Visit the Culinary Institute in Providence Rhode Island

Male: The restaurant scene in Providence is an experience of world class cuisine.—to the culinary institute at Johnson and Wales University. Even during summer there are delightful aromas and textures to be found on campus.

Just around the corner, their culinary museum is a particular treat if you want to experience the cooking passion of their curator.

Richard J.S. Gutman: Welcome to the Culinary Archives and Museum, we have a number of objects on display, I’ve been describing it lately as everything form short order cooks to celebrity chefs and all the gear that is needed in between. Short cook started out with the diner which is born in Providence and we have a big diner exhibition permanently installed here.

It began with Walter Scott who was an entrepreneur who served food after restaurant have closed for the evening and that was the beginning of restaurant wagon and it started downtown by the Providence Journal. We have little things like a typical set up in a diner with old dishes, silverware, menus, and the accouchements that you might find on the table that date back about 50 years or so and I think that most people will recognize that when they go into a Diner it’s an environment even though it’s fast food place, it’s not like a chain place. I mean each one is similar to the next but it has its own personality and that’s what we love so much about diners.

This is a 1906 portable electric range which has fold down sides, a little door and it’s a very unusual item. Then we have things like an early gas range, this is one that was designed to use automobile gasoline which is fairly unusual and probably somewhat of a safety hazard. And here are a couple of cakes that were done in 2005, some wedding cakes and no that is meant to be slightly skewed. It’s not your typical wedding cake. This is a tremendous wedding cake which was not made by someone here but it was a replica of one that was made for a competition called the Ultimate Wedding Cake of the Nation and six weeks of work went into the production of this with all of the flowers, lettuce, pieces and curly cute scrolls, brackets, decoration and otherwise and it’s—.

Male: On Federal Hill, Providence’s Italian neighborhood.

Cindy Salvato: Here on Federal Hill this is really where the center of food is here in Providence. We have butchers, candy makers, ravioli makers, you have unbelievably fabulous restaurants, coffee shop, cillato, anything you could imagine, prescutto, all these pasta, fresh mozzarella, anything you could imagine is up here. This is where everybody comes to. It’s a small state in the union, so anybody, anywhere, anybody can get here within 40 minutes of any spot in Rhode Island, so it’s really the place to come for good food.

Isn’t this a super bakery? Established in 1916 with all the original pasta still intact all the original décor and if you noticed we have some really wonderful specialties like the paragnome and tart. Pepper sticks which are really a staple here on Rhode Island. Macaroons, egg biscuits, all gorgeous cupcakes and puff pastry all made by scratch, by hand.

Carol Gaeta Lois Ellis: The way the shop works is early in the morning at around four o’clock, the ovens are lighted to start to get heat. And then at the end of the day the ovens are lighted again, and we work on that oven heat during the day. We don’t keep firing the ovens otherwise everything on top would be burned.

The first thing we put in the oven is bread. The bread has no preservative, no shortening, no sugar, so it’s bread it has very little shelf life. And we try to make just as much as we need to, as we can sell for a day and like this week it was very hard because the temperature we broke a record on what was it, Saturday? And Saturday we would be very busy because there was water fire and a lot of things going on, so people did shop but on Sunday it was very hard to judge and I think there was bread left over and we never sell it the next day.

Allan Costantino: Well, what we’ve attempted to do is here in America we try to become an umbilical cord to Italy so we can make a connection in terms of what a heritage has thought us and where it has brought us in terms of how we’ve grown in life and what our parents and grandparents have thought us. And we try to duplicate that in the type of business that we run, the foods that we sell and the way we treat people. We have a saying here that “everyday is Sunday” because that’s the day when families get together, they speak, they talk, they share experiences and it’s a very cultural thing as well as an educational thing and usually a very exciting thing because you always going to get differences of opinions.

Michael McLynch: We do have shops on board to help people in cooking recipes, they might have seen something, how do you make rissoto how do you make our shrimp. There’s always a chef here or someone here that can help. Today it’s very easy to sell something, it’s very nice to sell something, someone’s going to take it all, really enjoy it, come and say “that’s the greatest thing I’ve tried” how did you do that, the recipe you gave me or whatever the feedback is, it’s wonderful and that’s what we are trying to do here. Everyday we try to meet new people, make people happy.

We would like make a dinner table as interesting as it was for us. Growing up and I’ve been very fortunate as exciting as we've had it was like—then have our costumers do the same and that’s what we strive to do and I think that’s part of our success.

Male: Right they’re making jumbo tortolonni and it has a Puccini mushroom filling and these are all made by hand. And we do all the 200 different fillings so in the course of the week these things will all change, it could be lobster one day, it could be just a spinach filling, it could be a sun dried tomato failing, it all depends what were making on a given date for a particular customer or need in the store.

And as you can see it’s a very delicate process. Here, this is primarily stuff that’s made form gourmet restaurants and through our store. So we make bread here, we make pizza here. We make tiramisu for the restaurants here and we make fresh mozzarella for our operations as well. I’m going to try to twist this on, can we make some mozzarella? There are a lot of things you go for making good mozzarella, the quality of the curd is very, very important. But in the end it’s really the person that’s making it and how we handle the mozzarella, when you determine it’s ready to be molded, the temperature of the water and we experience on the knowledge again of the cheese maker is credible. He is stretching the mozzarella again and he’s going to get it to—when you see him spreading it out that way, he’s sensing where it’s at in terms of its consistency and then he’ll make a determination. He’s getting very close right to where it’s going to be almost perfectly him. Once he gets to that point where it stretches the right way and it’s smooth then he’s and his going stop forming.