A new thing in our town, every Friday night Scott Carrino sets up a tent by a big brick oven and makes wood-fired pizza for dinner. Tonight, we had the Nonna, a white pie with roasted asparagus, roasted tomatoes, chevre (goat cheese) and garlic. We have become very fond of Friday nights at the Round House.
I worry about Scott, he works all the time, and I have really never met another person who does so many different things so well. Scott never seems to rest, and he has a remarkable power to rejuvenate himself, even though he often works through considerable pain – be broke his back in a construction accident some years ago.
Most days, he is in the cafe cooking or dealing with the thousands of things you have to do in a cafe – food, kitchen, cooking, staff, customers, fresh flowers, dish-washing – I can hardly keep track of them. Scott also builds things – like buildings – writes songs and plays the guitar, is a Tai Chi instructor, works in the huge Pompanuck Garden, and is often in the Round House Bakery making his beloved bread with his wife Lisa, the co-director of the farm, the bakery and the cafe.
He and Lisa are food artists, they make beautiful fresh food and present all of it like colorful works of art. I suppose they are. I can how brutally challenging it is to run a restaurant, deal with the public, order food and keep it fresh, cook a dozen orders at once, keep a lot of people happy, pay all kinds of taxes, worry about all kinds of equipment.
I stopped by his farm today and he was feeding the gold fish and cat fish in his environmentally-engineered pond. Monday he and Lisa were out gardening, many of the vegetables in the Round House come from their garden. Scott is a compassionate person, he loves to do good. I admit I wish he would get more rest, I also understand that this is his nature, to do a thousand things at once, to be all over the place, doing all kinds of things, most of them creative and interesting. He is a good friend to me, we talk often and are always there for one another, if it is possible. Once a week or so, Scott stops by the farm to see the donkeys or visit Red, who he loves very much.ScoI am a restless soul, but I feel I am standing still around Scott sometimes. The pizza was delicious, so were the new veggie burgers he unveiled today, ten different kinds of vegetables. I am grateful for Scott, he is an unusual kind of man, open loving and generous.