“How was the food in Greece?”
“Actually...it wasn’t so good-- I ended up cooking a lot of pasta at home,” my friend Katia confessed with a grin.
“You’re becoming one of them,” I joked.
What I was referring to was how Italians infamously miss Italian food whenever they leave Italy. I’d first encountered this in a book about Italy I’d picked up several months ago, wherein the author describes a colleague of his who, upon return from a vacation in France, told the author that his vacation had been excellent, but he hadn’t had a proper meal the entire time.
Imagine that: being unable to find a proper meal. In France. I may sometimes have some beef with the French (pun intended), but even I will admit to being charmed by the culinary prowess of that culture.
And yet, I’d had many experiences of my own along these lines. Almost every Italian I have met has a deeply ingrained conservatism around food-- even if they claim not to be all that interested in or knowledgeable about food, even if they’ve spent significant time abroad, even if in every other area of their life they are extremely progressive.
For instance, a couple of weeks ago I decided to take a one-week intensive language class. One day, our teacher read us an example of a conversation between a waiter and a customer and then asked us to pair off and do our own version on the fly using a menu provided in our textbook. One student would be the waiter, one the diner. I was assigned to be the customer in the last group to go.
By the time we got to my pairing, I was pretty bored of the very predictable and rote conversations we were hearing, and thought I might switch things up a little bit.
“Good evening!” I said cheerfully to my unsuspecting dialogue partner, a sweet young Dutch woman.
“Good evening, ma’am! Is this table okay for you?”
“Yes, certainly.” So far, so good.
“What would you like for dinner?” My partner asked in bored tones.
“I would like a coffee corrected with grappa,” (author’s note: ‘caffe corretto’ is coffee with booze and literally translates to ‘correct,’ which I find hilarious), “and a sparkling water.”
“Uhhhh, I don’t…” my partner gave a nervous laugh.
“I’m not very hungry tonight,” I explained.
“Do you… do you want a dessert?” she fumbled, but gave a big grin.
“Actually, sure. I’ll have a tiramisu.”
“Okay, of course!” my partner exclaimed, finally getting into our little skit. “I hope you enjoy it!”
“Please bring the bill with the tiramisu. Can I pay with card?”
“No problem, but unfortunately we can only take cash.”
“Alright.”
The rest of the class had shaken themselves out of the dazed stupefaction that most classrooms seem to inevitably impose upon their students and were chuckling at our unorthodox skit.
But the teacher, usually a very kind woman, looked a little uneasy. “Well, you know that that is a very strange dinner, and nobody would ever order it.”
I was surprised. The teacher usually had a great sense of humor, even about Italy and especially Italian language quirks. “Yes, I know, I just thought we’d do something a little different from all the other dialogues. Just like… shake it up a little.”
After all, surely the point was to practice using language, and especially to practice thinking on your feet-- no waiter or customer in real life would follow a script perfectly. Who cares if I ordered coffee with grappa followed by tiramisu instead of agnolotti and then a fish? I was practicing my Italian, and that was the goal, wasn’t it?
The teacher frowned and shook her head. “Yes, yes. Well. Anyway. Good job everyone.”
I thought about that incident and the teacher’s deep discomfort for a while, and realized that just about every Italian friend of ours became similarly off kilter when food was discussed.
There was Michele, one of the most progressive and open minded young Italians I’d met. “You can have a cappuccino in the afternoon,” he told us once. “But why? Why? No one would ever do that.”
There was Catarina, our former neighbor in Rome who spent the 90s as a cigarette smoking dancer, making her way cooler than I ever have been or will be, on the same subject. “It’s about the proper order of things. You can’t want milk after a whole meal.”
Our friend Sebastiano scoffed at modern so-called ‘foodies,’ especially ones who will only have certain ingredients from certain regions: balsamic from Modena, parmigiano from Parma, olives from a particular orchard. “It’s not like one hill over the olives are suddenly not as good.” Yet even he has what to me seems like an encyclopaedic knowledge of grapes and vintages and what to pair with what, despite claiming to know very little about wine. Also, he makes his own limoncello.
One of my and Adam’s dirty little secrets is that we love to indulge in foreign food when we go to Rome-- in particular, there is a Korean restaurant in Trastevere we are obsessed with. Adam lived in South Korea for a decade, so when he tells me something is authentic, I believe him, and anyway: the tastebuds don’t lie. Since our Korean food options are somewhat limited here, every time we return to Rome we have what can best be described as an orgiastic feast: obviously we have to get fried chicken, and I’ll never get tired of bo ssam, but then we’ll also add a third entree as we work our way slowly through the entire menu.
Lately, we’d been plagued by bureaucratic nonsense, which isn’t unusual in Italy but in our case required many trips from Turin to Rome, which is several hours by train or car. The bright side of this is that we have had many more occasions to experience the delicious Korean restaurant. That weekend, we revelled in the hot, spicy, and kimchi goodness, which almost made up for the fact that from a bureaucratic standpoint it was a wasted trip.
And it wasn’t just the Korean feast-- we’d also found places to get decent American-style burgers (sorely lacking in all of Europe as a whole, I’d say), even acceptable Mexican. For a long time, going to Rome meant getting to have all kinds of foreign food treats generally difficult to find outside of the capital city.
But the strangest moment came when we were drinking a cappuccino on our last morning in Rome. Discussing the upcoming week, I remembered that we’d promised to go with a few friends to a local restaurant in San Mauro we’d discovered a month before. Their menu was limited to appetizers and pasta dishes, yet we’d been three times already and ordered the same thing every time. How very Italian of us.
Thinking about it, my stomach rumbled aggressively and I felt what I could only describe as a soul-deep craving for lasagne. At some point along the way, unbeknownst to me, I too had been infected with an immutable desire for pasta, tomatoes, garlic-- just like all of my Italian friends. Just like Katia. I frowned when I realized that the dinner date was some days away.
Looking at Adam, I smiled sheepishly.
“Can we have Italian for dinner tonight?”
Hey everyone!
Just a quick reminder to follow @utopiaitalia on instagram, which acts as a hub for the entire utopia Italia project. There’s tons of lovely photos of Italy, updates on new offerings, and if you live in Piedmont, there’s a very regularly updated Highlight Story reel all about events in Turin that range from art shows to concerts to parties to gallery openings.
If you’re enjoying what you hear or read, you can help me out by sharing with your friends, family, frenemies, and enemies.
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Ciao for now!
x ash