The wood-burning hearth was out in a courtyard.
"My grandmother did all her cooking on a wood-burning hearth".
"The old one," she said, "is a wood-burning hearth that my dad would pop popcorn on".
Others were stuffing black truffles under the skin of the chickens to be spit-roasted in a wood-burning hearth, filling rice balls with cheese and wrapping house-cured pancetta around chicken livers, using rosemary branches as skewers.
Sure, the bearded, bespectacled Mr. Fornatale, who at 55 still wears the dowdy flannel shirts and jeans he lived in back when those garments were the cutting-edge 60's uniform, favors an authentic wood-burning hearth.
The bar area has two coal fires, but my favourite is the wood-burning hearth in the spacious, panelled back room, where you can pull up a high-backed church pew and await the arrival of St Nicholas.
The lack of an easy source of fire in the early Roman community placed a special premium on the ever-burning hearth fire, both publicly and privately maintained; thus, from the earliest times Vesta was assured of a prominent place in both family and state worship.
An oversize fireplace, with pillar candles burning in its hearth, is the centerpiece of the space, which seats about 14, and both the vibrant papaya-red walls and luxurious Asian throw carpeting add to the general warmth.
Gas fireplaces offer many advantages over wood-burning hearths: they produce no ashes or embers, don't require a chimney, and seldom require construction permits.
The welcome, the service, the dark, weathered planks and rafters, and in particular, the lovely bar and lounge — and jolly fire burning in the hearth — provide an Old World feel of a gentler time, when such a stop was a comforting respite from stress and snow or rain.
Not while there are still gallons of good single malt, a fire burning in the hearth and a joint of something roasting in the kitchen.
