The Torrisi Italian Specialties stand at the Feast of San Gennaro will not be open Monday or Tuesday night. Torrisi’s chefs, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, said they’ll reopen it at 5 p.m. Wednesday and keep it open nightly through the end of the feast on Sunday.
The short backstory on why: they got crushed over the weekend. How crushed? They sold, for example, more than 500 pounds of fried mozzarella between Thursday and Sunday. (All of which was made, cut and breaded by hand and fried in small batches in a butane-powered wok on the street.)
I passed through the feast a few times over the weekend – to check on how the Torrisi booth fared and because it’s a few blocks from my apartment, on my way to and fro.
On Friday morning, I walked a half block into the feast and came upon a baby tiger and a baby lion. A sign near their cages promised there’d be a bear too, and that I could have my picture taken with the animals for a nominal fee. It said the booth, which was run by men my mother might describe as “rough”, was “USDA approved.” (My friend and I were feeling terrible for the cats when she noticed some detectives on the scene asking questions. An hour later, the men, the cats and the police were all gone, and the great cats have not returned to Mulberry Street.)
I met Mario Carbone’s father when I got to the Torrisi booth. His name is also Mario Carbone, I learned. Convenient.
I got a “box” – $15 for a roast pork sandwich, three mozzarella sticks and one of their crazy good cream puffs – and found that the restaurant is cooking food just as well out on the street as they do inside, and for cheap.
But, save for the crinkled brow of the occasional Chinese-reading passerby, the Torrisi booth caused no real commotion. I thought the sign — which said “Italian food” in Chinese characters — would make it stick out more, might draw in some people or repel others, that it would provoke some kind of reaction. But it blends into the jumbled bizzareness of the whole feast, where there are cigar rolling stands next to zeppole stalls lining a street where I saw a guy barreling through the crowd with a six-foot tall plush anthropomorphized rasta hat-wearing banana that he had likely just won from one of the many sun-scorched carnival lifers working out of plywood sheds of impossibly dubious construction.
And by the second or third night, I think the Torrisi guys were really getting into that facet of it. A nearby hat vendor had supplied the guys working the Torrisi booth with white fedoras (the restaurant’s logo is a pig in a hat.) And they’d started doing a little carnival barking of their own, yelling things like, “Italian food with an asterisk!”
I don’t know how many people cared about the joke or got the concept, but everybody likes a good mozzarella stick.