Nittolos eat Italy and Spain, bring tapas home

By Jacob Wheeler

Sun editor

When most of us travel to Europe, we savor an exquisite meal or two, we have an extra glass of wine, we go for an evening stroll, and we sleep soundly.

When Eric Nittolo, owner of Nittolo’s Seafood & Pizza in Lake Leelanau, travels to Europe—as he has done a couple times since the last busy tourism season in northern Michigan—he brings a family entourage and they eat like royalty, night after night. With each plate, in each city, Eric challenges himself to learn something new, to bring culinary lessons home to Lake Leelanau.

Last December he took eight of his children on a 13-day tour of Italy. They began in the north in Milan, where the menu is influenced by French cuisine, then moved onto Venice, Florence and Rome. Though the accompanying crew ranged in age from 25 to Eric’s 4-year-old son Maximo, they went out to eat at 10 p.m., as southern Europeans do, and those in the family old enough to drink would consume two bottles of Prosecco and four-six bottles of wine during each meal.

They ate pasta carbonara in every city, but the noodles varied based on the region of Italy. They ate a swordfish carpaccio dish that Eric said a health department in the United States would never allow. They ate octopus salad. They ate caviar. They ate fabulous desserts. They ate memorable pizzas, both in white linen restaurants and in a tiny espresso bar in Venice. A mortadella pizza in Milan reminded Eric of his childhood growing up in New Jersey. And he noticed that good pizzas there cost 19 Euros.

“America has had it too cheap for too long going out to eat,” he reflected. “A $6 pizza shouldn’t exist. You can charge that little because there are no food quality laws here.”

Every night Eric took mental notes on how he could incorporate these culinary lessons back home. Now at Nittolo’s in Lake Leelanau you can order a Tuscan wild boar pizza served with smoked mozzarella.

“We’re taking our flavors more traditional more old-school Italian,” said Eric. “I have steered the rudder here to be more traditional, even though I’m classically French trained.”

Eric, whose great grandparents left Avellino in southern Italy and passed through Ellis Island, grew up on Long Island with his grandmother before moving with his father to New Jersey. Because the immigrants immediately became “American,” no one spoke Italian in the home, but Italian food was everywhere in their neighborhood.

The Nittolos visited Rome last Christmas but found the Vatican and the Coliseum closed. By then they had tired of eating Italian food, so they feasted on sushi instead, washed down with champagne.

Back in Lake Leelanau, Eric doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as solely an Italian chef, but he’s also willing to play to his popularity.

“My goal is not to turn this solely into an Italian restaurant. Unfortunately, we don’t have the voice to say what we are. The diners tell us what we are. And the diners say we’re an Italian restaurant.”

The family adventure in December inspired Eric to add 57 more Italian wines to the menu. He tallied more than 100 hours researching and writing the restaurant’s new wine list. He also revamped the menu and gave it a trial run for New Year’s Eve. The changes were subtle. “Don’t shock the customers,” Eric told himself.

Bit by the travel bug, in March Eric returned to southern Europe together with his son Maximo and daughter Francesca—this time journeying to Lisbon, Sevilla, Barcelona, Valencia, and Mallorca to glean inspiration for a Spanish Tapas lounge that Nittolo’s will open on May 17. (Tapas will be available Sunday-Thursday in the lounge; the member’s speakeasy club resumes on Fridays and Saturdays).

Nittolo’s Tapas will be available for $6-11 apiece. The small plates menu that launches on May 17 will include: a salmon and scallop tartare, fried potatoes, date salad, croquette, mussels, octopus, oxtail, prawn, sea bass, assorted cheeses, calamari, jamon ibérico, and paella, as well as crusted bread with tomato puree and olives—to go with an assortment of Spanish wines and Sangria.

“My whole motto is, ‘Give them what they expect in a way they least expect it’.”

Eric hopped over to Luzerne and Zurich, Switzerland, before flying back to the Midwest in late March, but he wasn’t ready to settle into the slow grind just yet. He and Maximo picked up Angelina and Vincent and flew to Finland, where they ate their way through the Baltic capitals and nibbled in Scandinavia. They saw Helsinki, Riga and Tallinn, and finished the trip with street hotdogs in Copenhagen.

“My travel reset me internally. I travel to make my insides right,” said Eric, who came away as impressed by the local food as he was by the spirit of the people he met. The independent spirit of the Latvians, who have been free of the Russian boot for only a few decades; the courtesy of the Swiss, who would stop a 10-ton train for pedestrians waiting to cross the track, the pride of the Estonians, who boast colorful fruit markets erected inside inauspicious tin sheds.

After this busy season in Lake Leelanau, Eric said he wants to write a book, about life, food and spiritual journeys. And next November or December he wants to visit Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. Any place where the people are alive and celebrate through their food.