Sautéed Veal Kidneys in Madeira Wine Sauce

In the winter of 1952, drivers heading west out of Coral Gables, Florida, along Bird Road began passing a new sign at Southwest 65th Avenue. “Announcing the Opening of Anton’s Continental,” the advertisements read — a restaurant “For Gracious Dining,” serving the finest French and Italian cuisine, and situated, as the ads were careful to point out, “on route to Tropical Park.” The geography was no accident. Two miles farther west, where Bird Road met the future path of the Palmetto Expressway, sat Tropical Park Race Track, the 245-acre thoroughbred oval that had anchored Miami’s winter racing circuit alongside Hialeah and Gulfstream since 1931. Every racing season, a river of horse players, snowbirds, and stable money flowed past the restaurant’s door — an audience with time on its hands, cash in its pockets, and, if Anton’s had anything to say about it, an appetite for snails.

The man who put his name over the door — more or less — was Anatol A. Brezo, a New Yorker in his mid-fifties who had arrived in Miami around 1938. Brezo’s résumé read like three or four lives stacked end to end. He had been an operatic tenor, singing at various times at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York City and at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. In Miami he became a builder, then a real estate agent, and finally an educator of a very particular kind: the founder of a school for food-processing specialists, an institution his contemporaries knew as the Miami Institute of Food Technology. Anton’s Continental opened in 1952 as an adjunct to his school, and Brezo ran the dining room like a laboratory — the operation was designed, as the local press later explained it, on the “scientific” daily control of food purchasing, preparation, and service. The kitchen’s mandate was equally deliberate: to specialize in unusual and hard-to-find recipes, the dishes other Miami restaurants wouldn’t touch.

Brezo did not run it alone. His wife, Ester Brezo (born Ester Dordoni), served as co-owner and hostess, and she brought her own brand of theatricality to the front of the house. Ester had directed plays at the University of Miami and was a champion of children’s theater in the area, and diners who came for the food often stayed for the welcome. Between the tenor in the kitchen and the director at the entrance, an evening at Anton’s came with a certain sense of production.

The menu delivered on the promise of the unusual. In 1953 lobster thermidor could be had for $1.70, and the specialty of the house was braised sweetbreads en casserole at $1.95. But the columnists steered readers first to the snails. Herb Rau, a columnist for the Miami Daily News, insisted that “you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten” the escargots bourguignonne — snails baked in a garlic-butter-parsley sauce, a bargain at $1.25 — before so much as touching the sweetbreads. Frogs’ legs and veal kidneys rounded out a roster of what Rau called the restaurant’s epicurean standouts, and the gossip columnists began doing their part as well: Milt Ross and Louise Brown, a husband-and-wife team who were fixtures on the Borscht Belt and Miami Beach hotel circuit, were spotted at a table that year, the first in a string of boldface names the restaurant would collect.

The veal kidneys, in particular, became a calling card. In January 1954, when the Miami Daily News invited the chefs of Greater Miami to reveal their favorite recipes, Anton’s contribution was its Veal Kidneys Sautéed in Madeira Wine Sauce — kidneys minced, seared hard in their own fat, then finished in a thickened sauce of golden onions and shallots, wine, tomato purée, and brown beef gravy, and sent out over croutons with a shower of chopped parsley.

That same year Brezo doubled down. He closed Anton’s Continental for a remodeling of the interior and announced that the restaurant would reopen on November 16, 1954, while he continued plans for something more ambitious: a frozen-food specialty operation in an adjoining building. Five days after the doors reopened, Herb Rau surveyed the whole operation in the Miami Daily News under the headline “Gourmet’s Paradise.”

A gourmet of his acquaintance, Rau began, was prepared to swear “on a stack of Escoffier cookbooks” that the best frog legs Provençale in Miami were to be found at Anton’s. The dish was one of a half-dozen house specialties, its garlic-butter sauce the object of connoisseurs’ devotion; others included sliced filet of beef sauté Forestière, roast beef, veal escallopine à la Française, and veal parmigiana. Table d’hôte dinners ran seven courses — appetizer, soup, entrée, vegetables, garlic bread, dessert, and beverage — with 22 entrées in all to choose from, at prices from $2.50 to $4.50. The à la carte side of the menu, Rau wrote, was “for the real gone gourmets,” organized in the classic French manner — hors d’oeuvres, potages, poissons, grillades, pâtés, fromages — and running from the escargots (six snails drenched in a garlic-butter sauce of fine herbs) through vichyssoise, pompano amandine, chateaubriand, and eggplant parmigiana, and on to baked Alaska, peach flambé, and crêpes suzette. The kitchen remained in the hands of chef Andre Marcel Longuesserre, formerly of the Brook Club and the Larchmont Yacht Club in New York — Rau assured his readers that the top-quality staff was unchanged by the redecoration — and the cocktail lounge, recently added and stocked with a vast collection of imported spirits, was staffed by a barman who, in Rau’s words, “whips up a perfect sherry-martini.” An advertisement on the same page quoted Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating, the national restaurant directory published by the editors of Gourmet magazine, as pronouncing Anton’s “tops in Miami.”

Brezo, never a man to let a good corner lot idle, then opened a second restaurant next door. Il Guappo — the name is Neapolitan slang for a swaggering dandy — debuted next door to Anton’s Continental as a straight Italian eatery, trading on the reputation its parent had built in only a couple of seasons. Herb Rau used the occasion to recap the proprietor’s improbable arc: The one-time operatic tenor who had concertized at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl, now running two restaurants on Bird Road and standing up a frozen-food business in between.

By 1955 Brezo’s frozen-food business was no longer just a plan. Anton’s was freezing a half-dozen of its house specialties for distribution to food markets — among them an item the columnists singled out as pelmeni, “a luscious little hors d’oeuvre.” The choice of pelmeni, the classic Russian meat dumpling, was a quiet tell about the man behind the Continental façade: Brezo’s funeral would one day be held at St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church, and the Social Security rolls carried him as “Anatoly.” The company hired real star power to sell its wares. Billy Gilbert — the rotund character comedian whose convulsive sneezing routine had made him famous and won him the voice of Sneezy in Disney’s Snow White — flew to Miami to film a series of Anton’s Continental frozen-food television spots through Reela Films, the local production house. The dining room, meanwhile, kept drawing names: the Phil Wylies — the Miami author of Generation of Vipers and the Crunch-and-Des fishing stories, and his wife — were spotted at Anton’s that year.

By 1956 the sideline had incorporated as Anton’s Continental Frozen Foods, Inc., with Jack Castaldi serving as vice president, and the restaurant itself had settled into the role of neighborhood institution. On the third Thursday of every month, Anton’s turned over a percentage of its business to the Lend-a-Hand Fund, the Miami Herald’s charity for needy children. There was another change at the stoves: Edmond Foulard, who had been chef at the La Gorce Country Club and the Sans Souci Hotel in Miami Beach, now held that position at Anton’s. And the boldface sightings reached their peak. George Engle, the Kentucky oil millionaire who that January had reopened the Coconut Grove Playhouse with the American premiere of Waiting for Godot, hosted Victor Borge and his wife at Anton’s. Tennessee Williams, whose Sweet Bird of Youth had its world premiere that spring at Studio M Playhouse in nearby Coral Gables, dined there the same year.

And then, with the abruptness that was the fate of so many mid-century Miami restaurants, it was over. Anton’s Continental served its last dinners in 1957. By 1958 the papers were reporting that what was once Anton’s Continental at 65th Avenue and Bird Road was now Ronnie’s Steak House, and the address kept churning: By 1961 the Bon Vivant, redecorated and under new management, occupied the site. The frozen-food dream, the food-technology school, the adjoining Il Guappo — all of it faded from the columns.

Anatol A. Brezo died in 1968 at age 70. His obituary noted that services would be held at St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church in Miami. He was survived by Ester, who lived another 17 years; at her death in 1985 she was remembered, fittingly, as the co-owner and hostess of Anton’s Continental.

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Sautéed Veal Kidneys in Madeira Wine Sauce

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Serves 4

Anatol A. Brezo, a former operatic tenor turned entrepreneur, opened Anton's Continental on Miami's Bird Road in 1952 as an adjunct to the Miami Institute of Food Technology, a school he had founded for food-processing specialists. Brezo ran the dining room like a laboratory, specializing in the sort of elaborate French and Italian preparations few other restaurants in the Miami area dared to attempt. Chef André Marcel Longuesserre, formerly of New York’s Brook Club and Larchmont Yacht Club, led the kitchen at Anton's Continental, and this dish — Sautéed Veal Kidneys in Madeira Wine Sauce — was one of his specialties. In 1954 Anton's Continental offered a seven-course table d'hôte dinner built around the veal kidneys for $2.50.

Ingredients

• 4 veal kidneys, about 1 1/2 pounds total
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tablespoons rendered kidney fat, or neutral oil
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
• 4 shallots, finely chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 cup Madeira
• 1 teaspoon tomato paste
• 1 cup brown beef gravy or rich beef stock
• 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh parsley
• Toasted bread or croutons, for serving
• 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh parsley

Instructions

1

Using a sharp knife, cut the kidneys lengthwise into halves. Remove and discard the hard white cores, membranes, and excess fat. Cut the kidneys into small, roughly 1/2-inch pieces. Season with the salt and several grinds of black pepper.

2

Heat the kidney fat or oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the kidneys in a single layer and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned on the outside but still slightly pink within, 5 to 7 minutes.

3

Transfer the kidneys to a colander set over a bowl and allow them to drain. Carefully discard the fat and any accumulated liquid from the skillet, then wipe out the pan.

4

Return the skillet to medium heat and add the butter. When it has melted, add the onion, shallots, and bay leaf. Cook, stirring often, until the vegetables are soft and golden, 8 to 10 minutes.

5

Add the Madeira and scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the skillet. Simmer until the wine has reduced by about half, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste and beef gravy or stock and bring to a gentle simmer.

6

Cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon, 5 to 8 minutes. Return the kidneys to the skillet and simmer gently until just cooked through, 3 to 5 minutes. Avoid boiling them vigorously, which can make them tough.

7

Remove and discard the bay leaf. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper. Spoon the kidneys and sauce over toasted bread or croutons and scatter the parsley over the top.

Notes

The original recipe called for sherry; Madeira is used here because its nutty sweetness suits the sauce and reflects the name under which the dish appeared on the menu. The original directions also called for cooking the kidneys in the finished sauce for 12 to 15 minutes, but a shorter final simmer keeps them more tender.