“I think I was the only Greek kid in Queens whose parents didn’t have a restaurant,” joked James Mallios, the Flushing-born lawyer-turned-restaurateur, in his distinctive gravelly voice. Of opening Amali, the swank Upper East Side restaurant that he co-owns, he added, “I think it was some Freudian sh*t.” Mallios, in jeans and a plaid shirt with buttons that strained a bit around the middle, addressed the journalists who had gathered in a private upstairs room of his now year-old restaurant. The air was rich with the scent of pine needles; silver plates gleamed on rough-hewn wooden tables; shadows cast by flickering candlelight danced across Mallios’s shiny bald head. We were there to preview a “unique pop-up-style dinner experience inspired by the food, design and spirit of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol,’” and I was worried.
Amali is a farm-to-table Mediterranean restaurant, whose usual fare includes cappelletti with dandelion greens, burrata di campagna, and octopus a la plancha (Mallios’s business partners are Steve Tzolis and Nicola Kotsoni, the duo behind Il Cantinori and Periyali). I’d argue that there exists a cognitive dissonance between the foodstuffs of Victorian England and octopus a la plancha. Furthermore, Amali’s executive chef, Junior Borges, is from Brazil, where zero Dickens novels take place. Add the alarming fact that the dinner was based on a book about ghosts, by an author known for writing about begging for seconds of gruel, and things were looking pretty grim. To gird myself—for an evening of “past, present and future interpretations” of the foods described in Dickens’s tale—I went back to the source.
In the pages of “A Christmas Carol,” I found some of the truly distressing gastronomy I sought. Marley’s face, Dickens writes, “had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” And the colossal turkey (“twice the size of Tiny Tim”) that saves the day is its own kind of nightmare, especially for those of us who just survived the culinary sprint that is Thanksgiving: “He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ‘em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.”
Yet “A Christmas Carol” is really a book that worships food, that delights in bounty. “Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam,” and so on. (The book may also contain literature’s sexiest description of the grocery store: “The Grocers’! oh the Grocers’! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses!”)
When Mallios and Borges began researching the dinner, they did, however, run into the problem that there were few cookbooks from the period to consult. The cooks employed by the upper classes in Dickens’s day carefully guarded their recipes, to avoid competition. The lower classes ate a lot of potatoes and stale bread. “There were like two cookbooks that said, ‘Boil this for seven hours.’” Mallios said. So he too turned to Dickens’ text, “I started treating it like a legal citation. Is this a C.? Is this a Cf.?” He interrupted himself, “Oh sorry, that’s a blue-book term.”
Before getting into the restaurant business, Mallios spent five years as a litigator, on the plaintiffs’ side of the securities business. “You met a lot of Scrooges,” he said, “particularly men who were Scroogish with women. It was a world where women were making a fantastic amount of money, but men were making fantastic-plus.” Swilling red wine, he added, “But I like that Dickens was paid by the word, and that in the story the poor kid triumphs.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that too many poor kids will make one of Amali’s twice daily Dickens seatings, on offer through January 6th. The meal costs $95 per adult ($40 for “Tiny Tims,” defined by Mallios as “anyone who can’t spell foie gras,” and by press materials as anyone under twelve), and reservations must be for eight to sixteen guests. This type of “dinner experience” might not seem quite in keeping with the novel’s spirit of selfless giving. But perhaps putting “A Christmas Carol” on the proverbial plate alongside the literal feast will serve as a reminder that for Dickens, at least, the holidays were a time to both appreciate abundance and to share it.
Amali’s Dickens dinner must of course be taken for what it is, a fanciful seasonal conceit for a fancy restaurant—but Mallios’s sincerity and enthusiasm do enliven the project. “What Dickens did with ‘A Christmas Carol’ was that he took a very specific, denominational holiday and instead espoused virtues of giving, of family, of sitting down at a table for a festive occasion,” he said. “It’s not just the goose from the movies, it’s about plenitude, family…. It’s very Mediterranean.”
To turn, for a moment, to the plenty: inspired by the past, were crisp fried oysters with tarragon mayonnaise and raw oysters to be slurped down with a refreshing fennel gelée, as well as locally sourced charcuterie and cheeses. Straddling historical and contemporary cuisines was a (remarkably un-gamey) goose-leg confit with apples, buttery mashed potatoes with sage, chestnuts with roast carrots and swiss chard, and one of the most tender and flavorful chickens I’ve ever eaten. This “poulard in half mourning” was roasted with foie gras and black truffles stuffed beneath its skin. “It’s in mourning because it can’t eat itself,” Mallios said, although the more conventional explanation is that the dish is named for the dark veil the truffles create atop the bird, evoking that second period of Victorian mourning, when black clothes were replaced by somber purples and grays.
