Romance on the menu

DEEP DISH: Emily and Matt Hyland, co-owners of Pizza Loves Emily in Brooklyn, ?N.Y., fell in love with each other and Al Forno pasta while attending RWU. / COURTESY ?JILL FUTTER
DEEP DISH: Emily and Matt Hyland, co-owners of Pizza Loves Emily in Brooklyn, ?N.Y., fell in love with each other and Al Forno pasta while attending RWU. / COURTESY ?JILL FUTTER

There are love stories about food, about the love of food and about couples who fell in love over a special dish. There are love stories about chefs. Here is a love story about two chefs, a special dish and a famous restaurant which led to love and a family business.

Emily and Matt Hyland serve Cheesy Baked Pasta at their restaurant in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, N.Y., which they named Pizza Loves Emily. The pasta was what they ate on their first date at Al Forno in Providence. But it was not all they had for dinner that night and the menu for the evening was almost very different. The couple re-created the baked pasta with tomato, cream and five cheeses from memory, and a most pleasant one at that.

It was the fall of 2001. Emily and Matt had hit it off playing basketball against each other with a group of friends who all attended Roger Williams University. The two sophomores decided to start dating. For the couple’s first date, Emily wanted to impress Matt and bring him to a hibachi-sushi place she loved. Unfortunately, she could not remember the address and in those pre-Google, Yelp-less days, they were unable to find it.

Matt eventually suggested an alternative: Al Forno. Matt’s brother had attended Providence College and his family made it a tradition of eating there when visiting PC. Emily had never heard of the place and although Matt frequented the iconic restaurant on the Providence waterfront, he also was unaware of the worldwide reputation it and its owners, George Germon and Johanne Killeen, enjoyed.

- Advertisement -

The two enjoyed what numerous first-time visitors to Al Forno order: the grilled pizza Margherita that the restaurant is famous for, and the spicy clam roast. And they got the “pasta in the pink” as it was known then. Nowadays it is on the menu as Baked Pasta with Tomato, Cream and Five Cheeses. They went back to the restaurant many times during their courtship and always ordered it.

Emily told the Tasting Table blog, “If we didn’t finish it, there was always a fight over the leftovers.” Six years later, they got married, and six years after that, they opened Pizza Loves Emily.

They decided to re-create the pasta for their own customers to celebrate their anniversary. They worked from memory, rather than from Killeen’s and Germon’s cookbook, “Cucina Simpatica: Robust Trattoria Cooking From Al Forno,” in which the recipe first appeared. They could have found it from several other sources as well. It has been re-created by everyone from Martha Stewart to the Olive Garden.

In addition to relying on their taste memory, they did some experimentation. Instead of the Gorgonzola in the original recipe, they tried a few varieties of blue cheese before settling on a mild variety.

As at Al Forno, the Hylands tweak the pasta dish seasonally. Matt makes sure the cheeses and the petite shells are always there but adds corn or even pumpkin for an autumn twist.

The pair have revisited Al Forno on several occasions. Emily told me in an interview, “We spent our first 48-hour ‘vacation’ away from the restaurant by driving up to Rhode Island to see some old friends, check out how things have changed and of course, eat too much delicious pizza and pasta at Al Forno!”

Bruce Newbury’s “Dining Out” talk radio show airs on 920 WHJJ-AM, 1540 WADK-AM and on mobile applications. He can be reached by email at ?bruce@brucenewbury.com.

No posts to display