Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

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 flapping 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