A.J. Lambert is talking about Game of Thrones, record stores and the Elvis impersonator who walked her down the aisle for her wedding in Las Vegas. After the vows, there was dinner at Sinatra, Encore’s Italian stronghold named for Ol’ Blue Eyes. Those eyes are on the wall in a massive photograph, and they’re looking at me, because Lambert is Frank Sinatra’s granddaughter.
The musician and Sirius radio host is at this Restaurant Week event to help raise money for Three Square and honor the memory of her grandpa and the talents of the chef who’s still cooking some of his favorite dishes. Theo Schoenegger is that chef, and when he was in the kitchen at San Domenico in New York, he made pasta and plenty of pounded veal for “the Chairman.”
“I cooked this for Frank Sinatra myself,” Schoenegger says as he and Lambert prep the ingredients for a simple fresh tomato sauce that will coat the curly fusilli noodles Frank loved. The plum tomatoes are so red they look almost like actual plums. A woman in the crowd asks how ripe they should be. The chef smiles and doesn’t say anything for a moment. “The tomatoes should be perfectly ripe.” These are straight from a grower down in California, an example of the ingredient standard at Sinatra. And they’ve been blanched so they’re easy to cut and cook.
“I still have 10 digits, so all is going great,” Lambert says with a laugh as she dices the bright meat of the fruit. Schoenegger shares that Frank only liked the flavor of garlic, so he cooks some into cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil and strains out the pieces to start the sauce, which has red pepper and lots of basil. The dish is basic, served with some grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, and it’s so delicious. The pasta is chewy and perfectly salted, and sauce clings to every curve, full of tart acidity and balancing the richness of that garlicky oil and hard cheese.
Lambert shares that in her family, there’s a lot of healthy competition when it comes to cooking. She maintains that her grandma was the best, but Frank was a contender. His sauce was more of a Sunday gravy, where pork chops on the bone were cooked down “forever” so that every bit of fat wove into the dish. “He was a fantastic cook,” Lambert says. She talks about coming to Vegas with him as a kid in the early ’80s, how he bought her a Big Wheel that she rode around the hotel. Someone asks if Frank ever sang to her. She gets that a lot. “Never an outright serenade. You wouldn’t be sitting there peeling a tomato and then—‘New Yo-oork! Tomato Ti-iime!’” she sings. The next question reveals her favorite of his famous tunes, “If You Are But a Dream.”
Then it’s down to business—meat. Schoenegger shows it off, the first four chops, always cut from the back. “The rest we give to Allegro,” he jokes, teasing his Italian restaurant neighbor at Wynn.
He and Lambert go through the steps with the pounded veal, using the bone like a handle for dipping in seasoned flour, egg and panko breadcrumbs. Into a bath of hot oil one goes, and the chef tells us to constantly move the meat so it crisps and colors up evenly. He adds butter at the end, because why the hell not? And he talks about this one time he cooked a meal for Pavarotti and Bruce Springsteen and other big stars, shrimp and beans with fusilli. That was nothing compared to the half-pound of polenta stuffed with foie gras that he made for Pavarotti alone, he says, adding that Frank was not a big eater.
But he liked good food, like this veal Milanese, which is served with fragrant lemon to squeeze over the breading and tangy, velvety tomato puree for dipping. A salad of arugula and endive cuts the richness, but because the veal is so thin and tender and the breading so crisp and tasty I eat all the way to the bone, barely leaving room for the signature dessert. Of course it’s Frank’s hat made of chocolate mousse, with a milk chocolate panna cotta on the side. It’s too beautiful to destroy, so I stare at it until Schoenegger comes over to see what’s stopping me. No doubt he’s seen this molded delight many times, but it has to feel good presenting a tribute to the man whose voice sticks in your head like the memory of a perfect meal. Schoenegger, a Michelin-starred chef who is famous in his own right, has met a lot of celebrities. Charlton Heston. Ronald Reagan. But Frank Sinatra …
“Meeting him was one of the highlights of my career.”
After the interactive cooking demo and gorgeous three-course lunch, for which Lambert flits from table to table to share more stories, she joins Schoenegger in a photo op, flipping pasta in skillets. It goes everywhere. And when she laughs, she looks just like Frank.
