"Exquisite Italian"
With stylish decor and cuisine, Staccato is a delicious experience
By John Gottberg Anderson / For The Bulletin
Published: December 28. 2007 5:00AM PST
No restaurant can be better than its executive chef. When Staccato at the Firehall lured James Malone to Bend for its November 2005 opening, it took the first big step toward the success it has experienced in its first two years of business.
Malone, who was raised in Spokane and once had a restaurant in its suburb of Liberty Lake, Wash., was working at Citronelle in Washington, D.C. studying under famed chef Michel Richard when he got a call from Susan Pasquetti asking him to apply for the Oregon job.
"I had put ads on the Internet and all over," recalled Pasquetti, Staccato's owner and general manager. "I talked to dozens and dozens of people, on the phone and via e-mail, from Hong Kong to Italy and all across the United States. When I spoke with James, I knew instantly that he would be the one. We had a great connection."
Wonderful dinner
When Pasquetti leased the old firehall, the building was bare. A thorough six-month renovation created a restaurant with a cozy entry parlor and four separate seating areas. Just inside Staccato's entrance, tables sit beside windows that open wide for al fresco dining in summer. A step above is the bar area, with counter seats and additional high tables. To the west is a second dining room that can be used for private parties or overflow dining.
Classiest of all is the lovely fireplace room at the rear of the restaurant. Its red-brick walls and central fireplace, always ablaze at this time of year, make it a great place for intimate dining and special-occasion meals. It was here that I recently enjoyed one of the best meals I had in Bend all year.
Service can make or break a dining experience, of course. On this evening, my companion and I were served by Ron Lybeck, whom I consider to be the best server in town. A veteran of the New York restaurant scene and the former food-and-beverage manager at Broken Top, Lybeck is the consummate professional. He makes honest food recommendations from the menu, knows his wines intimately, and is impeccable in timing the delivery of dishes.
On Lybeck's suggestion, we ordered a bottle of 2003 Allegrini Palazzo della Torre, a delicious and moderately priced red wine from the Veneto region of Italy.
As a first course, we had a bruschetta unlike any other in Central Oregon. Tuscan bread, rubbed with garlic and olive oil and roasted, was layered with prosciutto (cured ham), sliced Bartlett pears and creamy Cambazola cheese. It burst with flavor.
We next shared a Caesar roulade salad. Hearts of romaine lettuce were individually stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped and made to stand vertically on end. They were topped with a delicious Caesar dressing, rich in garlic and anchovy paste, and garnished with an ancho-parmesan tuile, a thin and cheesy cracker.
As an entrée, my friend ordered wild boar pappardelle. The wide, rippled noodles of the pasta made in-house with chickpeas were tossed with a ragout of braised boar, a wild relative of the pig. She found it saucy, savory, and ate every last bite.
I had a big bowl of cioppino, a seafood stew reputed to have originated in San Francisco's Italian fishing community. The tomato broth was rife with mussels, clams, prawns, crab and fresh white fish.
It was seasoned perfectly, and the soup was so good. I was glad to have a side of garlic toast to lap up the dregs.
Cannolis made a nice dessert. The crispy pastry shells were dipped in chocolate, sprinkled with pistachios, and filled with mascarpone and ricotta cheeses, candied orange zest and chocolate chips. They were served with fresh fruit and strawberry sauce.
For a lighter meal, I enjoy sitting at Staccato's bar, beside the 1920 fireman's pole, still in its original position as specified by historic-preservation laws. The bar seats about a dozen, and the friendly bar staff is quick with a story and a smile.
One recent evening, I had a meal of soup and pasta. The soup "di giorno" was a cheesy cream of parsnip, topped with thin slices of duck, sprinkled with fresh thyme and drizzled with olive oil. It was a great starter for a cold December night.
Then I had capellini pomodoro with prawns. Capellini is a long, thin pasta noodle, similar to angel hair. Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato. This garlicky dish was cooked with diced tomatoes, white wine and olive oil, tossed with fresh basil and Parmesan cheese and topped with a dozen-odd prawns, cooked perfectly.
I have also visited Staccato for Sunday brunch, the only meal served here beside the nightly dinners. I have been less impressed by brunch than by dinner.
A couple of Sundays ago, a companion and I dropped by in late morning. Her classic eggs Benedict ? served on an English muffin with Canadian bacon and hollandaise sauce ? should not have been a difficult dish to make, but the eggs were poached until little yolk ran.
The same was true of my spicy Italian sausage and potato sauté. Had I known, I would have specified that my fried eggs ? laid atop a bed of roasted red potatoes with caramelized onions ? be cooked over easy. Instead, they were over hard.
A favorite of brunch visitors, said Pasquetti, is the Northwest beef tenderloin topped with a poached egg, Bordelaise and Hollandaise sauces. I'll put that on my list for the next time around. And I'll let the server know how I want my egg cooked.
J.J. Anderson, Staccato's assistant manager and Pasquetti's son, was coaching basketball in Florida (today he is coach of the Mountain View High School girls' varsity team) when his mother approached him in 2003 about jointly operating a business.
"We put our heads together, and our ideas evolved into opening a restaurant," recalled Pasquetti, whose background had been in contracting. Together with her husband, Ray Pasquetti, who came out of retirement to assist, they found the downtown space and worked for half a year to get it ready before opening.
"When we started talking about doing it," Susan Pasquetti recalled, "we asked people what kind of restaurant they'd like to see, and without exception, they told us they wanted to see a good Italian restaurant."
Malone was the glue that pulled it all together.
"We have a unique collaboration at the restaurant," Pasquetti said. "From the very beginning, (Malone) and I have talked and planned, day after day after day. Everything that he does in the kitchen is shared. If we talk about a new menu idea, we sit down and chat about it. He creates the dish, and we taste it and talk together about it.
"We also talk together about what happens in the front of the house. It works because of the importance to me that kitchen and front-of-house combine to make the flow nicer, to make the restaurant a nicer place to dine and to work."
When Staccato opened, it was planned as a lunch and dinner restaurant. Lunches didn't find consistent patronage, however, so Staccato cut back to dinners and Sunday brunches. "It was very spotty in terms of the regularity of people coming in," Pasquetti said. "We may revisit lunches down the road."
STACCATO AT THE FIREHALL
Location: 5 N.W. Minnesota Ave., Bend
Hours: 4 p.m. to close Monday to Saturday (dinner served beginning at 5:30 p.m.); 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. to close Sunday.
Price range: Appetizers $8-$11, pastas $17-$25, entrees $22-34; brunch $9-$15.
Credit cards: American Express, MasterCard, Visa
Children's menu: Yes
Alcoholic beverages: Full bar
Reservations: Recommended
Contact: 312-3100, www.staccatosfirehall.com
SCORECARD
OVERALL: A
Food: A-. Wonderful gourmet Italian dishes and great salads. Brunches could be better.
Service: A. When the best server in town is on your staff, it's hard to go wrong.
Atmosphere: A. A beautiful renovation of a historic 1920 firehouse.
Value: A. A wide range of prices will satisfy any budget.
STACCATO's REVITALIZES FIREHALL
The lights are back on at the old fire station, but it's no cause for alarm
By Andrew Moore
Published: Bend Bulletin November 25, 2005
Bend's first fire station was built in 1920, at the southwest corner of Lava Road and Minnesota Avenue.
Eighty-five years later, and five years after being vacated by the Bend Fire Department, the building has a new tenant: Staccato's at the Firehall.
A fine dining restaurant that offers haute Italian cuisine, Staccato's fills a niche that co-owner J.J. Anderson found empty in Bend.
"We had a few things we were looking at and an Italian restaurant wasn't one of them," Anderson said. "But the feedback was consistent, people telling us that that's what they would like to see."
To prepare the menu, Anderson's parents and Staccato's co-owners Ray and Susan Pasquetti took a trip to Italy, and chef James Malone was recruited from Michel Richard's Citronelle restaurant in Washington, D.C.
The result is a menu featuring traditional Italian dishes, but with savory contemporary twists: beef tenderloin with a Chianti demi-glace, pappardelle pasta made from chickpeas and a filet of salmon topped with tobiko caviar and served with basil oil.
"(Malone) pays meticulous attention to balancing flavors," Anderson said.
Staccato starters include clams and mussels, bruschetta, gnocchi, grilled portabella mushrooms and calamari. Prices range from $8 to $11. Salads are available separately for $8. Along with a caesar salad, choices include a spinach salad with toasted pine nuts, goat cheese and crispy shallots tossed with warm bacon vinaigrette; and the Staccato with Gorgonzola cheese, dried cranberries and toasted almonds tossed with sherry vinaigrette.
The pasta dishes available include capellini pomodoro, wild boar pappardelle (a house-made chickpea pasta with wild boar ragout), linguine puttanesca, fettucine Bolognese and a medley of spinach, ricotta, pecorino and Parmesan ravioli. They range in price from $12 to $19.
Entrees include pan-seared chicken Marsala with whipped potatoes, baby carrots and a forest mushroom Marsala sauce, for $19; a pan-seared free-range chicken breast, stuffed with apples and goat cheese, with a cranberry marmalade and roasted red potatoes, for $22; and pork, braised with cannellini beans, pancetta and garlic, and served with fried eggplant and yam chips, for $21.
Beef options include the beef tenderloin, with truffle-whipped potatoes, baby fennel and carrots served with the Chianti demi-glace, for $29; osso bucco, with root vegetables, polenta and wilted greens, for $25; and a culotte (or tri-tip) steak grilled with Gorgonzola and served with a roasted garlic risotto cake, sauteed chanterelles and a port reduction sauce, for $23.
For seafood, diners can choose from a pan-seared Alaskan King salmon, served with sweet potatoes, saffron essence and topped with salsa criolla and tabiko caviar, for $24; trout, served with carmelized onions, roasted garlic, slow-roasted tomatoes and potato croquettes, for $17; and cioppino, which features mussels, clams, King salmon, prawns and Australian crab, for $22.
Also on the menu are four pizza options (chicken pesto, Caprese, sausage and mushroom), and either minestrone or winter squash soup. Pizzas cost $10 or $11, and the soups are available for $4 to $8.
Staccato's also is open for lunch, and features a variety of sandwiches. These include a hamburger, a prosciutto sandwich and turkey, chicken and vegetarian foccacias. Each is $9.
One new addition to the firehall that likely wouldn't have passed muster with any past captain is the restaurant's wine collection. From champagnes to Italian reds to West Coast whites, more than 175 wines are listed on the crowded menu. One whole side of the wine list is dedicated to Italian vintages, featuring selections arranged by region, such as Tuscany, Sicily and Sardinia.
For all wines, bottles range from $17 for a California white to $220 for a red wine from Italy's Piedmont region, a 1999 Gaja Barbaresco. Thirty of the wines are also available by the glass. Prices range from $5 to $10.
The restaurant is divided into three rooms. The main room features a long, curved bar set against an original brick wall. The old fire pole stands behind the bar, and replicas of the old garage doors hang along the street. Anderson reported they can be opened, when weather permits, to make for a European, outdoor cafe-like setting.
The smaller, more intimate Tuscan room is lined with wine racks. Anderson estimates he has storage for 1,000 bottles in the racks. The room can be closed off for private parties.
In the rear is a cozy room that was the firefighters' community room in the building's past life. It is dominated by a huge lava rock fireplace. Leather-upholstered booths and rich, hardwood floors accent the room's warmth. It also is available for private parties.
"We like the atmosphere and energy of the front room," Anderson said. "The back room is the Fireside Room, and it has that more intimate feel."
Anderson, 30, also coaches the Central Oregon Hotshots, a professional minor league basketball team based in Bend. He does not have a restaurant background beyond washing dishes in college, he said.
But this self-professed entrepreneur, who left college in Chico, Calif., to start his first business at age 20, is excited to open the doors of his latest venture. Along with his parents, he has been working toward the restaurants's recent opening for more than a year, with a goal to "create as nice a dining experience as possible in Bend."
Andrew Moore can be reached at 541-617-7820 or amoore@bendbulletin.com.
FROM THE SOURCE WEEKLY 2006
Staccato's has been open barely a year, and while it remains perhaps one of the lesser known of the growing number of downtown's fine restaurants, it has a fantastically creative and flavorful menu, filled with enticing Italian delights.
The gnocchi and the calamari appetizers are must-haves, and Chef James Malone's take on bruschetta is inspired. The Caesar salad is a treat as is the Staccato, served with baby greens, gorgonzola, dried cranberries, toasted almonds, and tossed with a sherry vinaigrette.
Among the pasta dishes are the Linguine Puttanesca, the Fettuccine Bolognese, and the Wild Boar Pappardelle, also served are Beef Tenderloin, Osso Buco and Cioppino. And of course, the stuffed chicken is, as everyone agrees, to die for.
Deserts are numerous although as this guide went to press, the summer desert menu had yet to be set. The wine list is substantial and the libations are numerous and unique including drinks such as pomegranate lemontinis, basil mojitos and bellnis.
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