Reprint: One Paper 02/16/2007
It would be fun to imagine that every morning, when Anna Lia Notardonato gets out of bed to greet the new day, she might call out, "It's 0400 hours, and all's well." Notardonato owns Tutto Bene, a food service company in Goodlettsville specializing in homemade bakery items. Tutto bene means, more or less, "all is well" in Italian. Notardonato is from Italy, as you might surmise. She came to America in 1970, spent 20 years in the computer business, and then changed her focus from bytes to bites. She graduated from chef's school at the turn of the millennium with, like many a new grad, no particular plan in mind, but after a talk with her grandma---well, suffice it to say, all's well that ends well. Tutto Bene Bakery has been built on biscotti, Italian cookies (singular biscotto) with an age-old heritage in Italy and a long one in Notardonato's family. Her biscotti, unlike most that are hard and crisp, are soft and tender. Biscotti are ideal for dunking in coffee, milk or wine. Notardonato makes hers one batch at a time, baking them in loaves then slicing and toasting them, the old-fashioned way. She wraps and seals them individually, before delivering them to stores. Notardonato's customers are coffee shops, primarily, all over the U. S. She also makes tea cakes (glazed with orange frosting and sprinkled with sugar lumps), gourmet cookies, and wine pretzels (made with white wine, to eat with wine.) All her items are packaged in gift bags, boxes, baskets or tins; she also sells biscotti and tea cakes by the pound and accommodates larger wholesale orders. Tutto Bene is not a retail bakery. Everything is sold through other outlets, including the Internet. (See www.tuttobenebakery.com.) "I like to have my own time," Notardonato says of her decision not to have a storefront. Still, she punches the clock before dawn most days, to get a jump on the day's orders. She bakes about 600 biscotti a day, and the wine pretzels are a big seller. (Her kitchen is TDA-approved, and on FDA inspections to which she is subject, she regularly receives scores of 100.) She uses no preservatives, artificial additives or dreaded trans-fats in the making, true to her family tradition. Notardonato is from Pizzone, a village in the Apennines, in central Italy. Her mother died when she was a little girl, and she was reared by her grandparents on both sides. Her father remarried after ten years – a lady from the same town, whom Anna Lia calls mom. Her new mom and her dad moved to Chicago in 1966, and Anna Lia followed four years later, with her brother, Joe – and if you're confused by all this history, you can buy her book, Trionfo ("Triumph"), in which she sorts it all out. She got a degree in computer science, and spent eight years as a systems programmer and 12 as a software field engineer. In 1997, she took early retirement and went to chef's school at Opryland. "I wanted to do something I really loved," she says, and that something was cooking. She was undecided on a specialty, however, until she talked to her stepmother's mom, who steered her toward biscotti. Her recipe has been cherished – and zealously guarded – by the family for 50 years. Everything on the menu at Tutto Bene, in fact, except the chocolate chip cookies, is from an old family recipe. She often goes back to Italy, where she still has numerous cousins and aunts and where her father still has a house. So, even if she didn't have cooking, she'd still have family, which means: Tutto bene. Tutto Bene Bakery products are on sale at J & J Market & Café (1912 Broadway in Nashville) and at Caffeine Coffee Bar (1516 Demonbreun in Nashville). Visit www.tuttobenebakery.com; call 615-243-0726. |
