Anne BralyShrimp scampi first appeared on menus back in the 1960s and by the 1970s was a standard on many. I well remember having it for the first time as a teenager at The Gazebo, a popular restaurant on Georgia Avenue that is now a hair salon.
I don’t see it too often anymore on menus, though. Sometimes it’s offered as a special, and whenever I eat at Olive Garden – once a year or so – I see it in some form or fashion.
Scampi is a dish open to the whims of the cook. Some add tomatoes, different fresh herbs or finish it with a sprinkle of bread crumbs. But traditional shrimp scampi is made with nothing more than garlic, butter and white wine, then served over angel-hair pasta – and it seems to have disappeared from restaurant menus, for the most part.
According to Lidia Bastianich in her cookbook “Lidia’s Italian American Kitchen,” shrimp scampi is a dish with Italian roots that immigrants brought to our shores and reinvented, using shrimp rather than scampi, which are tiny lobster-like crustaceans used in Italy.
One thing that’s a must when eating shrimp scampi is an overabundance of the buttery rich sauce. I want my shrimp swimming in the stuff – enough so that it soaks the pasta with enough running over into the plate to sop up a basketful of crusty bread. That, to me, is the perfect scampi. Forget diets.