A restaurant owner calling to offer young Frank a job wasn't unusual in the Ruta household in McKeesport. It happened every night. But after one call, Frank, very excited, phoned his mother at work:
"You'll never guess who wants my resume! Jimmy Carter!" he said.
"Jimmy Carter? Who the heck is Jimmy Carter?" Rosemarie Ruta replied, never imagining that it could be the president of the United States.
But two trips to Washington for interviews and a few months later, Frank Ruta, 22, was the Carter family's private chef in the White House.
Ruta, now 44 and chef and co-owner of one of Washington's top restaurants, Palena, never applied for the White House job. The call for his resume came "out of the blue," he says. Later he learned he was one of several people recommended by Ferdinand Metz and Edmund Brown, leaders in the American Culinary Federation apprenticeship program at Community College of Allegheny County on the North Side.
Ruta got the White House job, he thinks now, because Henry Haller, the White House chef, was looking for "a young person with the right attitude who could be trained."
He worked in the White House kitchen until 1987, preparing meals for the first family and their guests and assisting at big state dinners. He spent 1987 cooking -- and learning -- in Italy, then was asked by the White House to return as executive sous-chef.
After December 1990, he worked with prominent chefs, including the late Jean-Louis Palladin and Yannick Cam, at top Washington restaurants. He opened Palena in May 2000, with Ann Emrick, a pastry chef he had known from his White House days. The restaurant is named for his mother's hometown in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo, east of Rome.
From the beginning, the reviews have been enthusiastic. In a recent travel piece, The New York Times recommended six restaurants in Washington, D.C., and Palena was one of them. In December, Palena made Esquire magazine's Best New Restaurants list. Food and Wine magazine called Ruta one of the Best New Chefs in the nation for 2000-01.
And the Washington Post's dining critic, Tom Sietsema, wrote, "The chef's lush salads, elegant gnocchi, see-through ravioli and honest way with prime ingredients keep me coming back for more."
Palena, in the city's Cleveland Park area, attracts famous guests. "Robert Parker [the wine guru] sat in the seat where you're sitting," the waiter told me when six of us ate at Palena. "Dick Cheney sat in the chair across the table." On a different night, presumably.
Cheney, Parker and my family had a prime table, No. 41, in the corner of the back main room, with a good view of the restaurant. It's an oddly shaped restaurant, almost like a barbell, with a few tables in the front, a narrow passageway with booths for two on one side, and the larger back dining room, highlighted by photos from the Work Projects Administration years on one wall. The decor is generally plain and understated; the food is the star here.
My two grandsons, 11 and 14, were impressed. They pronounced Palena the fanciest restaurant they'd ever seen. Maybe it was because the waiter called their dad "Monsieur."
Ruta calls his cuisine American, because it draws from many cuisines. Every plate is carefully composed before it is presented to the table. In a sense, it's also extreme cuisine. He treats each dish as a masterpiece.
Nothing is too much trouble for Frank Ruta. He chooses ingredients from growers who practice organic methods and works extremely hard, by his own admission, "to achieve great things with simple cooking." Ruta makes his own wonderful, coarse, country-style bread. He cures his own bacon and stuffs his own sausages.
The small menu, which changes every day, is offered as three courses, first, second and main course, all priced individually. Or you can order a $57 tasting menu.
Picture, if you can, the Muscovy duck breast and duck chorizo, grilled and served over a stew of Castellucio lentils, capers and cockscombs. It's three thick, almost steak-like chunks of medium rare (bright pink in the center) duck meat and spicy sausage sitting on a colorful bed of lentils. The rich duck is surprisingly tender for such a thick cut. Combining luxurious ingredients (the duck) and earthy ingredients (lentils) is one of Ruta's signatures.
The six of us ordered different courses, from foie gras and red leg partridge terrine (wrapped in house-cured capicolla with mostarda di frutta, pickled walnuts and a salad of baby spinach, a first course) to Pacific Pastures veal chop, pan-roasted with a stuffed artichoke, roasted potatoes and an aged sherry vinegar sauce (a main course). No one was disappointed.
One of the best sausages I've had anywhere is Ruta's boudin of pheasant, roasted with Willakenzie verjus. The fat, white, delicate sausage was served with chopped local Asian pears, apples, pearl onions and turnips in the bottom of the dish.
I read the menu carefully, looking for signs of what Ruta had learned when he was an apprentice for three years at the old Lemon Tree restaurant in McKeesport, or at the William Penn, Downtown, or the Lincoln Hills Country Club, North Huntingdon, where he worked before leaving for Washington. All I found was potato gnocchi with wild rice, sweet potato and shaved pecorino cheese.
"Frank would help me make gnocchi when he was a little boy," his mother says. "He always wanted to make the hole in the middle." But the gnocchi he makes now, she quickly adds, is his own recipe.
Even as a baby, she says, Frank liked to help in the kitchen, He insisted on being allowed to put the first piece of pasta, and the last, into the boiling water.
It wasn't until he got a part-time job in a Christy Park, McKeesport, restaurant, though, that he decided he wanted to be a chef. Rosemarie tried to warn him: "You'll never be home, and you'll be on your feet all the time."
When he was at the White House, Ruta met his future wife, Anne, who was working in the curator's office. They married in 1989, and now have a 7-month-old son, Phillip. "Between the baby and the restaurant, I'm not sleeping too much," Ruta says.
The chef is one of four children of Guerrino and Rosemarie Ruta, who now live in White Oak. Frank's brother, Jerry, is the only other Ruta sibling in the restaurant business; he is president and CEO of R.T. Minneapolis Franchises, which has seven Ruby Tuesday restaurants in Minnesota.
Frank and his family were back in White Oak for Christmas. Rosemarie cooked "and I just watched her and cleaned up," Frank says. His mother remembers another holiday when he watched her prepare lamb alla pizzaiola. He put it on the menu at Palena, and one customer was overwhelmed. It was just the way his mother used to make it, he said.
During Christmas 2001, Frank Ruta picked up his mother's recipe for tarrelli, an Italian cookie that's boiled and baked and is hard, like biscotti -- just right for dunking. That should soon be on the cookie tray at the end of dinner at Palena.
Woodene Merriman is the former Post-Gazette restaurant critic.
Palena, 3529 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C., 202-537-9250. Dinner only, Tuesdays through Saturdays. Dinner for two: $150.
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