A tradition I try to keep in Paris is having pasta at least once a week. Growing up in an Italian family, Sunday meant gathering around my grandmothers kitchen table and eating for six hours straight. Mozzrella caprese, roasted red peppers, a chunk of parmigiano the size of a boulder, seasoned olives, handmade orrichette pasta, a secondi of meats soaked in my grandmother's homemade sauce that she began preparing at six a.m, and wine, lots and lots of wine. Due to another Italian funeral that we all attended last week in Jersey, we missed Sunday pasta and this week's Sunday pasta happened on Wednesday. This was my send off of going back to France, and Josephine and Angelo's belated honeymoon pilgrimage through Puglia, the region of Italy we are from.
My grandmother, who has been on the cover of Cucina magazine several times and is famous for her cooking, especially her Sunday meatballs sometimes needs a day off. The woman cooks gourmet meals from scratch four to five times a week, as well as cleans a house with a toothbrush (I'm not kidding), gardens, and does freelance consulting for local Italian markets. She's pushing 90. Whenever I think I'm exhausted, I think of my grandmother and tell myself that I have no idea what it feels like to be tired. The woman, albeit tough and sometimes a little scary, is incredible. She inspires me to push myself.
On this rare occasion that we went out for our pasta, we went to one of grandfather's favorite restaurants where my cousins say that always have "hot chicks", and where he has known the owner since 1963 where the two spend the first five to ten minutes greeting each other with insults in Italian, and calling each other illegal immigrants.
Our dishes arrived and as we all dove into our Sunday pasta on Wednesday (it still has to be called Sunday pasta) we did the obligatory praise, comments or suggestions of the dish, whether it was the plumpness of the tomatoes, or if the pasta was cooked to al dente perfection, or the temperature and if it could be hotter because Italians always have to make a comment. We can't help it. Once all of the commentary was out, which turned into a unanimous agreement that dinner was "good", there was a commotion across the restaurant. For once the uproar wasn't coming from our table. Thank God. As it turned out, there was a man choking at the back table, and was on the floor dry heaving. What started off as an intense cough turned into a full on emergency which sent the entire restaurant into mass hysteria. Forks were being slammed down on to plates from other patrons who were in total shock that this man appeared to be dying in this restaurant that seats no more than forty people, girlfriends standing up, covering their mouth screaming, the choking man's young wife fanning him with her napkin, screaming help as this poor man was turning a deep shade red, matching the chunk tomatoes in my Pomodoro sauce. My grandfather who left his hearing aid at home, didn't hear a thing and had his down in his bowl, peacefully enjoying his meal, completely unaware of the fact that the restaurant had been flipped upside down in complete and total pandemonium.
My grandfather finally looked up to see the entire restaurant was in disarray and had no idea why. "What's all the commotion about?" he innocently asked my grandmother, "Dolly!" she screeched as she smacked his shoulder, "the man is choking on..." She then put her glasses on to see what was on the table, "sfogliatelle, it looks like, he's choking on a flaky piece of sfogliatelle," she confirmed. This caught his attention. I swear because the mention of food was brought up he was then able to comprehend the severity of the situation. My aunt Mary always said that our family was abnormally obsessed with food. My grandfather then noticed the other restaurant-goers who either had their hands waving frantically in the air as if this was going to make him choke less, the screaming girlfriends were still screaming, but now they were standing on chairs to get a better view, and my mother who is a flight attendant and is used to crisis was barking at the general manager and waving her cell phone in his face to call the ambulance. "Hey, when this happens in the air, we don't have the luxury of 911, we're thirty thousand feet in the air, so take advantage!" The servers were all shouting to each other in Spitalian and I'm not sure if anything was communicated as they were hovering over Eduardo, the busboy who may or may not have his license in CPR. At the moment it was left unclear because to my untrained eye, he appeared to be pounding the shit out of the poor man's chest in front of his wife who had streaming tears running down her face. It was awful, just awful.
The Italian pastry that had been lodged in the man's throat had either dissolved or he coughed it up, I'm not exactly sure, I wasn't standing on my chair but he appeared to be breathing again and sat down, took a sip of his wine, and waved to us that he was alright. His wife went back to her seat and the two of them continued dining.
By this time the ambulance arrived, and the Italian manager insisted that he should be taken to the hospital, even though he was breathing and was now consuming his wine like water. He finally agreed when his dinner was free, and hopped himself up on the stretcher. As he rolled past our table, sitting with his legs hanging over the sides of the vintage wobbling stretcher (were the ambulance from Italy too?) with his face down in his Blackberry, with his wife following, the woman he was dining with, we heard her say, "You don't have to call his wife, I'll just come along to the hospital."
That wasn't the wife? "I knew there was something that wasn't right about him," my grandfather declared with his fork waving in the air, as they rolled by, and he heard what the "wife" had said. "I could sense it when he walked in that he was up to no good," My grandfather who couldn't hear the mayhem that was taking place in the restaurant, but an affair, that my grandfather heard that. And then I looked around the room, all guests were couples. Old Italian men and young, attractive "wives". It was a mistress restaurant! This whole time we have been going to a mistress restaurant! No wonder there are always very attractive women there, or as my cousins put it, "hot chicks". When we questioned why we have been going to a restaurant where men hide their goombatas like a true Italian, my grandfather responded, "You go where the sauce is good."
Good lord.
While I love French culture, my new life and experiencing the way the French live, I'll never forget where I came from and on my real roots; batshit crazy Italians from New York. But saying that, a break from said roots never hurts and it's good to be back in my new home, Paris.
