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"Rising Stars 2006 - Charlie Hallowell"

By carol ness / january 29, 2006 - Original Article

It's not every chef who manages to squeeze mentions of Chef Boyardee, Chez Panisse and the French intellectual Roland Barthes into a quick riff on the perfect Bolognese sauce.

But it's typical of Charlie Hallowell, the unpretentious and engaging 32-year-old whose rustic Italian pizza joint Pizzaiolo, in Oakland, leapt to radical popularity within minutes of opening last year.

He's a Rising Star chef who never really meant to be a chef, but fell into a deep relationship with food--first when, as a Connecticut high school kid, he spent a life-changing summer in Shanghai, and then later, when he spent almost eight years doing whatever was needed in the kitchen at Chez Panisse.

Hallowell had drifted west, married, become a father and, when he needed a job, started cooking at a place where salad dressing came in a jar. Pretty soon he realized he wanted to know how to make his own. His then-wife had connections at Chez Panisse, and Hallowell scored an interview.

"I told them I knew nothing," Hallowell says. "They said, 'Perfect.'"

The intellectual confines of the Panisse kitchen stimulated him into thinking critically about food--where it comes from, how it's put together, the ethics, the taste, the cost, everything. Mostly it taught him about how food should taste, and how to make that happen.

The Bolognese riff is Hallowell explaining this, sort of.

Say he orders pasta with this sweet, meaty red sauce. "I take a first bite, and instantly every Bolognese I ever had, in some kind of memory file, rips through my head and that one bite is compared to all of those," he says, borrowing from Barthes' theories of memory.

"There's always one that stands out," he says. In the case of Bolognese, it's one cooked by Chez Panisse cafe co-chef Michael Peternell, his good friend and mentor, whose perfect sauce connects in this memory scan to the spaghetti-in-a-can of his childhood. It's the sweetness--Peternell, though, uses carrots to get there.

It's what food is supposed to taste like. And that's what Hallowell tries for, every time.

After more than seven years at Chez Panisse, where ideas fly as fast as chef's knives, he'd pretty much figured out he could never work in any other kitchen--except maybe his own. So last year he took the plunge with Pizzaiolo, where he's created a lively, lusty Italian menu and an atmosphere that matches.

It had to be Italian, which perfectly fits the Panissian ideal of cooking "authentic food--you taste the best ingredients and (fool) with them the least," he says. "Italian cooking is really all about simple. There's no purer food."

Now he spends his nights standing by Pizzaiolo's tiled, wood-burning oven, turning out pizzas, pastas and vividly flavored Italian dishes such as oxtails braised in balsamic, bollito misto or ribollita, the soup of beans, greens and bread (see recipe).

"It's just really good, it's super soul food," he says of the ribollita. The sweetness of the bread, the hint of smoky pork and lots of good olive oil round out the bitter edge of the greens. It's comfort food.

"If I ever had an old Italian grandmother who needed food, I'd want to cook her ribollita," Hallowell says.

He doesn't use recipes--he starts with the flavors of his ingredients of the day, rifles the cooler for whatever he may find and starts cooking and tasting.

It's always going to be good but sometimes, he says, "The sky opens and the light shines down and the angels sing and it's perfect."

Pizzaiolo: 5008 Telegraph Ave. (near 51st Avenue), Oakland; (510) 652-4888.