A not-so-funny thing happened to chef Paul Verica when he took his final research trip to Italy before opening his first Italian restaurant last year. Traveling through Genoa with his partner and fiancée, Jane Tramontana M.D., with plans to head north to Milan, news of the pandemic’s spread in Italy became grimmer and grimmer. Tramontana, a pulmonary doctor, realized that the situation was going to get worse, so they curtailed the trip and headed back to their hometown Charlotte, North Carolina as quickly as possible.
Still, Verica managed to make the most of his abbreviated trip, heading to Pisa and finding the inspiration for his first Italian restaurant, Orto, named for the sign he saw outside the Orto Botanico, or botanical garden. Verica says the garden’s look also influenced the design. “The wall was stucco with all these rusty colors and earthtones,” he says, adding, “That was the jumping-off point from a design perspective.”
Orto NODA, in Charlotte’s booming neighborhood north of the city’s downtown, would open later than expected, in February of this year. But it marked an important turn in the career of this respected farm-to-table chef, whose now-closed Heritage Food & Drink and three-year-old Charlotte restaurant The Stanley earned him James Beard Award semifinalist nominations. Despite being raised in Philadelphia to Italian-American parents, with family ties to a village south of Rome and the Amalfi Coast, he’d never helmed an Italian restaurant.
Pizza from Orto in Charlotte, North Carolina. Credit: Peter Taylor
“It’s been seven years that I’ve been in this box, and I’m really excited to be out of that box and doing some different style of cooking and food,” he says of his shift from inventive American farm-to-table food to the pizza-and-pasta-centric menu at Orto.
Of course, Orto’s name, as well as the botany-themed mural by local artist Duy Huynh in the main dining room—Tramontana had commissioned Duy 20 years earlier to paint murals in her home, and tracked him down for Orto—imply that Verica will still source from North Carolina’s plentiful farms, but the chef notes that while menus change daily at The Stanley, he’s aiming for consistency at Orto, with a steady list of fresh pastas and Roman-style pan pizzas. The latter is a sort of homage to his favorite pizza as a kid growing up near Philly, Pica Pizza, know for its sauce-on-top square pies.
Lobster and shrimp ravioli at Orto. Credit: Peter Taylor
The pasta, meanwhile, is made fresh and with Verica’s flair for artful presentation. The lobster and shrimp ravioli in saffron sauce features black-striped pasta. “We’re rolling out a squid ink and cutting that info fettuccine, and lay that down into the egg pasta and press it out,” Verica explains. “The colors really go well with the black and the white and the saffron sauce. We’re doing confit tomatoes and arugula. I’ve always been very visual with my food, and that’s one that pops.”
To complement the pastas and pizzas, Orto features a thoughtful craft cocktail and spirits program by Amanda Britton, a local mixologist Verica met and bonded with in part over their shared childhood experiences growing up near Philly. Britton is now very committed to her adopted home state, sourcing gins from North Carolina to showcase what she calls “some of the best gin in the U.S.,” including Cardinal Barrel Rested Gin and Thousand Piers. These gins see a lot of action, she says, given that Orto is “a place that makes a fair amount of Negronis.”
Britton says she wanted to create a cocktail menu that draws from Italy even when the spirits aren’t Italian, using fresh ingredients like fennel and blood orange. There’s a lemon ice-themed cocktail that Britton calls a “sgroppino riff.” She even sources an Appalachian Fernet made by an amaro company called Eda Rhyne Distilling from Asheville, two hours west from Charlotte in the mountains.
Orto opened in February.
Orto may have taken seven or eight months longer than planned to open, and certainly debuting during a pandemic doesn’t help, but Verica is bullish on his newest restaurant. Like every chef, he has had to get creative to survive over the past year. To keep The Stanley afloat, he even started flying in Amoroso’s rolls from Philadelphia and selling that city’s famed cheesesteaks as a pop-up, to-go-only concept. “We’re selling “300 of ‘em a week out the back door,” he says of the sandwiches.
While the chance to revisit a Philly classic may seem appropriate for a chef whose breakout restaurant was called Heritage Food & Drink, the return to his Italian roots is even more apropos.
“Part of the reason I became a chef, and I’m sure you hear this a lot, was Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house,” he says. “Every other Sunday, my grandmother would be in the kitchen making pasta and gravy. It’s always been something near and dear to my heart.”
Now that Orto NODA is up and running, serving pizza and pasta to a growing audience in a part of a thriving city that’s adding apartments by the thousands, Verica and Tramontana have plans to expand. They see Orto as a concept that could thrive in other parts of Charlotte.
Hopefully, the next research trip to Italy will go more smoothly.