Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  It was during the Olympics, and he wasn’t the pope yet, just a cardi-nal, but he was a nice man. He had pickled salmon and a sirloin steak.” Good choices. I went right for the full Eastern European experience—hey, why do you think Cardinal Karol Wojtyla ate at Moishe’s?

  My appetizer was irrationally salty schmaltz herring that tasted as though it had come right out of a barrel that had come right off a boat.

  Then I had the chopped liver, as dense and dark as chopped liver gets.

  Chopped liver is very serious food in English-speaking Montreal, and Vogel says the reason is that French-Canadian butchers had such a small appreciation of liver they’d practically give it away. “My mother would always give me a dime, send me to a French-Canadian butcher, and tell me to ask for the calves’ liver for the dog,” he says. “It was for us, of course.”

  I ordered a rib steak coated with garlic and pepper, the house specialty. It was not as good as Vogel’s sirloin, which was as thick, tender, and beefy as any Manhattan sirloin strip. The food that had the most resonance for me was the tarts and pastries. These are filled with whipped cream so dense the kitchen must burn out blenders making it. When I told Franky I was amazed that the pastries were every bit as good as I remembered them, he said, “That’s because the same man has been doing the pastries for forty years—Giovanni from Naples.

  He came a little after me.”

  Vogel, unabashedly emotional about Moishe’s, says, “I’ll tell you something. As long as there’s a Moishe’s, there’ll always be a Montreal.” Restaurant critics are not supposed to be sentimental, but as William Neill, I always had a soft spot for Beautys, the best place in the city to start your day if your idea of breakfast isn’t feves au lard and cretons.

  To appreciate Beautys, your idea of breakfast has to be an omelette containing hot dog, salami, green peppers, and fried onions. This is known as Beautys’ famous mishmash.

  I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into the old place, a coffee shop on Mont-Royal, but I sure didn’t expect to find Hymie F O R K I T O V E R

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  Skolnick at the cash register, precisely where he was when I left the city twenty years ago. “I’m still around,” said Hymie, who is seventy-five.

  He seemed as happy to see me as I was to see him, and he lavished upon me the mishmash omelette (ahhh!), the sandwich of smoked salmon and cream cheese on a toasted sesame-seed bagel from the great Montreal Bagel Factory on Saint-Viateur Street (oh, my!), and homemade rice pudding so rich and raisiny that Marvin Hamlisch himself praised it from the stage of the Place des Arts not too long ago.

  Everything looked the same, only better, including Hymie. The overly spacious orange booths are now overly spacious royal-blue booths, but I couldn’t see that anything else had changed. Hymie told me his customers are a little different because so many Jews have left Montreal—“the young people, not people my age.” Business was still good. He got a plug on French television, and now French tourists stop in all the time.

  He cleared up a few questions I never bothered to ask him all those years ago. I asked how the place, officially the Bancroft Snack Bar, came to be known as Beautys. He said that Beauty was the nickname he got because he was such a good bowler. “I got a couple of cups, as a matter of fact,” he said. I asked him about the rumor that he walked onstage during one of Dean Martin’s shows in Las Vegas to collect money that Martin owed him. He said it was true that Martin ran up a tab in the forties and ignored it—“Every day a mishmash, a hot dog,” Hymie said—but he never went after the money, and Martin never paid up.

  He said he had something to ask me.

  “I forget your name,” he said.

  I told him my name, the one my parents gave me.

  He said, “I always thought it was O’Neill.” I told him it was good to be remembered, and it was good to be back.

  GQ, may 1996

  S L I C I N G U P N A P L E S

  I ask little of the great cities of Italy, no more than the presence of a few admirable trattorias scattered among the unheated museums, crumbling amphitheaters, and heroic statues with no noses. I’m content if the polenta is creamy, the Gorgonzola pungent, the artichokes tiny and fried just right. Is it wrong for me to want tasty Bolognese sauce in Bologna or savory Genoa salami in Genoa?

  Simple though these needs may be, in-town dining in Italy rarely works out for me. Whenever I’m there savoring a magnificent meal, I can usually look out the window of the restaurant and see an old farmer in a pilled cardigan chugging by on his tractor. A mule stumbling along under sacks of arborio rice won’t be far behind.

  We all know Italian cuisine is the food of the home kitchen and, absent that, of the simple country restaurant with the wife at the stove and the husband out front, greeting guests and pretending he is the reason the place is doing so well. It is a cuisine of freshness and simplicity, which is seldom the strength of formal restaurants, yet that is not a satisfactory excuse for Italian food to suffer so acutely when exposed to the trappings of urbanity. After all, a restaurant owner has only to hire somebody with a fast car, of which there is no shortage in Italy, and instruct him to fill the trunk with ripe tomatoes, zucchini flowers, and artisanal sausages and drive in from the country once a day. He must also marry a stout woman who grew up in a household in which the mother cooked for the family, and there are plenty of those around, too.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  Now and then, I have enjoyed meals in Italian cities. I love the wines at Don Lisander in Milan, the fish at da Fiore in Venice, and everything at Cibreo in Florence (except the gelatinous calf ’s foot, and I don’t have to apologize for disliking that). I’ve spent a total of four to five months in Italy in my lifetime, and while I don’t wish to appear ungrateful for those travel opportunities, few of my dining experiences away from the countryside have been memorable. There is much to recommend about Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Bologna, but restaurants aren’t among their virtues.

  I’ve spent most of my time in the northern cities, but I’m gradually wending my way south. Most recently, I veered off toward Naples, an undertaking that had me buoyant with optimism. It is by reputation the birthplace of the red-sauce cuisine that defined Italian food for Americans throughout most of the twentieth century. Even better, the pizza of Naples is legendary, admired everywhere as the benchmark of the genre, even by citizens of northern Italy, who almost never speak of the people or the products of the south without a curled lip and a sneer of contempt. (It’s mostly a work-ethic thing.) In Naples I would find pizza from wood-burning ovens, pizza sold in the shadows of perilous alleys, pizza that would expose as a cruel joke the pies we Americans have been eating all our lives.

  Furthermore, I was thrilled to be visiting a city filled with the resplendence and detritus of history. Naples is a glorious relic, the most densely populated city of Europe, a survivor of conquests by the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Byzantines, and the Normans. Naples was har-ried by the runaway slave Sparticus, placed under siege by the Germans, attacked from the sea by the Saracens, harassed by the Vandals, tormented by the Franks, forced into an alliance with the Sicilians, and, to hurdle a few centuries, bombed by the Allies. (It caught a much-needed break when Sophia Loren was born there, in 1934.) The Spanish, starting with Ferdinand and Isabella, ruled Naples for more than two hundred years. Under the influence of the Spanish and Bourbon kings, the cuisine of Naples began to evolve, helped along by an influx of New World products such as the tomato, the bean, and the pepper.

  F O R K I T O V E R

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  Naples is the base of the dread crime organization known by the old Spanish name camorra, far more insidious-sounding than mafia, which has come to reek of ineptness. In Naples I would learn if street crime and spaghetti go hand in hand, as American filmmakers would have us believe. I would gaze upon the killer volcano Vesuvius, destroyer of entire civilizations, walk dangerous alleys hung with ominous fl
apping laundry, inhale the sweet wood smoke of pizza ovens mingled with the sooty residue of everyday life. I eagerly awaited my visit, for I have wearied of traveling to cities so civil even the subways are safe at night.

  The taxi driver bringing me from the airport excitedly pointed out the soccer stadium where Diego Maradona starred for Napoli in the 1980s—

  yet another reminder that whatever the century, Naples is forever living in the past. I told him I knew a man who knew Pelé, which must have impressed him, because he failed to overcharge me for the trip.

  In the course of several excursions to the airport to collect my wife and some friends, all lured to Naples by my assurances that they’d experience the finest traditional Italian dining of their lives, I deciphered the system of extortion employed by drivers plying the airport-to-midtown circuit. It is ingenious and pervasive. They demand two to three times the fare registered on the meter, and should the victim protest, they offer a receipt that is four to five times what is on the meter. This way the driver cheats the passenger, the passenger cheats his company, and everybody prospers by participating in a satisfying life of petty crime.

  I had booked a room at the Grand Hotel Parker’s, which is up a winding hillside road from the Bay of Naples. My room overlooked the harbor, one of the world’s great vistas, and waking up every morning to such a view made the trip to Naples worthwhile—even if the restaurants, as I was soon to learn, did not. A welcoming treat in my room was a waxed-paper bag of sfogliatelle, the world-class ricotta-and-dried-fruit pastry of Naples that manages to be crunchy, buttery, silken, and chewy, all at the same time.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  For a good part of my life, I’d been looking forward to dining in Naples. I’d dreamed of it the way lovers fantasize about Paris, scholars about Heidelberg, and romantics about Venice. There is no more evocative scent to me than Pecorino Romano, the grated cheese that floated down upon every pasta dish served to me in the Philadelphia restaurants of my youth. Words such as cacciatore (cooked in mushrooms, onions, and tomatoes) and saltimbocca (sautéed with ham) are as emotionally appealing to me as any gastronomic terms, and I have always considered red-sauce cooking the food least likely to let me down.

  Back in the 1970s, when I was a sportswriter and traveled to major American cities without recognizable restaurants, I always knew I could count on places named Luigi’s and Mama’s to serve up satisfying plates of chicken alla scarpariello with rigatoni alla marinara on the side.

  I hoped to visit a dozen restaurants during my ten days in Naples. I went to only five and gave up, dismayed. I tried five pizzerias, too, and I quit on them after discovering an awful secret: there are puddles in the pies, little lagoons of hot liquid that soak through the otherwise magnificent crusts. As troubling as I found this to be, it didn’t shatter my confidence nearly as much as two restaurant meals I experienced soon after my arrival. The first was at a quietly fashionable spot called Ciro a Santa Brigida, near Via Toledo, the fashionable shopping street Neapolitans like to call Via Roma.

  Ciro a Santa Brigida looks just right: nice tablecloths, simple wood furniture, the ambiance promising excellence without pretension. A friend and I stepped inside and were immediately shown to a tiny table in a cramped passageway next to a window overlooking a taxi stand.

  Then our waiter discouraged us from having anything we wanted, including the seafood stew that is supposedly the house special.

  I ordered wine. He shook his head at my poor choice. “You like dry?” he asked. “Sure,” I replied. He brought out a bottle called Asprinio di Aversa, which was dry all right. Perhaps it was the power of suggestion left by the unfortunate name, but the flavorless, flinty beverage seemed to leave a chalky film on my tongue, much like an unswallowed aspirin tablet. I insisted on the gnocchi alla napoletana because it F O R K I T O V E R

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  sounded so right for my very first dish in Naples. To the waiter’s credit, he warned against it. The gnocchi were gummy, probably store-bought.

  The sauce wasn’t much more than canned tomatoes. We were offered no grated cheese, and when I asked why, the waiter replied, “I didn’t know you wanted it.” Never before had I come upon an Italian waiter mystified by the time-honored concept of cheese on tomato sauce. I insisted on the famous stew, which contained squid, octopus, mussels, and shrimp in an oily, garlicky sauce. I liked it well enough, although the shrimp had been overcooked to mush, which I subsequently found standard in cucina napoletana. My friend’s grilled orata, a harmless local fish of minimal distinction, wasn’t fresh. An arugula salad came soak-ing wet, and the leaves were too tough to chew.

  It was a poor excuse for a meal, but worse awaited.

  I had been advised by several heretofore trustworthy friends that Dante e Beatrice served traditional food untouched by time, and I looked forward to dining there more than at any other restaurant. After all, I had come to learn about the foundation of the Italian-American food that had sustained me for so long. My initial impression of Dante e Beatrice, like that of Ciro a Santa Brigida, was favorable. It’s a tiny spot of two small rooms, with family photos on the pale-yellow walls and no frills except a guitar player whose discordant refrains turned out to be a perfect accompaniment to the invidious cuisine.

  The moment the five of us were seated, a waiter brought out a slice of something he called pizza rustica, a sweet-and-savory ricotta cake laced with bits of ham. It was so appealing I was thrown off guard. When he suggested that we allow him to select our appetizers, I happily agreed.

  Out came eleven dishes, as fast as he could fling them on the table. The marinated yellow peppers were fine, and the carrots weren’t too bad, although I can’t say carrots take all that well to a long soak in vinegar.

  The other dishes were so outside the parameters of what I would call appetizing, I couldn’t believe they were part of a cuisine that had established an unshakable foothold in the United States.

  Most were so overly marinated my tongue shriveled on contact.

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  A L A N R I C H M A N

  and mushy, the only inedible white beans I’ve ever been served in Italy.

  The mozzarella was sour, clearly spoiled, but it was highly desirable compared to the marinated unidentifiable vegetable jerky, which in turn soared over the marinated small smelly fish.

  I lunged for a menu, anxious to take this meal out of the waiter’s hands. Listed was “tender roast veal.” That sounded like a lifesaver, but my pleas were ignored. The waiter could not be stopped. He presented us with rubbery rigatoni in an insipid tomato sauce. We picked at it, and then I cried out “Finito, finito!” It was perfect Italian, the only time in my life I’ve pulled that off, but it had no effect. The cook came to our table carrying an oversize skillet. “Special! Fried spaghetti!” he said in English. I sagged at the announcement, but gamely replied,

  “Okay, but finito after that.” The fried spaghetti was crunchy. There was nothing more to it. Then the waiter rolled out a serving table groaning under the weight of diverse animal products, most of them unidentifiable. We barely muffled our shrieks. The long, bony things were stringy.

  The fatty rolled things were tough. The meatballs had been cooked so long they had totally dried out, and yet, in a kind of perverse tour de force, they were absolutely cold.

  There was more, as our futile finitos faded into hoarse whispers.

  Bitter, bitter greens. Some fruit nobody touched. Finally, a frosty pitcher of ice-cold limoncello, a local liqueur usually offered complimentary after a meal. Here it was reminiscent of lemon-flavored dishwashing liquid, and it was on the bill. In fact, everybody was charged for every course, whether the unwanted food was touched or not. In an effort to pad the check even more, a mandatory tip was added.

  It is impossible to recover fully from that kind of gastronomic body blow. What made it worse was that the wretched Dante e Beatrice
, surely the most terrible restaurant in Italy, had been touted to me as a place that would exquisitely guide me toward a greater understanding of the cuisine I had come to explore. I was stunned. I finally understood why everybody was always attacking Naples.

  And I had yet to visit the pizzeria that would double my bill.

  F O R K I T O V E R

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  The pizzas of Naples emerge from ancient wood-burning ovens smoky, charred, and puffy around the edges. Although thin, the crusts are supple and chewy, not cracker-crisp like those on the thin-crust pizzas of America. The cheese is mozzarella, either flor di latte, which is made from cow’s milk, or mozzarella di bufala, made from the milk of the water buffalo. The cow’s-milk mozzarella is as good as the best mozzarella in America, but the mozzarella from the water buffalo is unsurpassed—creamy, tangy, and complex. (On the two occasions I ordered buffalo mozzarella in restaurants—not pizzerias—it was spoiled.) The tomato sauce used on Naples pizzas isn’t much different from the tomato sauce in America, although occasionally chopped fresh tomatoes are added to good effect.

  The pizzas cost almost nothing, maybe $3.50 for a whole pizza marinara (oregano-laced tomato sauce, chopped fresh garlic) that overflows an oversize dinner plate. I noticed that the women of Naples were able to handle these outlandishly large servings by leaving the wonderful outer crust untouched, an observation I passed on to Letizia Tancredi, the front-office manager at the Grand Hotel Parker’s. She and I debated restaurants every morning. I would stumble down to the lobby, shaking my head in dismay, and the debriefings would commence.

  When I mentioned to her that women were wasting the best parts of their pizzas, she huffed, “We do not!” When I presented her with my far more disturbing discovery about the wetness of the pizzas, she did not flinch. At Trianon, one of the oldest and best pizzerias in Naples, my wife had looked up in dismay from her tasty if fatally gooey pizza margherita con bufala (buffalo mozzarella, tomato sauce, basil, Parmegiano-Reggiano) and said, “It’s soup.” This was an exaggeration, although I wouldn’t have been surprised to see small children with tiny boats floating them across their pizzas, reenacting Columbus sailing toward the edge of the world.