Viva Italia: Dinner and a Concert

Although it’s been a while, I’ve written a handful of posts with a classical music theme. This one is on a combination of music and food, both with an Italian accent. 

Many of the earliest classical concerts I attended between the mid 80s and early 90s, including the first one in 1985, were led by Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, then the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He returned to Philly last week to guest conduct several performances of the great Requiem by Giussepe Verdi, a noted Italian nationalist during the 19th century and one of that country’s greatest composers. 

My mother took me to that first concert – an all-Beethoven program. She also accompanied me to see Muti’s grand return Friday evening. We wanted to have dinner beforehand at a restaurant near the concert hall in Center City and settled on Mercato, a fairly long-standing Italian BYOB. I ate there once years ago with my wife, but that was during a local Restaurant Week promotion and the place was packed to the gills. We had the full menu to choose from on this occasion and there was a little more room to breathe. 

From browsing their menu online periodically over the years, I’ve been impressed with Mercato’s pasta offerings. One in particular that always jumps out at me and has been on the menu for as long as I can remember is called Pyramid Pasta, which is detailed in the photo right above this paragraph. I was determined to find out if it tastes as good as it looks on the menu and ordered it as my main course. My mother opted for a linguini and crab meat special. 

For our first course, we decided to share an order of mussels in red sauce. We also requested that their house-made focaccia with sun-dried tomato butter, which is listed as a side, be brought out with the mussels for dipping purposes, thinking that the slice or two of bread that would come with them wouldn’t be enough to satisfy that need. 

When the first course arrived, we immediately questioned the wisdom of that decision. While the focaccia and butter were very good, each one of the four attached rolls were massive, and there was a little more bread than we expected with the mussels. It wasn’t a loss. My mother had a couple extra rolls to take home. 

The mussel sauce, which also contained little chunks of ground sausage, was extremely good – but the mussels themselves weren’t. For one thing, there seemed to be more shells than actual mussels. Don’t ask me to explain how that happened. And the mussels that were there were too small to be satisfying. 

There was nothing disappointing about the pasta. Whether it was house-made wasn’t specified on the menu and we didn’t ask. But we both suspected it was based on the quality and texture. 

My mother’s linguine with crab meat came in a slightly creamy white sauce while my Pyramid Pasta was accompanied by a lobster cream sauce. Both dishes included asparagus. 

The filling for mine was also extremely good. Too often with seafood filled pasta, there is merely an essence of lobster – or whatever they are using – with the cheese. In this case, I both tasted the lobster and shrimp and felt them from a textural standpoint. 

The pyramid pasta lived up to and may have even exceeded my longstanding and high expectations. But all of that bread and pasta left us too full to consider dessert. So we paid up and walked a couple blocks west on Spruce Street to the Kimmel Center, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra. 

In addition to being excited about seeing Riccardo Muti conduct live for the first time in about 25 years, I was thrilled that he would be leading Verdi’s Requiem, one of my favorite pieces of music. It’s scored for a large orchestra, chorus and vocal soloists and is filled with some of the most inspiring passages in the classical standard repertoire. 

I hadn’t seen it performed live since 2012, when Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the Orchestra’s current music director, led off his tenure by conducting the Requiem. That was one of the more memorable classical concerts that I’ve attended.

Friday’s performance didn’t quite live up to that earlier one. Maestro Muti is second to none among today’s conductors when it comes to various aspects of his craft, such as balancing the orchestra’s sections and drawing the ideal sound from each section for whatever music they are playing. That was very evident in this performance. But such attention to detail sometimes comes at the expense of overall visceral impact, and that struck me as being the case Friday night. 

I have what is arguably a bad habit of comparing each new performance of a piece I know well to a past one that made a big impression on me. For Verdi’s Requiem, the aforementioned 2012 performance set a standard that is going to be very difficult to equal or top. 

Nonetheless, I still have something of a sentimental attachment to Riccardo Muti due to the personal history that I detailed at the start of this post. I’m very happy to have seen him live again and will likely do so again if he returns to Philadelphia more often.