Cuisine Soignee a la Brigitte

-- By Tom Phillips

My wife is a Presbyterian minister, the solo pastor in a thriving, active suburban church. Many days she comes home from work in late afternoon, then heads out again across the George Washington Bridge for an evening meeting.  My job is to keep her nourished, healthy and happy, and let her know how much she is loved and appreciated at home.  All this can be accomplished with a delicious home-cooked dinner, dished up on time.  I take this as a duty and a delight, in the spirit of the woman who taught me most of what I know about cooking, and who blessed our marriage from the beginning, in more ways than she knew.  

If you think I’m talking about my mother, you couldn’t be more wrong. She hated to cook, and never learned how.  “Food is fuel,” she fumed, refusing to put any more than minimal thought and care into her meals.   No, the woman who taught me was Brigitte Catapano, proprietress of Chez Brigitte at 77½ Greenwich Avenue, the smallest restaurant in New York, where I dined alone most evenings in the 1970s.