my family—Papa pasta. As you might guess, it was served with meatballs. When he was alive, Papa would dish up the rigs (rigatoni) one plate at a time, schmearing a ladle of sauce on the bottom and pouring two more on top of one or two gigantic meatballs. We called his servings “dogchoking portions.” He would tell us to eat it while it was hot, wipe the sweat from his brow and be the last one to sit down, often still wearing his marinara-stained white apron. The photos of Papa teaching his grandchildren to make meatballs are some of my most precious memories of him. I’ll never eat Papa’s pasta and meatballs again, so whenever meatballs are on the
“THERE’S A BIG RESURGENCE OF WANTING GOOD DOWN-HOME FOOD. MEATBALLS TASTE LIKE YOUR YOUTH.”
RYAN DORGAN
– NICK PHILLIPS
BRADLY J. BONER
Nick Phillips’s Scott Lane butcher shop, Sweet Cheeks Meats, sells several different types of take-home meatballs.
At Bin22, executive chef Luis Hernandez makes Italian-inspired meatballs, but grew up eating his mom’s Mexican meatballs. 120
JACKSON HOLE MAGAZINE WINTER 2019
menu at restaurants like Local Restaurant & Bar, Calico Restaurant and Bar, Il Villaggio Osteria, and Bin22, I order them. During the busy season, Bin22 sells more than sixty meatballs topped with fresh mozzarella from Vermont per night. Bin22’s recipe, as with most great Italian recipes, is simple: ground beef, pork, egg, milk, homemade breadcrumbs made with Persephone bread, fresh parsley, fresh oregano, garlic, salt, and pepper. “I think the secret is we do it fresh,” says Bin22 chef Luis Hernandez. “They stay soft, tasty, and really good to eat.” The meatball of Hernandez’s youth came from his mom who lives in Mexico City. It has hard-boiled eggs, rice, and cilantro and is just as dear to him as the memories of meatballs of my youth are to me. For Phillips, his first meatballs were the fist-sized balls at Sbarro in his local mall. His current recipe is borrowed from a culinary school he trained at in Las Vegas. But he knows a lot about Italian cuisine because he married into an Italian family. Nora Phillips, his wife, works right next to him at the butcher shop and makes all of the sauces including Carmen’s gravy, her grandfather’s marinara sauce that she learned to make as a Catholic schoolgirl in Chicago. “There’s a big resurgence of wanting good down-home food,” says Nick Phillips. “Meatballs taste like your youth. They make you remember being a kid.” JH