Savarino Italian Pastry
5572 Nolensville Road. 832-4444
Hours: 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Tues.-Sat.; noon-5 p.m. Sun.
Food may be a universal human need, but when culinary encounters are of a cross-cultural nature, they often require a bilingual dictionary. Just ask Corrado Savarino, a native Italian who moved here from Staten Island about a year ago to open a bakery.
“I wanted to take some of my baked goods to a coffee shop I saw on the way to work,” he recalls in heavy Italian-Brooklynese. “I called the owner and asked if I could bring by some biscots for him to sample. He said sure, come on by. So I made up a box and brought them to him. He opened the box, and then he looked at me like I was crazy. He sez, ‘What kinda biscuits are these?’ I didn’t know from Southern biscuits. Fuhgeddaboudit.”
In the Italian neighborhoods of New York, biscotti—the crunchy, twice-baked cookies typically dunked into coffee or dessert wine—are often referred to as biscots or biscuits, but the two have about as much in common as Italian opera and the Grand Ole Opry. So from behind the counter of Savarino Italian Pastry, located in the Wal-Mart shopping center at Old Hickory Boulevard and Nolensville Road, Savarino is providing his services as translator.
“The hardest part has been teaching customers what everything is and how to say it. I even have to explain to Italians,” he says, shaking his head.
He picks up a palm-sized seashell-shaped pastry. “This is sfogliatelle.” Come again? “Schvu-glee-ah-tell,” he repeats slowly. A sign in the display case describes the cheese-filled, flaky-crusty pastry as an Italian cheese Danish. “In Brooklyn, we call them clams, because that’s what they look like. A lady came in the other day and was so excited. ‘You’ve got clams!’ I knew she had to be from New York.”
Savarino was born in Sicily and moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., with his family when he was 9 years old. His father was a barber, but with a love for cooking in his blood, Savarino started working in a bread store when he was 15. Not long afterward, he began an on-again, off-again 10-year stint baking and making pastries at Veniero’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was also working nights at Rispoli, a bakery in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst. When the owners of Rispoli decided to retire in 1987, Savarino purchased the business. Meanwhile, he had moved his family to Staten Island.
“A few years ago, I started thinking about moving out,” he says. “New York can be such a hassle; if you gotta take care of some kind of business, it takes the whole day. And I wanted my kids to grow up someplace less dense. New York is very dense.”
Though relatives and friends suggested Florida, Savarino had an uncle in Nashville who invited him to visit. “The first time we came, three years ago, I didn’t like it. I didn’t see nobody, it was weird. We were supposed to stay a week and we lasted three days.”
But a subsequent visit to Nashville made a better impression, thanks in part to Nick DeFilippis, the owner of Nick’s Italian Deli on Fifth Avenue South. “My uncle took me there to eat when I came back. We pull up to Nick’s store, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. His hours were on the front door: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. You gotta be kiddin’ me! What kinda hours is this? My store was open 6:30 in the morning till 9:30 at night. For two years, I carried his card around with me, and when people in New York asked me why I was moving to Nashville, I would show them Nick’s card. They would say, ‘What am I lookin’ at?’ I would say, ‘The hours! Look at the hours!’ I told my wife that if we moved down here, we would close one day a week.”
With his uncle’s help, Savarino found a location for the store, and Savarino Italian Pastry opened in May. He says that about 90 percent of his customers are Italian or of Italian descent. “I had no idea there were so many Italians here,” he says. “But they come from all over. I have one guy who comes every few weeks from Alabama, and another lady drives down from Clarksville.”
They come for his biscotti, his pastries, his cakes and his cookies. When asked what makes Italian sweets Italian, he pauses. “Our pastries aren’t just baked goods,” he says. “We don’t have things like bear claws. Lots of our pastries start out with sponge cake, and you add cream, or they are filled with something, cream or fruit or cheese.” Cannoli, he says, originated in Sicily and were made by monks. Sfogliatelli, from Naples, were made by nuns.
Because of Savarino’s small retail/bakery space, the cannoli shells are made at his store in Bensonhurst, then shipped to Nashville and filled here with the sweetened, whipped ricotta cheese. He carries nearly 30 types of biscotti, though all are not available daily. One case in the store is devoted to cookies, and he points out the different types. “There’s your basic cutouts, shortbreads, macaroons, filled, dipped. We use a lot of nuts in our cookies. The pignoli is very popular. There’s the bruti ma buoni, which means ‘ugly but good.’ People like the seven-layer cookie, but it’s really only six layers. I don’t know why it’s called seven-layer.”
Savarino has little patience with mainstream America’s many interpretations of tiramisu, the classic Italian sponge cake dessert. “You have to make it with Kahlúa,” he says. “Not amaretto, not rum. Kahlúa.” He sells his tiramisu by the serving or by the whole cake, with a pan going for just $14.
In a freezer case are containers of Savarino’s homemade gelatos, which come in nearly a dozen flavors, and several varieties of Italian ice. Though fresh gelato is no longer new to Nashville, thanks to Christie’s Gelato in Green Hills, Savarino’s version is especially good, with a uniquely smooth, creamy texture—a sure sign it’s the real thing. And the Italian ices, so common to the streets of New York during the summertime, are amazingly rich and flavorful, especially considering that they contain no dairy. Savarino’s is the only place in Nashville where they can be found freshly made.
Savarino recently began baking breads on Fridays and Saturdays, and he carries sun-dried tomato, olive, salami and provolone, and pagnotta. After the first of the year, he hopes to open some deli cases in the store, with Italian olives, cheese, meats and other prepared goods. For now, when he wants to eat Italian in Nashville, he does so at Nick’s Deli, Joey’s House of Pizza or at home. “Every month or so, I drive back to New York, load up and drive back here, all in 48 hours. It’s hard to find what you need here to cook.
“But Nashville is growing on us. It’s a lot slower-paced than New York, but the people are nice, and my kids like it. And you can’t beat the hours.”
