H ARRY’S BAR AND MY FATHER’S INVENTIONS have left their mark in many different and subtle ways, from the carpaccio, which has become a generic term for thinly sliced raw meat or raw fish, to the pink cocktail, the bellini, not to mention his pale aqua Tiffany-like menus, which have become our trademark.
In 1950 Venice was bedecked with red and white banners: a major retrospective of the work of Vittore Carpaccio, the Renaissance painter, was being offered at the Doge’s Palace. The banners were in homage to the luminous red and white colors for which Carpaccio was justly famous.
That fall one of the habitués of Harry’s Bar, the ravishing contessa Amalia Nani Mocenigo — one of my father’s favorites — came in for lunch. She beckoned him to her table and informed him with tears in her eyes that her doctor had just warned her that she must go on a strict diet. For the next several weeks she could not eat any cooked meat. Could my father come to her rescue and dream up a dish that would be not only tolerable under these intolerable conditions, but hopefully delicious? My father smiled, acknowledging the challenge, and offered her a bellini.
Never at a loss, he said, “Give me fifteen minutes,” and with that vanished into the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later to the minute he reappeared, followed by the maître d’ carrying a beautiful fanlike display of paper-thin sheets of raw filet mignon, onto which was laced a white sauce that consisted of mayonnaise and mustard. “And what is that?” she asked. “A beef carpaccio,” my father answered, as if the dish had existed for centuries, whereas in fact he had just made it up. Inspired by Carpaccio’s red-and-white paintings, which like most Venetians worthy of the name he had visited and admired at the Doge’s Palace, my father had on the spot combined a beef tenderloin with a white sauce.
Today imitations of carpaccio can be found in thousands of fine restaurants around the world, from Paris to New York to Tokyo. What the world doesn’t know is that if my father had been a bit more egotistical, or as we would say today “PR oriented,” the famous dish could just as fairly have been caned Cipriani.
In creating what was to become known as the bellini cocktail in 1948, my father was once again inspired by a painter. The fifteenth-century Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini was often mentioned at home. I had no idea at the time that the pink glow my father had so admired in one of Bellini’s paintings would be the inspiration for his famous cocktail.
Peaches are in abundance throughout Italy from June through September, and my father had a predilection for the white ones. So much so, in fact, that he kept wondering whether there was a way to transform this magic fragrance into a drink he could offer at Harry’s Bar. He experimented by pureeing small white peaches and adding some prosecco (Italian champagne). Those who tested this new concoction gave it rave reviews, and my father was encouraged to pursue his alchemy. He named it the bellini, and from that day on the pink champagne drink became part of the Harry’s Bar culture. For many years, in the kitchen of Harry’s Bar, there were those whose sole function was to create the puree by actually squeezing and pitting the small and fragrant fruit with their hands. A labor of love. But because we depended on the peach season for fresh fruit, we could make the bellini only during these four months. Since then, an entrepreneurial fellow Frenchman has made his fortune by setting up a business that fresh-freezes the white peach puree, which he ships to me on an ongoing basis both in Venice and in New York — and also in Argentina, where a new Harry Cipriani has recently opened.
The popularity of the bellini was such that in 1990, somewhat against my better judgment, a Mr. Canella persuaded me to license the bellini to him. While it seemed a fine idea at the outset, it turned out to be one of my great errors. It was to be a “ready mix” containing the puree and the prosecco. And to accentuate the pink, he used a drop of raspberry juice. The drink was terrible. I was angry at myself for insulting the wonderful cocktail my father had created and soon confronted the licensee. His concoction was maligning the drink, its name, and Harry’s Bar. In 1995 we took it to arbitration, I won, and the whole affair was promptly forgotten.
So the bellini reverted to its original, pristine state, saved from possible extinction by an arbiter’s common sense and good judgment.