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

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.

Tancredi shrugged off this disturbing flaw as irrelevant, although she did not deny its existence. “I like wet,” she said. “That’s because I dip the 1 6 0

A L A N R I C H M A N

round (the outer crust) in the middle, where it is wet. We dip a lot in Naples. When we eat pasta, we dip the bread in the sauce. I have three babies, and they all dip. My husband dips. We dip a lot in our house.” After sampling nearly twenty pizzas, I figured out what made them so wet: everything. The cooks of Naples are generous with oil, and a lot of vegetable (not olive) oil is poured onto each pizza before it is baked.

Mozzarella has a high water content, and so do crushed tomatoes. Add up all that liquid and what you get is a puddle in your pizza. Trianon, which had the most flavorful pizzas in Naples, also had the wettest. The even-more-famous Brandi, which has a photograph of Chelsea Clin-ton adorning its walls, made medium-wet pizzas. It also made the worst pizza margherita I tasted, which was unfortunate, since it claims to have invented the pizza margherita to honor a visit by the Italian queen Margherita in 1889. A lesser-known pizzeria, Luigi Lombardi a Santa Chiara, made admirable specialty pizzas topped with mushrooms or lightly smoked provolone cheese. We had a wonderful waiter there by the name of Ciro, but don’t bother asking for him, because half the waiters in Naples are named Ciro.

The place that brazenly cheated on our check was Pizzeria da Mimi, on Via Speranzella in the heart of the Spanish Quarter, which slopes up from the Via Toledo and was built in the sixteenth century to garri-son troops. A friend and I decided to explore the narrow, uneven streets, despite having been told the area was dangerous to outsiders. One of the streets of the Spanish Quarter, Via Concordia, is allegedly the principal habitat of the foot soldiers of the camorra. An elderly fruit peddler who spoke a few words of English—he told us he’d once been to New York with the Italian merchant marine—warned us to get out for our own good.

The Spanish Quarter reminded me of Boston’s North End, particularly the shrewd efforts by residents to reserve parking spaces in front of their tenement buildings. One particularly resourceful woman had placed two clothes-drying racks filled with wet laundry on the street, end to end, taking up space just large enough for a car. About the time her husband returned, the clothes would be dry (if grimy from passing F O R K I T O V E R

1 6 1

traffic). This part of Naples respects the code of the Curba Nostra—

Our Parking Space.

Mimi’s is on nobody’s list of the best pizzerias in Naples, but my friend and I sought it out after hearing that it attracted authentic citi-zenry, not tourists like us. The place wasn’t much to see: wobbly tables, a hideous fake-stone vinyl floor, and freaky walls with tile on the bottom half and wood up top. We took one of the seven tables in the back room and ordered two Cokes and one pizza to share. Almost all the regulars were drinking Cokes from bottles. The waiter brought us two holiday promotional cans decorated with pictures of Santa Claus, even though Christmas was long past. Clearly, outdated inventory was being unloaded on unwelcome guests.

Service was agonizingly slow, and not only for us. One elderly lady called over a waiter (who was wearing a baseball cap with bronx on it) and said, “Today?” The pizza margherita, when we finally got it, was about the same as the other pizza margheritas we’d been eating. Then we were handed a bill that was twice what it should have been. When I demanded an explanation, the waiter said, “Service charge.” I paid up, figuring we were being punished for trespassing in a section of the city where tourists aren’t wanted. Somebody had to teach us a lesson, and Pizzeria da Mimi did it well.

Near the end of the trip, with my spirits plunging, I decided on an act of desperation: I made a reservation at the only restaurant in Naples awarded a star by Michelin, the French food-and-travel guide that likes to put its inspectors in countries where they don’t belong. Italian chefs who cultivate the approval of the powerful Michelin guide invariably cease refining their own culinary traditions and begin duplicating unnatural acts of French gastronomy, which is why their restaurants invariably disappoint. La Cantinella is located near a strip of deluxe hotel properties, across from the harbor. It has the make-believe Polynesian-paradise look of a chic Hollywood club from the 1950s: bamboo walls, bamboo chairbacks, and tiki-style tin lamps