When you put a world-traveled photojournalist from Dundalk who teaches his art with a world-renowned chef from Highlandtown who teaches everyone she can how to cook, you get an intersection in Canton of an explosion of “you can do it, too!” as well as some great laughs. Nancy Longo and Joe Giordano talk food and lore with a side of scrapple knowledge.
Nestor Aparicio, Joe Giordano, and Nancy Longo discuss Baltimore’s culinary scene, focusing on Highlandtown and Pierpoint restaurant. Nancy shares her experience as a celebrity chef, her sausage-making skills, and her cooking classes for kids. Joe talks about his photography work, including being named a Maryland Master of Photography and his book on the Preakness. They reminisce about local food traditions, like sausage and scrapple, and the impact of COVID-19 on local restaurants. The conversation also touches on the Maryland Crab Cake Tour, sponsored by the Maryland lottery and Curio Wellness, highlighting the importance of local food and community.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pierpoint restaurant, Nancy Longo, Joe Giordano, Highlandtown food, sausage, crab cakes, photojournalism, Maryland lottery, Baltimore culinary, fish markets, cooking classes, kids cooking, restaurant equipment, Maryland photography, Mid Atlantic horse rescue.
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Joe Giordano, Nancy Longo
Nestor Aparicio 00:00
Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T. Am 1570 task Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. We’re positively here in beautiful Canton Maryland. And I’ve gathered Berkshire’s finest and Colgate finest, with cantons finest. We’re deep with squalis. I’ve already had sausage, ham, pancetta. What else have I had? I’ve had coffee. We have espresso. We’ve talked sausage, we’ve talked crab cakes, and now we’re going to talk cooking and more photojournalism. Joe Giordano is going to stick around for a little while. Here I have the Back to the Future scratch offs from the Maryland lottery and one for Nancy Longo from Pierpoint restaurant. I was going to call you our celebrity chef, but I didn’t, you know we’re friends, but you are sort of a celebrity chef. I mean, you’ve been on chop, you’ve been places. You cook for people. You have your beautiful restaurant. You’re a teacher. Joe’s a teacher. He teaches photo journalism. You teach all sorts of people how to cook. He needs take a class with you, because
Nancy Longo 00:59
we can swap. Yeah, how are you I tell you, a little under the weather. I’m good. I’ve been, well, you know, nothing worse than that summer cold. My wife’s got one, right? Oh,
Nestor Aparicio 01:08
that is hideous. She’s been in bed all weekend. Yeah,
Nancy Longo 01:11
they say that whatever, if it’s, if it’s a flu strain. There’s a couple of them that, if you got a flu shot, it weren’t, it wasn’t covered. But I, you know, I fight it out. I eat more Chinese food. I think by today, um, I’m ready for the MSG. Puts it out with, Oh, yeah. Well, might be time for some Italian penicillin today, since I’m here and Joe standing
Nestor Aparicio 01:32
right over there. Joe’s waving at everybody in this
Nancy Longo 01:36
well, you know, I have great Joe stories. Oh, you have
Nestor Aparicio 01:39
Joe stories. Telling stories about you. He’s like, I’m leaving.
Nancy Longo 01:45
It’s just some crazy childhood. So
Nestor Aparicio 01:47
thanks for coming by. And you know, this thing turned into something I told someone before you got here, my wife and I were unhappy with our sausage lately, yeah, and I knew Darren’s family. I reached to his brother, and I said, I need to get better sausage at the house. Where can I go to get inside? Darren is the sausage king. He’s been over here deepest Qualis a number of years after making Roma for years. And I reached him, and he said, Come down here. I’ll get you a box. I make the best sausage in the world. All the stuff that Darren is being Darren on. And I came here about four weeks ago. My wife had not been into the new space. God, no, really, well, we moved out to the county three years ago, and it’s just like, we don’t walk up and down Canton the way we used to walk through the city every day, right? And many old place a million times. But she came in here, she’s like, Oh my God, it’s like, New York. We got sausage, we got sandwiches, we bought pasta, we walked out of here with all sorts of stuff. And then Joe and Don we put the show together and and then I’m like, Well, who am I gonna have out? And honestly, I feel like a jerk for not putting you on the top couple people I thought of because Dan Rodricks was supposed to be here now, and he had the bail on me Sunday. And I’m like,
Nancy Longo 02:52
Yeah, Nancy, I gotta call Nancy. That’s okay. Dan and I are friends. I know you meet together, so we’re even,
Nestor Aparicio 03:00
well, you could. We all loved it, don’t you do the Seven Fishes? When we do, we
Nancy Longo 03:03
do, we did. We’ve done some great Fish Tales. He brings his tackle box and everything. We tell stories about fish, and then I talk about why. My whole you know thing about Conservancy and keeping fish safe in the water and safe for us to eat. So Dan and I do a really good back to back on that one. So what? Why aren’t there more fish markets in the city? Well, you know, I want to tell you something that one that used to be, where? What do we got? That is that like a kiddie playground now?
Joe Giordano 03:33
Yeah, it was a fish market. Well,
Nancy Longo 03:36
do they still call it the fish market? I don’t know. So this tells you how old I am. Back in the early 80s, when I was going to Baltimore culinary they used to send us over from class over there to pick out our own fish hole, right? That was, yeah, and it was like, your eyes got really big, because that was everything. And then they said, well, the trucks can’t get it out of here. We’re moving it to Jessup. I don’t know it was because they thought the development was already going on there, and they were gonna just redo it. Yeah, back to the sausage thing for a quick minute. You know, that’s a Geno that comes into you if you’re Italian, because the other day, I was making some rabbit sausage in my place. So I’m a sausage maker too. You know what stuff in the store is junk compared to this what he’s making in here. And I do come. I live around the corner from here. So I come here.
Joe Giordano 04:23
I thought you lived above Pierpoint. You just get up. No. People
Nancy Longo 04:27
live over top of their restaurants. I’m, you know, I thought you lived there. No, I didn’t know. No, no, I lived around the corner from our other best friend. So
Nestor Aparicio 04:37
you walked in, or you I saw you park right here, and Joe’s like, I know Nancy, she’s the best beer point, doesn’t she, and I’m so for everybody that wants to hear what you’re up to, because I don’t really know you, and I haven’t connected in a couple of years since I left downtown to, like, really sit and Bs and visit. I was coming in your place with a mask on. I was coming to your place. My wife had cancer twice a week. You’re feeding me. And trying. You’re trying to feed her. She’s on tubes, so you fed me, but, um, what, what is, what’s peer point. Now, what do you because you’re doing classes so
Nancy Longo 05:09
exciting stuff, we’re we’re still there. We’re still still dining room. Now, granted, we don’t do the business. We use the dining room. However, I’m one of those kind of people that likes to do more than one thing, and so it’s always been that we’ve always had a catering business, and that’s still, you know, going along as it is, but we’ve been doing classes, and we have stuff for the kids. We took a week or two off because it’s vacation time. They’re packed for the rest of summer. Kids come for six hours a day. They learn how to make 15 different things. Guess who gets to take it all home? They do their parents. Like, I love this a week of free food. Not free food. It’s they paid for it, but, but the kids really enjoy being being able to take it home. How are these kids you’re teaching how to cook? Most of them are 10 to about 14. I had Home
Nestor Aparicio 05:56
Ec in Holabird. You went to Holabird? Right? Yeah. I had miss. I try to think of her name. Anyway, I had a home ec teacher in seventh grade, and we made pizza and we made cinnamon biscuits. Yeah, you know when I was a kid, and I’m thinking, Oh, that was in 1979 right now, I’m so impressed my mother. I was in the kitchen all the time. I mean, I had a cook, you know, I’m a good sue for my wife, or good help, or whatever, my wife’s an excellent cook. But there is something about being a kid and having professional attention, or having that memory of I remember with Lisa buckledge, Wendy Anderson and Kevin eckham, my home ec class. May we still talk about it, 50 years later, making food together we were kids, because there is something about that that it serves you the rest of your life, yeah, well, you learn how to
Nancy Longo 06:42
reason. I don’t have them younger than that is because they’re using restaurant equipment. This is not like, you know, Mickey Mouse pancakes the boys. Last summer, there was a class I left these cleavers. I see these boys the last week they did. They said, can we break down that leg of lamb? They were taking an Indian class, so we’re not whatever I teach an adult, I teach kids, why do I need to teach kids how to make mozzarella sticks, and then later in life, I teach them how to make a mozzarella salad? So that’s how I feel about it. And these kids come, they know all about different
Nestor Aparicio 07:19
kinds of sushi. They deepest Qualis is their favorite place. They told me that on the way. So he even told me I had a lot of listeners. He clearly doesn’t know. No one listens to this show.
Nancy Longo 07:33
They’re over there at the counters. Kenny Houston henningers, okay, so we got restaurant people in here all the time. We all come here
Nestor Aparicio 07:42
from New York. They came all right? Well, I mean, I say this is like a New York style Dell. I mean, this is a real gift, right?
Nancy Longo 07:51
I laugh because I grew up with the deepest walleyes in a different sense. So my father, you know, typical, you know, my father, your father, Boxer, had five brothers. They were all boxers, and couple of sisters and the parents. So it was like 11 people. Well, they grew up with Joe’s. And, you know, my father used to go to the, you know, cock fights, whether they used to do chicken fights, crazy stuff. And so every time somebody would die, we had to go to Zenos. I think one relative we
Nestor Aparicio 08:25
know family, because they had a kitchenette in Colgate, in my
Nancy Longo 08:29
neighborhood. So I think we might have went to Delano to once somebody sprung the thing. So we would go there. And every time we’d go there, the adults would be in there. You know, they’re sad that their sister died, and don’t get me wrong, I was sad about my aunt or uncle dying, but then we would just go, We’d sneak out, we’d go next door to deeper squalities. So I spent a lot of time at Deepa squalis. Then we went during
Nestor Aparicio 08:53
the grieving process, absolutely, part of the grieving process is eating,
Joe Giordano 08:56
yeah? And you can also place bets at zaninos too, you know?
Nancy Longo 08:59
Yeah. Well, I think it might have been my uncle that
Nestor Aparicio 09:04
was taking the bed. Sounds different. I grew up in a more I’m more gentrified in Colgate. You know, I didn’t realize they were that kid smoking pot and drinking beer on the corner of the walls.
Joe Giordano 09:13
Well, my dad, my dad’s from Seth, Philly, so I’m my mother’s from Dundalk. She’s not Italian. That’s where I get this Slovak fat face,
Nancy Longo 09:21
you know, the rest of the whole little album on our street, you know, yeah. So I used to laugh. People say me, why don’t you ever go to literally, I said, because it makes me sad. I think about my grandmother cooking food for us, and we were never gonna get that again, yeah. So we had to learn how. I gotta say, though we were there,
Joe Giordano 09:39
maybe, I think we went in September or October, something like that, on a weekend we were gonna go to Michigan. Yeah,
Nancy Longo 09:46
and good call, which is where I go, you
Joe Giordano 09:50
couldn’t get a seat, yeah, so with the chips, couldn’t get a seat 30 minute every I don’t know who was in town. I don’t know if the Orioles were on the street. This was like the fall. I. Okay, it’s like, the fall good. And my wife and I were like, This is great. Like, we went to four restaurants and they’re like, 2030, minute wait. We’re sorry. I’m like, in little Wait a minute. What I
Nancy Longo 10:08
noticed that? And I remember my friends saying that are over there. Like, we really, they really suffered after COVID. And I saw one of my friends recently, and she said, No, it’s, it’s bouncing back. So that’s a really good
Nestor Aparicio 10:23
sign. Well, you know me. She says family to me. It’s how I know you. Scott and Roland were family to me. Jody Penny, everybody down there, chef for all these years. And it goes back to the sausage story, because we will get the penny. Amici there, yeah, and it’s the sauce,
Joe Giordano 10:39
I guess I get this. It’s my dish Penny, okay, no mushrooms, but I
Nestor Aparicio 10:43
get it. It’s the sausage that Darren just came out and promoted. It’s the deepest quality sauce. So I remember Scott saying to me a number of years ago, I still get my sausage from Darren. Yeah. And about a month and a half ago, we were getting sausage that was subpar. I mean, just yeah, like at home, we we’re not getting the kind of sausage my wife wanted to put on the grill or into her sausage and lentil soup.
Nancy Longo 11:05
The problem is, is it’s, there’s an art to it. See, some people think, Oh, I just grind up the meat of a little season, shoving the casing or make a patty at it. But there’s a, there’s a percentage of fat that has to go in there, and then you have to put these other seasonings. So when we make it, you know, I take a little bit, double check, make sure it’s good, and then we test it, then we put it in the casings, and, yeah, we were, you know, I mean, it’s a thing. And the problem is, it’s the same with, like, people talk about, Oh, you shouldn’t eat that. It’s not good for you. It’s like, not everything isn’t necessarily fabulous, but in moderation, just like scrapple.
Nestor Aparicio 11:46
Scrapple now, let me touch line right there. I don’t like
Nancy Longo 11:51
scrap I’m gonna make you some screw. I don’t my money your screen. Listen to me. I’ll take his. You know where scrapple originally came from? Not sausage. It was a wish. It no was sausage. It was a western Pennsylvania thing where they used to make polenta, and they took the sausage, not encasing the ground sausage, and mixed it in with the polenta and turned it into this thing that we call
Joe Giordano 12:16
scrap. That’s the Amish. That’s the Amish
Nancy Longo 12:18
because, because, if you go to North Carolina, they call it liver mush. And there’s as livers in the junk together, scrapple Italians with Italians used to make, I’m there. Can I be here? I have an afternoon of it, because it’s, it’s not like the junk that people think about Baltimore. All right, I gotta
Nestor Aparicio 12:40
let Joe get out of here. Promote your books when we’re Oh, sorry we didn’t. Sorry, we didn’t talk we talked photography. Now, listen, sausage,
Joe Giordano 12:46
you gotta see photography. Talk food. Talk food. So the only two things I got promote something because I Yeah. So no. So tonight, I was very honored to be named the the six Maryland master of photography by the Maryland photography Alliance, which is a it’s one of the oldest clubs in this country, and I’m giving a talk tonight. If you go into Maryland photography Alliance website, you can register. It’s free. If you want to donate. We’re doing it to benefit what’s called flashes of love. And it’s portraits of kids with cancer and their families. Photographers volunteer to take family portraits. So that’s the charity that the Maryland masters goes represent, goes to represent. And if you want to support the Mid Atlantic horse rescue, this is, this is, yeah, this is my This is Thunder on the hilltop. It’s on blurb.com it is to commemorate the 150th running of the Preakness. It is not cheap, but it is a gorgeous coffee table book. And the proceeds from this go to benefit Mid Atlantic horse rescue. I’m working on a smaller version. It’s not as expensive, but it’s worth weakness 148 pictures. Here is, there’s, yeah, there’s, it’s 10 years of doing the Preakness. So the horses are in the they’re in there. It’s all in there. In fields in there. Gamblers are in their hats are in there. It’s all in there. I hope I’m in here. I hope I actually, I actually, I actually, I actually, liberated a bumper sticker from the last Preakness from a door. No. Woman, No, I won’t miss it. Yeah, there was a mad dash. They were watching people. They were watching even members of the press. They were told to watch people stealing stuff from the last previous Yeah, well, they had a big auction, but a lot of it’s going to archives. But yeah, I managed to just peel off in pristine shape, a high hope and like a bumper sticker. And it’s at home, my office on a forever anyway, yes, Nestor, thanks for having me. I gotta get out of here. Nancy, whatever you need to, whenever you need to get that polenta scrapple. I’m gonna, I’m gonna get on there. Invite. What’s the best way to get into I just want to be on your radar. You know, to
Nestor Aparicio 14:57
peer point. What are peer. Points
Nancy Longo 15:00
out 208, a weird. There’s a
Joe Giordano 15:02
rotary phone. Sunday, Tuesday through Sunday.
Nestor Aparicio 15:04
No, 675, so Highland town. Oh
Nancy Longo 15:07
no, no. It’s a Fells Point.
Joe Giordano 15:11
Okay, but you’re open Tuesday to Tuesday to Sunday. Yeah, every night that was 342, okay, we’re gonna come down for dinner, please. We love seafood,
Nancy Longo 15:18
and sometimes when you come in the week and it’s quiet, there is no menu. That’s the beauty of that place you got me. I’m coming down certain age. You can
Nestor Aparicio 15:27
do whatever you want. It. I love it. Artisan sausage, artisan chefs, artisan artists. And Joe Jordan over here, I take a break. I’m gonna come back with Nancy. I might try to drag Joe over here DOM or something like that. I want to talk more cooking with you. Yeah, I want to talk about the art of crab cakes with you. Can we do that seafood? Do all that? Yes. Talk about how delicious summer corn is, white corn and farm to table dining. Nancy Longo is gonna hang out. She’s a Pierpoint restaurant. She I am so embarrassed. It’s the first time you’ve been on my show.
Nancy Longo 15:56
Oh no, I think we did it one of the taste NFL, I did a show with you, Super Bowl. That’s like, I know it doesn’t
Nestor Aparicio 16:03
it’s in Baltimore City. We’re doing a Maryland crab cake tour. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery, our friends at curio wellness as well. I’m giving back to the future scratch us. We’re gonna be a Costas and Timonium on Thursday. We are going to be next week on Friday, we’re gonna be doing the morning show with Zeke’s, and then in the afternoon, we’re gonna be in Eldersburg on Wednesday at 1623 drinking beer. My thanks to Joe Nancy’s going to stay with us back for more. We are W, N, S T am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore. Positive. You.
