. Adding beet juice to teardrop-sized malloreddus (another Sardinian pasta) so they look like little ribbed purple jellybeans? Why not? Maybe they’ll try and turn it yellow with corn in the summer.

To produce dishes of unparalleled freshness and flavor, Nick and Tim are even planning a farm dinner for Lettuce Be Local featuring pasta made from local grain milled fresh at the restaurant. Chances are those diners will happily gobble it up. Could regular customers see this freshest pasta possible on their menus too? Who knows but one can hope as things seem to be changing: According to Tim, there was spaghetti and meatballs on the menu at one point. When they took it off, they thought an angry mob would form: “But people accepted it despite the fact that it had been really popular.”

This is good news because Volturno is planning to broaden its reach and opening a second location in Framingham near Framingham State this fall – a big stake in the ground for Worcester’s growing reach and potential as a food city.

“We want Worcester to keep coming up– to be the next Portland, Maine. It has that potential,” says Tim. “Look what we have already. It’s just getting everyone getting past what they know and want and keep trying new stuff and exploring what they didn’t even know they wanted and needed.”