By CHARLES FERRUZZA
Fame, even on the smallest scale, can be a double-edged butter knife. Last month my friend Rick Hellman, the editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, e-mailed me to say that the Pumpernick’s Restaurant & Deli at 3820 West 95th Street had used a quote (from a Fat Mouth column I wrote last July) on a big poster hanging in its window. But there was, alas, a typo in the copy.
Yes, it would have been more flattering if the very large poster had spelled my name correctly. I mean, I know that Sicilian names tend to have a lot of vowels in them, but Pumpernick’s owner Phil Harbor turned the u into an o. I didn’t get too upset since I’ve had some experience with this problem before: The publisher at another newspaper I worked for introduced me as Charles Ferruggia for more than a decade. I was just thrilled that he got the vowels right!
But let’s talk about the quote on the poster: “Fresh pastries? I’m there.” It was the last line from a column announcing that the talented young chef Jason Bowers, formerly executive chef at the now-defunct Café Trocadero, had become one of the partners at Pumpernick’s. Bowers had revived the tradition of baking fresh pastries at Pumpernick’s – I never actually tasted one, by the way – and had, by most accounts, improved the food quality.
But ten months later, Bowers was gone; the partnership with Harbor had soured.
I recently caught up with Jason again: A month ago, he took a job as executive chef at the Phillips Hotel. “Right now I’m tightening down the hatches,” Bowers told me when I asked if he was making any major changes to the hotel’s main dining room, Phillips Chophouse, or the popular 12 Baltimore lounge, which still has a first-rate lunch menu.
“You’ll see some changes,” Bowers assured me. “But not right away.”
The last time I wrote about a chef at the Phillips Hotel
it made the hotel’s management quite irritated.
I guess that means they won’t be putting up a poster.
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