CONDON’S CUISINE

Prizzi’s Honor offered mov-iegoers the rare pleasure of seeing Jack Nicholson (as hit man Charley Partanna) in the kitchen. The film was based on Dallas novelist Richard Condon’s book of the same title.

Next month, Prizzi’s Family (Putnam, $17.95), Condon’s “pre-quel” to Prizzi’s Honor, will be published. Happily for readers whose interests are culinary as well as literary, there is plenty more Italian food worked in between Charley’s other activities.

Of special interest to Dallas-ites is Charley’s evaluation of a local Italian restaurant, which Condon does not name but which readers could infer to be Campisi’s. In town to make a hit, Charley checks into the Mockingbird Hilton and goes out in search of dinner: “He dressed in his new clothes and went down to the lobby to find out where there was an Italian restaurant. They sent him to an Italian-type restaurant on Mockingbird behind the hotel. The pasta was out of a package and had been made with plain white flour. It lay there in lumps. The sauce was like hot ketchup. He ate the bread and the salad.”