Chef Franco Lombardo will do whatever it takes to source the best ingredients

For the New Year, I’m bucking the trend to eat less. Instead, I want to eat more of the foods I know and love and grew up eating. I will drive for food. So will my friend Franco Lombardo, owner and head chef of Sapori Trattoria Italiana in South Jersey’s Collingswood.

Casarecce is a traditional Italian pasta shaped like a tiny scroll. | PHOTO BY NIKKI PALLADINO

During a recent conversation, the chef revealed to me that even with food prices as astronomical as they are, he isn’t compromising when it comes to setting the menu or sourcing foodstuff for the restaurant. “I’ll just drive my car and get it,” he tells me about Tomino, an Italian cow’s milk cheese from the Piedmont region in Italy’s Northwest corner that he has driven to Brooklyn, N.Y., to buy and bring back to the restaurant, to bake and top with walnuts and truffle honey.

“It looks and tastes better than Brie,” he said. I promise to order it the next time I’m there but admit that my absolute favorite thing on the menu is the casarecce, a traditional Italian pasta shaped like a tiny scroll.

Lombardo said he goes to South Philly for the sausage he tosses with that pasta and that he tracks down buffalo milk mozzarella imported from Napoli to serve with bresaola (cured beef).

I find out then that sea urchin is one of his favorite things to prepare but that after COVID, it’s not as easy to find. In my house, we feel that way about tripe. Over the summer, we saw on Facebook that the restaurant had a limited quantity and by the time we got to the restaurant the following day, it was sold out. “People looked at me weird when I first started making it,” Lombardo said with a laugh. Clearly, they don’t anymore, and he promises to make a batch again soon.

I don’t know how he’ll find the time, between opening on select days for lunch, hosting more private events than ever, including, most recently, a wedding, and transforming the restaurant’s patio yet again, but something tells me he’ll make the time because he is in tune with every detail. A mechanical engineer, he’s got everything
in sync.

When I refer to him as the kitchen’s conductor, his tone turns serious. “No one person delivers the sound.” His attitude and approach strike the right chord with me and countless others who have been patronizing the restaurant for 21 years.

Lombardo plans to feature lamb, rabbit, goat, octopus and sepia in the coming year, along with cotechino, a traditional sausage dish. Let’s hope he remembers to add tripe to that list. Regardless, I’m looking forward to eating more of the countless traditional Italian foods the chef continues to prepare, like our grandmothers and their grand-mothers before them.

When I was growing up, we hardly ate out. We didn’t need to. We were related to a chef – my aunt and uncle owned a restaurant, and my grandmothers were amazing home cooks. We had everything and everyone we needed right at home.

As we got older, though, my aunt and uncle sold their restaurant, my grandmothers passed away and suddenly, chefs were some of the only people I knew who craved authenticity on a plate, as much as I did. My friend and all-time favorite chef is keeping that tradition alive for all of us.