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Just like grandma's Sunday Dinner at Prezza
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The pork ribs in gravy are like buttah.
My mom was Polish, but she made the best pork ribs slow-cooked in tomato sauce, poured over a box of Prince spaghetti every Wednesday.. The meat would fall off the bone, the gravy rich with meat and flavor. It’s been years since I had that dish, but Prezza owner and chef Anthony Caturano came pretty close with his version, which he serves up with Prezza’s new “Italian Gravy Sundays.”
Every Sunday from 5pm til close, the upscale North End Italian restaurant serves up meals inspired by Caturano’s grandmother, with such dishes as Chicken Parmigiano, tagliatelle and San Marzano tomatoes, Meatballs and Sausage with creamy polenta and tomato, and Handmade Potato Gnocchi and San Marzano tomatoes with basil.
“It’s a little more family oriented than the rest of our menu,” said Caturano, who was inspired to start the Sunday dinners after a successful experiment on Easter, when he put chicken parmagiano on the brunch menu on a whim. “We sold 40 dishes of it,” he said. They did it again on Mother’s Day, and decided to keep it going.
The pork ribs dish was fairly simple, but it takes a few hours to get the meat to fall off the bone. He sautes the ribs, cut into three-rib portions, browns them in oil and garlic, braises it in tomatoes with garlic and onion, and puts it in the oven, covered, for more than an hour, until the meat is tender. When done, the tomato gravy (yep, gravy has meat, sauce is meatless, clarifies Caturano) is rich and thick. Especially this time of year, many home chefs aren't up for all that cooking time, but Caturano is.
Caturano hails from Revere, where he’d eat his grandmother’s Sunday dinners every week. “You didn’t have a choice,” he said. He’d hang around the kitchen and helped out a little, but it wasn’t until college, when he found it pretty natural to treat his frat buddies to regular BBQs and pasta dinners. “The school served that crap cafeteria food,” he said. “I said, ‘I’m not used to this.’”
His father was friends with Olives’ Todd English, who hired Caturano as a prep cook. He went to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, plied his trade in LA and Miami until Boston pulled him back home. After another few turns at Olives he opened Prezza in 2000, named for a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, where his grandmother’s from.
Caturano opened an upscale Italian restaurant during a time when there were only a couple of other such spots. “There was Terramia and Bricco, the only ones who were doing anything different, really upscale.”
Caturano created a wine list with over 800 bottles, and his place was one of the few North End spots with a full liquor license, too. “We had a great start,” he recalled. “We cater to everybody here, the neighborhood, the food-and-wine-oriented crowd, the financial sector.”
Today, he calls the North End relatively recession-proof. “It’s a pretty lucky neighborhood. It’s dodged every bullet the economy sends at us,” Caturano said. “Around 9/11 it was down a little but we came right back. Now there’s great boutiques, it’s a safe neighborhood. The North End offers a lot, and it still has an old-world feel down here.”
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