My first job after graduating from High School was as a hostess at a local restaurant. The chef there made some really good food that I still think of often. One of my favorite of his dishes was, I believe, Pollo Gambretti. It may have been ‘Gambrieti’ but that doesn’t hit on anything culinary-wise when I search, so I’m using that as support that Gambretti is the right term.
I also don’t know all of the ingredients in the dish, cut I’ll do my best. He started with a pounded flat chicken breast which he then stuffed by slathering it with chopped spinach mixed with a creamy looking mixture of cheese and some seasoning and rolling it up. Insert tooth picks to hold it together, roll in breadcrumbs and then pan fried.
Finished with a little Hollandaise, it was damn good.
I’ve been trying with Google foo to figure out a similar recipe to try, assuming that Gambretti implies certain ingredients or technique, but maybe it is just some guy’s name, or an obscure cheese variety for all I know. There are a few other dishes that reference the word, but from what I can tell they don’t have much in common with the dish I described, except maybe dairy and garlic.
I’m not sure,but I think Gamberetti are little shrimp as opposed to Gamberoni. Though the dish seems to have nothing to do with shrimp- maybe it has something to do with a traditional preparation, like our chicken fried steak.
Or maybe camberetti has roots in “camber” and refers to the look or construction of the roll.
Shrimp was my first thought too. It might be named after the chef. It sounds more like an Italian-American type dish than a traditional Italian dish. The method is the same as making chicken cordon-blue or chicken kiev.
That would make sense if I’m misremembering the word which is dove-tailing to a bunch of hits of people misspelling of shrimp/gamberetti. There was no shrimp in the dish. Maybe I’ll just have to experiment.
Where you from darkside? Grimaldi’s by the bridge caters them… Bet they have a similar recipe to the retaurant you worked for. Maybe give them a call… drop them a line. See if they will tell you their recipe, or ingredients, at the least.
It wasn’t Florentine, it was phonetically close to either gam-bree-eh-dee/cam-bree-eh-dee or gam-breh-dee/cam-breh-dee. It is getting the filling right that would have to be the experiment. Cheesy, garlicy, spinachy shouldn’t be too hard to pull off. I thought it was spinach but it could have been some other leafy green, and the ratio of green to cheesy sauce was pretty small. It may also have had some bacon crumbles in it but I don’t know if that is revisionist memory or not, as pretty much anything is better with bacon in it, of course.
The restaurant was the Victorian Village Inn in Ferndale, CA. It is still open but has gone through many reinventions through the years, no idea where the Chef is these days. He also made a mean cassoulet, chocolate pistachio raspberry cheesecake, and the best key lime pie I’ve ever had.
I don’t think you get what I am saying, “Gamberetti” might have been the colloquial term for “your” holy unblemished memory and dish arising from several linguistic possibilities … but you are describing a classical Florentine preparation. It’s definitely an Italian-American Frank Sinatra Era Dish.
Even considering it Italian at all is a stretch, again reinforced by getting hits with a few WAG search terms before I posted. But I’ve had a few different Chicken Florentines too, and this was different. In how many languages does pollo = chicken?