Strega Restaurant Owners Open Strega Market In Milford

Chef Danilo Mongillo continues to bring his vision of Italy to Milford with the newly opened Strega Market. On the same block as the Strega restaurant he opened after the pandemic had closed his original location in Branford, the Market showcases the same sauces and ingredients used just two doors down, as well as sought-after tastes of home for Italian expats, like Mongillo himself.

The market layout is simple, but its contents are rich with multitudes of flavors. First, though, Mongillo takes me to the side, past rows of gleaming jars, and selects a small package.

“Cards,” he says, “From Naples. You go into a little market like this in Italy, they always have the cards for people.” It’s indicative of the outlook he has, wanting the market to feel instantly familiar to anyone who grew up in Italy, and to bring that experience, that food, to Connecticut.

“Everyone always asks me, they say ‘your sauce is so good, how do I get it?’ And I thought of the idea for the market as soon as I opened the restaurant.” The market would be open almost exactly a year later, this August.

Those sauces? Pomodoro and arrabbiatta, exactly the same as in his dishes down the block, but jarred and ready for you. Danilo whirls around...

“The pasta? RUMO, from my home, Benevento province. Made there since 1846. You see the texture?”

He holds up the pasta, darker, almost orange, like the difference between a grocery store and farm fresh egg’s yolk. The edges and surfaces are indeed rough.

“This is good grain, from our area, you can almost see the Sun! The flame in the pasta. The cheap pasta, processed, hard to digest. All the vitamins and proteins are in the germ, it’s still in there. The texture grabs and soaks up the sauce.”

Calamarata tubes, linguini, orecchiette, nests of egg fettuccini, all available to be used however you can imagine. Gragnano pasta, from the town of the same name near Naples, is also on offer. The pasta itself is DOP, guaranteed by Italy’s agricultural police – the division which seeks out and busts the booming underworld of counterfeit Italian foods; think The Untouchables, but for mortadella and gorgonzola – one of Mongillo’s jobs before he came to America. 

Everything in the store, almost needless to say, is legit.

“Gragnano is between the Adriatic, and Vesuvius,” he says. “For some reason the wind, the sun, the wheat there is unable to be the same anywhere else in the world.”

“It’s the same for rice. Rice is from China, but in Emilia-Romagna the rice is perfect.”

Rice and farro swell packages in shelves over boxes of olive crackers, and trays of Sicilian cannoli.

Entire racks are dedicated to antipasto. Broccoli rabe, escarole, peas, soup from Italy, peppers and pumpkin sauce... he grabs a bag from another shelf, Giantomasi friselle, shatters of stale bread. 

“You put the escarole, some cannelloni, olive oil in a pan with the bread – you can feed a whole family for, like, $15.” 

He says they have the absolute best red tuna in olive oil in the shop, next to packaged anchovies from Chittara, on the Adriatic, where the bay’s shape creates a natural estuary for the young fish. 

He picks up anchovies packaged in salt, his voice dropping to a whisper as he gently touches the transparent window:

“You can see. You can see it was all done by hand.”

He says he comes from a tiny town, Puglianello, 900 people, where everyone knows everyone. And one of those is a friend of his who started a cosmetics company which utilizes snail trails for skin care. Being Italian, though, he of course starting thinking of ways to eat them.

“Biocle,” says Danilo. “You can’t find this anywhere, Connecticut, America, nowhere,” indicating jars of snail, packaged in arrabbiatta, or with spinach and speck, or as a pâté. 

Tarralle cookies are next up. Made, of course, by hand.

“This one, from my town? Farro flour, pumpkin, and we also grow saffron, so that.”

Positano tarrales, also Italian, but not local, is a Neopolitan recipe, studded with almonds, and made with rendered pork fat, “and a lot of black pepper,” he concludes.

He sells packages of the flours he uses, so you can make... whatever you like.

“If you want a recipe for my food, I can give you the recipe, you can make it at home.”

I’m momentarily nonplussed. Did a chef just tell me he’s giving away his recipes?

Danilo seems almost surprised at the question.

“Yes. It’s so wrong to keep secret. Food is for everybody. How are you going to raise the levels of the palates of the people if good food isn’t around? You have to bring everybody in.”

The space is, as you may imagine, pleasing to the eye. Some of that is undoubtedly due to the influence of Danilo’s wife, Rosanna, who hears us talking, sometimes helping Danilo out with the odd translation. She agrees with him, explaining:
 
“We have people come in to see the food but they’re not always sure what to do, how to eat it. I help them out. Often, I can just tell them ‘It’s ready! You just open it up, eat it like this, it’s perfect.’ Others we help them with recipes.”

Those who are already familiar with the flavors, often can’t get them. A colorful shelf of sodas profives some answers. San Pellegrino Bitter soda, almost like a nonalcoholic Campari, is a childhood staple. 

“We didn’t have Coca Cola in my area in Italy until maybe 30 years ago,” he states, to my scoffing astonishment. “This, Chinotto, is our Coca Cola. Italians, they’re looking for this.”

He cracks bottles for us. Bittersweet and citrusy, absolutely nothing like a Coke, it’s intriguing. 

“What is this, bergamot?” I ask. He says he doesn’t know, but he’ll look it up.

Rosanna to the rescue.

“It’s chinotto,” she says, holding up a picture on her phone. “Like a cross between a mandarin and an orange.”

Also this, he says, grabbing two jars of spread from Vincente in Sicily: cream of almond, and cream of pistachio. Those have to be good, I don’t realize I’ve said out loud.

“Oh my god, so good. The pistachios, from Bronte - also DOP - from a town on the side of Etna, so volcanic soil. Only there.”

“Even the candy we have is DOP,” Danillo tosses me a can. Licorice, from Calabria.

“We now enter the golden place,” as he strides across the way. The olive oil section.

Beautiful earthenware jugs line shelves, hand painted with colorful stripes, cacti, and octopus, holding your eyes with its own.

“Muraglia, from Puglia,” Danilo explains. “Sustainable, jars made from clay like it was a long time ago.”

He expands on his theory of olive oil.

“You can buy cheap, maybe $10 a liter olive oil, it’s like cheap perfume. You get the Chanel No. 5, you just touch, and it stays with you. You just finish the dish with this oil, just a little bit.”

“I can’t!” he exclaims. “You can’t... I have to teach you something,” and quickly disappears behind the deli counter.

I take the minute to look over its contents: gorgonzola, pecorino Romano, lardo, guanciale, ‘nduja - the hot, smoky sausage paste which liquifies under heat, and is present on my favorite pizza at Strega: the Calabrese, with pomodoro, fior di latte cheese, whole bufalo burrata cheese, ‘nduja, bergamot salsa, arugula, and basil. 

He emerges with more Muraglia, this time in a large tin.

“I’m gonna teach you how to taste olive oil,” he starts. I am 100% here for this.

“With wine, you have to mix it a little with the air.” He demonstrates, doing the familiar inhale, like whistling in reverse.

“With the olive oil, you almost taste it with your palate, so you do it like this,” with a sharper, hissing inhale, think Angry Housecat. “Then, as you swallow, you taste the olive oil. You taste the field, the sun... in my town, we all do the work, then we all do the harvest. I do your field, you come and do my field, we have dinner, we get drunk...”

And I reconsider the strength of my attachment to living in the United States. 

We do a shot of the Muraglia, do the hiss. An immediate depth of pungency is the first sensation: fresh, clean olives, in abundance, followed by a light note of black pepper, then bitter somehow, at the top of the throat. I finish the remains of the shot, no hiss, and every flavor is subdued, serene. The transformation in sensory input is remarkable.

Anyway, says Danilo, here’s some incredible balsamic – Giuseppe Giusti – from Modena, three ways. Jarred olives, sliced and whole truffles, truffle mayo, truffle ketchup, truffles and parmesano; from Liguria, a special kind of red onion, jarred and IGP - like DOP, but for a larger area - Firelli hot sauce, made with Calabrian peppers. Danilo says the first shipment arrived in America a month ago, 

We’re back by the deli case again, and again I hear “You have to try.”

Danilo grabs a loaf of halfway cooked bread, made from a ball randomly selected from the same he uses to make a whole pizza next door. Into a little oven it goes, now bisected.

Onto it goes prosciutto di Parma (DOP, naturally), fresh mozzarella, arugula, tomato, and some of that transformative olive oil. It makes up two meals for me that day. Both were sublime.

He gestures at a square box of Pane Carasatu flatbread. 

“It’s the most common bread in Sardinia,” he says. “Everyone has it there every day. Here, no one has it. I got it for them.”

“This is it, this is the kind of market I want. I want people when they come in, they can pick even just three things - I’ll help - then they can go home, open some wine, put on water to boil, and then have the best meal of their life.”

Danilo leans back, smiling.

“I love to think of it.”

Strega Market

Strega Restaurant

9 River St, Milford

Stregamilford.com; 203 283 1849