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

An orange-beaked tropical bird chirps away in the foyer.

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The night I was there with my wife, the clientele was mostly well-dressed businessmen. They all seemed to be eating fried-fish platters and washing the food down with tannic red Tuscan wine, as inappropriate a food-and-wine pairing as exists. I ordered one dish that had genuine finesse, an appetizer of chilled seafood mixed with baby arugula leaves in a light lemon sauce. I didn’t like anything else, including an appetizer of overly smoked swordfish slivers, a main course of baked fish and potatoes immersed in what I suspected was their cooking liquid, and a stunningly bad main course called Fantasia di Fritture. This turned out to be a collection of unappetizing miniature fish dumped from a deep-frying basket onto a plate. The meal contained no garnishes except for powdered sugar sprinkled on dessert plates containing cakes not worth mentioning.

Service until then had been mechanical, but after dessert we were ignored. Waiters wandered by. Waiters wandered away. None looked at us. After a half-hour, I suggested to my wife that we get up to leave, a generally infallible means of persuading a restaurant to bring the check.

We slowly made our way to the cloakroom. We tipped the coat-check girl—the only female presence in most Naples restaurants. We strode by the bird—which also ignored us. We walked out the door. I expected to hear footsteps, but nobody came after us. The next morning, I returned to the restaurant to pay, and the son of the owner could not have been more charming or more apologetic. I learned something from this encounter: the people of Naples are at their best after altercations, win or lose. Most of the taxi drivers I refused to overpay were much friendlier after our arguments than before.

I did enjoy one restaurant meal in Naples. It was at a deceptively simple waterfront spot, Ciro a Mergellina, a large, airy, glass-enclosed structure across from a stretch of waterfront kiosks where almost all of Naples gathers to eat gelato on Sunday nights. The grilled fish was fresh and perfectly cooked, and the pizza emerged charred from a wood-burning oven. Most restaurants in Naples that serve pizza use electric ovens, which means their crusts have the texture of wallboard, F O R K I T O V E R

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which is the way we enjoy it in America. Ciro a Mergellina stays busy until well after midnight, and the scene is engrossing. Beefy young guys who should be named Sal or Rocco (and would be in South Philly) waddle in to eat with one another, and suave older guys who look like Vittorio Gassman strut in escorting girls who look as if they should be in parochial school.

What I realized after a week in Naples was how much I loved being there, except when I was going out to eat. Everywhere I wandered, I saw something that made me think of another place, a side effect of a city bursting with history. The high-rises on the hills reminded me of Hong Kong; the crumbling stucco villas, of Old Havana. I never felt threatened or uncomfortable, even when I was traversing the narrow-est footstep-echoing alleys or challenging the surly staff at Pizzeria da Mimi.

I enjoyed walking around Naples, an activity that could only have been more pleasurable had the sidewalks been passable. The better neighborhoods have a dog-poop problem of Parisian proportions, and elsewhere the pavements are blocked with illegally parked cars. I invariably walked in the streets, which is a challenge, since the drivers are criminally indifferent to pedestrians. Now and then, I would duck into one of the magnificent Baroque churches to look around, and while there I would offer a small donation in thanks for not becoming a traffic fatality. The police, for all I know, are the darlings of Interpol, regular Eliot Nesses, but they appear to do nothing except stand around in clumps and reminisce about Maradona’s debut against Verona in 1984.

I used to think Bologna had the worst restaurants in Italy, but Naples deserves the title. I suppose I should be disheartened, considering that I had arrived with such high expectations, but I am not giving up my quest to find an Italian metropolis with acceptable eating establishments. There remains one more major city on my itinerary—

Palermo, the urban heart of Sicily.

I’ve heard wonderful stories about the food of Palermo. As I under-1 6 4

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stand it, the port area is paved with trattorias that offer still-writhing fish from which one might select a fine lunch. I recently read that the sautéed breaded veal chops “in the style of Palermo” are unsurpassed, and I’ve long wished to try a few cassata siciliana, the famous pastries rolled in almond paste. Yes, I’m sure Palermo is the answer. It has to be. The next city to the south is Tripoli, and I’m not going there to eat.

GQ, may 2001

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My friend Wing Nin Chan picked me up at the airport, and we drove directly to Xi’s Garden, where he ordered pig’s tail, chicken feet, duck tongue, preserved goose, dried marinated fish with scallions, sesame-flavored bean curd with pot herbs, dried duck intestines with pepper, wild-rice stems in oil, snails stuffed with chopped pork and snail meat, and a chicken soup filled with cubes of duck blood—a horror-film version of Jell-O.

Shanghai used to be called the Paris of the East. This kind of meal wasn’t the reason why.

Fortunately, I was so tired from nearly twenty hours in the air I didn’t know what I was eating. Anyway, only the bean curd repelled me,