Provincetown

[John Whiting]

Is the Dreadnaught the Flagship? Is Mario's Ciro & Sal's? Do you know Sal Del Deo? A fine cook, a good artist and a great man.

Your portrait of Howard Mitchum is generous and properly respectful of a man it's so easy to make fun of. His Provincetown Seafood Cookbook is, as you so rightly say, a book to keep going back to.

(signed)

An Exiled Ptowner

[bourdain]

John;

Under advice of counsel I can say that the Dreadnaught sure resembles the Flagship of old--and Mario's is indeed oddly similar to Ciro and Sal's. Tyrone resembles James Luster who now owns the place. And Howard Mitchum was indeed a great man. Didn't know Sal--as the Ciro's crew rarely associated with the competition (they were secretly regarded by all of us with respect as they were  often said to be better. )

[John Whiting]

It's generous of you to say that. When I sent Sal the first draft of my history of Chez Panisse, he wrote back that that was what he'd been trying to do when he set up his own place in 1962, a decade before Alice, in accordance with the same ambitious principles of respect for staff, ingredients, diners and the planet’s ecology.