After years of searching for just the right space, Chuck Draghi returns with Erbaluce
Chuck Draghi gets an A for perseverance. Twice he’s come this close to opening a restaurant of his own, only to have the deal fall apart at the eleventh hour. But this time, it’s really happening. This month, chef Draghi and his partner, Joan Johnson, will open Erbaluce, an enoteca and modern Italian restaurant tucked away in Bay Village in the former home of Dedo. It’s a small mom-and-pop restaurant that Draghi intends to be a “little urban oasis, where the chef is behind the stove every night, proving himself and his food.” Draghi says Erbaluce will be “evocative of the Northern Italian region of Piedmont, where the sun comes up every morning, shears off the morning mist, perfumes the air with lavender and sage, and then turns the fields green against a sky of electric blue.” (In addition to being a chef, Draghi is also a playwright.)
Draghi was among the first of the crop of talented chefs who nudged the North End away from red sauce and towards modern Italian. When he was the chef at Marcuccio’s, you could barely walk down the stairs to the restroom without kicking over hundreds bottles of infusions and fermented fruit sauces in various stages of readiness. Before every menu in town touted local, seasonal, and artisanal, Draghi was shopping at farmers’ markets on a daily basis. His signature dishes are flavored with a foundation of soffrito: deep, savory sauces built on browned bits of onion, garlic, and pancetta. The end result is earthier and very different from the classic French way of building a sauce with butter, cream, and stock. “That’s the problem with most American cooks who cook Italian,” says Draghi. “They were trained in French technique and can’t get over it.”
Draghi has always been a chef with a strong sense of self. At 15, he was working in kitchens as a prep cook. In short order, he became the lead line chef at L’Espalier, working under founder Moncef Meddeb. (To get a bead on what that means, working under Meddeb in the ’70s and ’80s was the equivalent of being the heir apparent to every chef whose name you know.) Meddeb’s intellectual passion for food and perfection inspired Draghi. “He was a crazy man in the kitchen, but he made it worth it,” Draghi recalls. “I’d never experienced that depth of passion. He’s sort of Picasso with a knife.”
Next stop was Marcuccio’s, where Draghi made his bones as executive chef until the owner got into a little trouble with the tax authorities. Draghi moved on to work as a restaurant consultant, helping develop concepts and opening a host of restaurants — including Limbo and 33 — for entrepreneurs throughout the Northeast. But they weren’t his restaurants. So he and Johnson, who had become a duo while working together at Marcuccio’s, put together a group of investors and bid on a small, perfect space in the South End. “Hours before the closing, we got a call that the owners wanted more money,” Draghi grimaces. Then, a few years later, they tried again for Gallia, this time with a new group of investors who left Draghi with a “huge mountain of debt” from the preconstruction costs. But the dream never left him. Draghi recouped financially by working as a server at No. 9 Park, and after a few years, he and Johnson were ready to get back in the game. Draghi credits Johnson’s “sixth sense” that this Bay Village location was finally the right choice after more than a decade of shopping for space.
Draghi can barely look away from the construction guys who are finishing Erbaluce. He’s transfixed, watching the plasterer’s arcs, the masons on their knees refinishing the original brick floors. “My father and uncles were bricklayers,” Draghi says, flexing his fingers. You can feel how much he wants his new restaurant to reflect his respect for the sheer goodness and simplicity of Italian food that comes straight from the earth and sea. He’s a food historian at his core, close to irritatingly authoritative as he reminds me, for example, that the original Italian bagna càuda used walnut — not olive — oil, and that the early Tuscan bread was unsalted, made with honey and molasses and left overnight to rise. But Draghi isn’t going to be a slave to history. “I’m not trying to do the ‘classic’ ribollita, for example,” he says. “This is really my food.”
Draghi is setting up his relationships with local suppliers, stoking his connections with cheesemakers, farmers, and fishermen. He’s curing his own salamis and drying his own herbs. “You have to respect the seasons and the food,” he says. “The hardest thing for a cook is to step back from the cooking process and let the food dictate the dish.” For all his fans who remember his rack of wild boar with fermented wild concord grapes at Marcuccio’s, Draghi stresses that he isn’t trying to recreate his old menu: “My food has become simpler and cleaner.” Then again, thankfully, the wild boar dish is on the new menu.
The restaurant has a wine and beer license and will be open only for dinner — which, with a good glass of wine, should run the guest about $30 in the bar and $40 in the dining room. Naturally for a chef who’s fixated on using fresh ingredients, the menu at Erbaluce will change nightly. But Draghi says his greatest pleasure is in “going off program,” making meals for patrons who just want to let him go crazy in the kitchen. “It’s very Italian when the chef comes out of the kitchen and over to a quiet couple sitting at a deuce and says, ‘I’d like to make you something special.’”
