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This story originally appeared on Fork in the Road.
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| Nicholas Gill |
The stretch of 28th Street just west of Sixth Avenue is not an area where one expects to find the kind of artisanal, housemade offerings that are now de rigueur in so many downtown and Brooklyn restaurants. Yet Roberto Bellissimo, the chef of Blu restaurant in the Hotel Indigo, which opened last fall, will soon be offering house-infused grappa as an after-dinner cap-off to his Italian menu.
Bellissimo grew up in Toronto making grappas with his grandfather, who hailed from Calabria in Italy. In traditional fashion, the chef’s “nonno” would use up extra fruit at the end of a season by throwing it into a batch of the liqueur. “He had a pear tree and a fig tree,” Bellissimo recalls.
About three months ago, the chef took apricots he’d frozen during the summer crop, along with pears, pineapple, and jarred Morello cherries, and sealed them in a grappa bath in oversize mason jars. The resulting four flavors are meant to be ordered after the meal, “like a digestif,” explains Bellissimo. …
Read the rest of the story on Fork in the Road.
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