Add the 3/4 cup lentils, the 32- ounce container of vegetable broth, and 1 and 1/2 cups chicken stock (or … Step 1. Cover the pot and reduce to medium-low heat. When the lentils are cooked, take the pot off the heat, add a handful of finely chopped fresh parsley. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.Dried lentils for soup. “I plan to stay in Oyster Bay until I retire,” Morizio said. My profits will come back when the economy improves. “In recent years profits have been down with the recession but I have 14 employees with 12 children and I have been able to keep everybody working. Morizio says that his restaurant has done well in Oyster Bay. I have a $40 family dinner combo that feeds a family of six. “For example, I have a catering menu and I have kept the prices the same. He says that he tries to keep the prices affordable. People want the foods they know when they come.” Though he looks forward to Mother’s Day, “I don’t have a special menu for holidays. “I have the same menu I started with but I have eight to 10 new special a week,” Morizio said. His most popular dish is Rigatoni Fiorentina, with chicken, pasta, fresh mozzarella cheese and organic spinach. “In fact, my most popular special was shepherd’s pie,” an Irish dish, he added with a chuckle. Though an Italian-American restaurant, “we like to try different specials - Asian dishes, French entrees,” Morizio said. Every night after we close I go on the computer for two hours looking for different recipes.” Though he takes pride in his family recipes, “I like to be creative, too. I use a local clamer and a local seafood market.” I use organic produce - spinach and mushrooms. “I use fresh food – wild-caught seafood such as salmon and shrimp. I get talking to them and sometimes I almost forget that they have to pay,” he noted with a laugh. Photos by Dagmar Fors Karppi“I looked at 50 different locations but I came to Oyster Bay” where he saw an existing restaurant for sale. The street sign for lunch at Al Dente on the corner of Spring Street and Bay Avenue. “We received good notices from the The Times and Newsday.”įor three years, he operated the Café Pizzazz in Rego Park, but decided to return to Long Island in 1993. Morizio started his own restaurant in 1987, the first Café Al Dente, in Sea Cliff. His first job out of Manhattan was Old Gerlich’s in Glen Head. He told me to make every customer feel special.” “I learned so much from the chef-owner,” Andre Soltner. Later he cooked for other hotels and also at Lutece, the legendary Manhattan French restaurant. “She asked for me to come to the table, thanked me for the meal, and introduced me to her son. “I had to look out from the window in the kitchen,” Morizio said. “We had a lot of celebrities,” but he was most impressed when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was in with her son, John F. “I hated it,” Morizio said, so he took a job cooking at the Algonquin Hotel. After graduating in 1981 he went to work for IBM. Though he worked his way through high school and college at delis and restaurants, he majored in computers at Queens College. Still, the restaurant business was not his original plan. “My chicken pastina is my grandmother’s recipe. “When I make the bolognese meat sauce in my kitchen it smells like my house on Sunday mornings when I was growing up,” Morizio said. I learned to cook from watching my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother,” said Morizio, who has operated Café Al Dente, an Italian-American restaurant on the corner of Spring and East Main, Oyster Bay, for 20 years. Customers at Phil Morizio’s restaurant, Café Al Dente, taste the flavors that evoke his family’s kitchen in the Bronx, as well some of the finest kitchens in Manhattan.
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