“One of the great food movies,” Roger Ebert once called the 1996 film “Big Night,” recalling the moment the chef slices open a timpano on-screen and “the audience sighs with simple delight.”
A mound of pasta, meat and cheese wrapped in crust, “timpano” translates to “drum” and, indeed, has the shape of a marching-band drum or a wheel of cheese. The timpano in “Big Night” feeds 20; at Coda di Volpe, the Italian restaurant in the Southport Corridor, a smaller version amply feeds two.
To make the classic dish, chef Chris Thompson tosses partially cooked pasta with tomato sauce, then folds in pork sausage, short ribs and cheese. He lines a cast-iron pan with enough rolled-out dough so it’s spilling out around the entire circumference, pours in the meat-cheese-pasta mixture, and folds the dough up and over the filling.
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Timpano is “a hodgepodge that works so well,” says Thompson.
Tuesdays, you can share timpano, a large salad and three scoops of sorbet or gelato at Coda di Volpe for $48. For an even bigger night — and value — add a bottle of red or white for $40.
Coda di Volpe, 3335 N. Southport Ave., 773-687-8568, www.cdvolpe.com
David Hammond is a freelance writer.
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