Five Dishes at Parm - NYTimes.com This week I review Parm, where Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone are serving food more or less taken from the Italian-American deli canon: Sausage and peppers, potato and eggs, garlic bread, pizza knots and all kinds of parms. I interviewed the two chefs earlier this week about five of the dishes I especially enjoyed. Baked clams ($10) A lot of the cooking at Parm comes from looking at an old standard and wondering, Is there a better way to make this dish? In the case of baked clams, the answer was to shuck. Many baked clams are already cooked before they're baked (or broiled). This initial cooking opens the shells, which makes life easier, but it doesn't do much for the clams. By the time they've been coated with bread crumbs and cooked a second time, they get rubbery, and they also lose some of their briny flavor. Parm opens its very small littlenecks with a knife. When the clams go under the broiler, they're still raw. And when the emerge, they're still not completely cooked through - they are, if you can use this term about a clam, medium to medium rare. Before going under the flame, each littleneck is topped with a chip of compound butter the size of a nickel. The butter contains crumbled sesame bread sticks, mixed with grated lemon zest, garlic, chile flakes and chopped parsley. It comes to the table with about a quarter inch of melted butter in the bottom of the dish, spiked with some of the juices from the raw clams. Meatball parm on a roll ($8) It's hard to tell from this picture, but the meatball inside that roll is, well, it's not shaped like a ball. It's flat. Meatballs, of course, are supposed to be round, but a round meatball has a disconcerting way of shooting out of a sandwich as soon as you take a bite. Mr. Carbone and Mr. Torrisi at first handled this the way many sub shops do: they put the meatball on the roll and then flattened this. Then they realized that they were facing an engineering problem that required a repair to the basic infrastructure of the sandwich. "You know what happened was, I got tired of smashing the meatball," said Mr. Torrisi. It was upsetting to me to put the meatball in the sandwich and have to smash it. And I don't think it wants to be smashed. I was like, listen, I'm going to make it as a patty and we're going to call it a meatball. Whatever you call it, the patty is a gorgeous pink in the center. It's made of soffritto (fried onions, celery and carrots), stale bread, milk, grated cheese and eggs mixed with ground beef, veal and sweet Italian sausage. After an initial browning, the meatballs are slowly braised in tomato sauce in a 180-degree CVap oven for 40 minutes, which keeps the meat from becoming dry, tough and gray. The roll comes from Parisi Bakery, a century-old business on Elizabeth Street. The mozzarella is made in-house. The sauce is nothing more than crushed Jersey tomatoes cooked for less than 45 minutes, finished with basil oil that the restaurant makes from all the basil stems it accumulates. Finally, there is grated cheese. And no, it is not parmigiano. Like Torrisi Italian Specialties next door, Parm uses only domestic ingredients. The American substitution for imported parmigiano that the chefs have found is a Wisconsin cheese called SarVecchio. "We named the restaurant after an ingredient we don't buy, which is kind of the funny-ha-ha part of the name," said Mr. Torrisi. Parm is amazing slang. It means so much to every Italian-American. It was a great catchphrase for what this restaurant is. Saratoga club ($12) Why do so many club sandwiches go so wrong? Why do so many sandwiches in general go so wrong? There are probably as many reasons as there are bad sandwiches, but when a place gets its sandwiches right, the world is a better place. Parm gets its sandwiches right, even its club sandwich, which entails a higher degree of difficulty. There is architectural problem: Can you build three pieces of bread and two layers of filling that will stay more or less intact after contact with the eater's jaws? There's the texture problem, too: Can you toast the bread lightly enough that it doesn't rip up the roof of the eater's mouth? Mr. Carbone and Mr. Torrisi have put some thought into these issues, spurred on by the third partner in Parm, Jeff Zalaznick. "Jeff rates hotels by how good their club sandwich is," Mr. Torrisi said. As Mr. Carbone described the structural challenge, which he casts in geologic terms: "There's always the problem of poor layering creating tectonic shifts, and your sandwich falls apart halfway through. Once you get that tectonic movement your sandwich is done. One solution they came up with was controversial, but the chefs stand by it. "We stopped cutting it in quarters, which killed everybody, because a club sandwich is supposed to be cut into quarters," Mr. Carbone said. But it was just starting to fall apart on people. The Saratoga club is a chicken-salad sandwich, made of roast chicken dressed with "a zesty mayo that has all the classic dried ingredients of the Italian-American kitchen: dried oregano, black pepper, chile flakes, a little bit of celery seed, raw celery, a little bit of onion." The bacon gets a rosemary-tinged brown sugar glazed. And the sandwich gets extra crunch from a layer of crushed potato chips. Hence the name: Saratoga Springs, N.Y., was the birthplace of both the club sandwich and the potato chip. Calamari ($12) On Parm's menu, printed on paper place mats, the listing for calamari is followed by a cryptic note: "Check the sign." The sign is a painting of an octopus on roller skates. When the word "calamari" lights up in neon, the restaurant has the tender, never-frozen baby squid that is the only kind of squid it will buy. When the light is off, the fried calamari is eighty-sixed. The dish is very simple: calamari dusted in rice flour and deep fried with two kinds of peppers, cubanelles and Italian long hots. When it comes out of the fryer it's sprinkled with salt and chopped parsley. There's tomato sauce on the side, following local custom, and there's also a good spicy Tabasco mayonnaise. Fresh tiny squid are the reason for the success of this basket of fried excellence. But there is one little trick - or maybe it's more like a ritual - that the kitchen follows. Before tossing the squid in rice flour, it takes a bath in seltzer. "I don't know why," Mr. Torrisi said. I started doing this at A Voce when I opened it with Andrew Carmellini. We got into this whole old wives" tale about seltzer water. "We don't even know if it works but we just do it," Mr. Carbone said. It's one thing we do where we can't describe the science of it. The painting, incidentally, is by an artist known as Marco, whose work can be seen all over the Lower East Side. Ice cream cake ($10) Back when Megan Fitzroy was making elegant desserts at Daniel, did she guess that one day she would become the pastry chef at Parm, where her employers would ask her to find a way of combining spumoni with a Carvel ice cream cake? Mr. Torrisi and Mr. Carbone grew up with Carvel cakes. Every birthday party had one, including theirs. When they were developing their menu, they went to eat at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And thus was born the idea of a Frankencake that would combine both sweets on one plate. If you've ever had spumoni, you expect all three layers to taste like the same thing: sugar. Ms. Fitzroy's layers taste like what they are: chocolate, pistachio and strawberry. Separating the layers are crisp chocolate wafers, and they, too, taste like chocolate. The thing I admire most about this dessert, though, is that the maraschino cherry on top hasn't been upgraded into some kind of sour cherry macerated in brandy, which is what a modern bartender would do. It's a maraschino cherry. With a stem. Oh and the colored sprinkles? They're colored sprinkles. The chefs promise that the ice cream cake will change seasonally, though it may not necessarily contain seasonal ingredients. They're currently developing one called The Elvis, with peanut butter, jelly and banana.