Via Italia: Days 2 and 3 part 1: How I Learned to Loathe Airports

It’s a quarter after ten, local time, and an extraordinarily cautious Roman named Pepe is driving me through the suburbs of that much-vaunted city. I am somehow reminded of rural Florida.

                This is the last leg of a multi-stage journey begun on Wednesday morning.  After checking out of my hotel, I caught a shuttle- amid rising wind and a driving rain- to Terminal 1, JFK airport. This would become my home for the next twenty-four hours.

                For eight hours I wandered the terminal aimlessly, stopping occasionally at the Greenwich Village bar which, if it is to serve as any example, is a strong argument against ever visiting that neighborhood again. The bartender’s name was Rajh and he called me “buddy.” I didn’t like him much. The only other options, however, were singularly bad Chinese food or the ministrations of a stand advertising hot dogs topped with sweet and sour chicken, a combination I found unacceptable, bordering on sacrilegious.

                At five o’clock, the tour group with which I am traveling- including my mother and grandmother- arrived, and I was treated to my first glimpse of my traveling partners. Within the hour, we were all fine friends, united in hope against the storm that had turned to a furious blizzard. That is, excepting the cohort of what can only be described as “uppity biddies.” They were almost automatically despised. They will be recurring characters, have no fear.

                We checked in, breezed through security, settled down to Martinis at the only open terminal bar (Martinis are very safe traveling drinks. Since they’re composed almost exclusively of cold gin, they’re pretty difficult to screw up) and waited with crossed fingers for our flight to be called.

                Long story short, crossing your fingers never works. Let that be a lesson to you.

                Our flight was canceled and required rebooking, a fairly straightforward process that was complicated monumentally by the needy idiocy of the following monikers: the Who-Loompa (she looked like a cross between a Seussical Who and an Oompa Loompa), Fisherman Sweater (she wore one) and Blonde Annoyance (non descript, but blonde and annoying). They decided, against the better judgment of the vast majority of anyone who’s ever had a single interpersonal interaction, that the best way in which to expedite the righting of our travel arrangements was to harangue the already harried Alitalia clerks. This worked about as well as expected and Mom and I repaired to a round of beers.

                There isn’t much to say about the next eighteen hours except these things: do not sleep on cold marble. It’s uncomfortable and, well, cold. That aside, the night passed without event, we were scheduled to a five p.m. flight from Newark, and Fisherman Sweater, turning her proclivity for annoyance to the good side, secured us a private bus to New Jersey.

                Newark is a strange city to me. It’s just across the river from New York, is dominated by similar-but smaller- architecture, and even sounds like an abbreviated way to say “New York.” I have decided to christen it “New York Lite,” with the happy knowledge that it almost certainly contains only half the caloric load of actual New York.

                There’s even less to say for the flight to Italy. We lifted off at five, on time, flew through the darkness, and arrived at 1:30 EST. We deplaned, spent about a lifetime in the airport, drank overpriced and terrible espresso, crowded like the herd animals we’re quickly becoming onto a charter bus and now I am sitting alone in the back of said bus, typing. Woah. Meta.

                It’s time to sleep. The ride is three hours to Florence. I haven’t properly slept since Tuesday. Exhaustion, take me.

Via Italia: Day One: New York City and Les Halles

I woke up with Briana in a cold apartment on Election Day, and an hour later I cast my ballot- a party-line vote- for Barack Obama.
Airports, I've noticed, are full of not-very-good televisions. There's always something wrong with the display or the cable feed cuts out or some other little error of technology serves to make them- if not unusuable- highly unusual. The monitor at the bar in the A concourse of Rochester is no different: the red-green tint was unbalanced and the candidates looked, well, bizarre. Obama appeared vaguely Indian. Romney- a bad sunburn. Eric Cantor appeared to be unaffected.
I almost didn't want to get on the plane. The media blackout in such a close race was almost- but not quite- unconscionable. Of course, trepidation was short-lived.
 Flying is one of my favorite experiences, second only to the light buzz of two glasses of champagne, the pleasant elasticity of a perfect steak or the heady rush of the post-prandial cigarette. The moment of acceleration- pushed back in the seat, doubting momentarily whether several tons of metal will be able to lift off- is one of the finest of life's little thrills.
And the view! The little commuter jet didn't fly high by any means, and the air was uncommonly clear. Looking down, one could see the interstate easily and almost imagine that, if followed, it would yield a view of Albany, two hundred miles distant. The finger lakes were laid out below- digits tearing into the landscape. South then, over the snow-capped Catskills, out to the majestic Hudson and south and south until, rearing from the lowlands like a sandcastle, the great bas-relief spires of wounded New York, glistening proudly in the evening sun. It was magnificent.
There's little to be said for the checking-ins and scurrying about that come with an off-airport hotel and early reservations in Manhattan, so I won't.
Let's talk Les Halles.
Brasserie Les Halles was, and remains, and in my mind always will be, Anthony Bourdain's restaurant. The house is dark and brooding, reminiscent of the great American bars that sprung up in Paris in the twenties. Efficient Bengali busboys change the butcher paper on the tables, French waiters in blue jeans and crisp red shirts slow carefully and with measured grace through the dining room and- glimpsing the kitchen- cooks at the height of dinner service move with the effortlessness of pure professionalism, soldiers in the fight against hunger.
The menu is rustic, not the haute-cuisine confections that immediately spring to mind at the mention of French cuisine. This brasserie knows what it is: a brasserie and grillade. And, of course, a bar.
In the end it was a skirt steak bearnaise, pommes frites with truffle oil, and the finest cocktail I've had the pleasure to taste. Called the "Les Halles," the house mix is composed of equal parts St. Germain, champagne brut and club soda. Light, sweet, aromatic. Delicious.
Then home again, home again quick as a flash to a martini in the hotel bar as election results rolled in and Obama's numbers crept higher and higher. At 11 pm, it was decided.
Barack Obama, president for four more years. Aaron Davis, asleep. A storm, on the way.
An adventure in the offing.

Tripe Tribulations

                Let us consider, briefly and with a fair amount of justified revulsion, the concept of tripe.

                Put bluntly, tripe is the edible portion of another animal’s stomach (said unlucky critter is generally a cow). It’s similar in appearance to a fleshy grey honeycomb, or possibly a football. It’s similar in texture to rubber, overcooked octopus, or the nightmares of Mr. Fantastic. Most distinctly, it’s similar in smell to the last chamber of Hell on chili con carne night, when Satan’s had one too many beers. It’s a cow’s stomach, to reiterate.

                And, it’s wildly popular in certain areas of the United States. The reason is probably the same as my mother’s rationale for eating pickled herring and sour cream on Christmas Eve: ancestral.

                Frankly, tripe sucks, on a desirability basis. It is, however, replete with protein. If you were, say, the peasant farmer whose newly slaughtered cow had just been carved up, all the recognizable muscles taken to the king, along with the thalamus (mmm sweetbreads), the heart, the liver, the intestines (sausage casing, don’t forget) and you were hungrily staring at a pile of bones, a few kidneys and the stomach, hell yes you’re going to jump on some sweet stomach lovin’! At least the stomach doesn’t smell like piss, right, kidneys?

                So, with a broad stroke of the brush and by playing fast and loose with facts in order to succinctly present the truth, there you have the origin of tripe, and its enduring appeal. Now the story gets personal and…painful.

                Being an Italian chef in a largely Italian town ten minutes away from my alma mater isn’t really such a bad gig. Great food, decent people, good bars and college girls? Where can you go wrong there? The answer will not surprise you: tripe.

                My chef had had too many requests for cow stomach near the holidays that year. He could ignore them no longer, and he heroically sallied forth, heroically purchased a half pound of the tough grey stuff for experimentative purposes, and heroically handed it to me. “Poach this, slice it up and stick it in some marinara,” were his exact words, I believe. What I heard was “Blah blah blah I hate you, have I told you that lately?”

                Never one to back away in the face of adversity, I promptly called to my close friend and waiter, Dave. “Dude. Smell this,” I said. He did. His face turned nearly the same color as the bloodless offal on the silver table. “Would you eat that?”

                “Man I wouldn’t even feed my mom that, and I hate her,” he may have said. Frankly, I’ve forgotten, but it seems like it’d be in character for him.

                Ok. The stakes are high, but I am a Man and therefore unafraid of raw cow stomach. I tossed it in a sauce pot, covered it with water, salted it liberally and set that vile bit of tissue to boil.

Poaching is a process of bringing a cold material (in this case, the tripe) to a rolling boil, then backing off the heat and allowing it to simmer until fully cooked. This process is useful for cooking a lot of things: chicken, eggs, fish fume. Usually one is aided in the process by indicators of doneness. In a fume, for example, the fish parts (head, tail, skin etc. Fish leavings. Cooking is gross, but pretty cool) will degrade considerably, flaking off and leaving a deeply flavorful broth in their wake. Chicken turns white. An egg turns solid.

The tripe did nothing. It boiled. Then it simmered. It simmered for a full hour until customers began lodging their complaints at that godawful smell, and, seeing no change in its basic appearance or structural integrity, I called it done and shocked the hell out of it with cold water.

                Next up: The slicing. Anyone who knows me will corroborate this- I keep my knives wickedly sharp. You could shave with my French. You could joint out a tree with my boning knife. Both fouled on the football-esque surface of the tripe. It was time for drastic measures.

                Besides the graceful curving form of the French knife, the most popular knife in the public’s idea of the chef’s rack is the meat cleaver. It’s a big, ferocious, German looking hunk of metal usually reserved for breaking bones (literally) and jointing large animals. Like cows. I turned now to this unwieldy monstrosity, hoping to, well, cleave through the stomach with sheer force.

                It worked, after a fashion and I managed to hack the tripe into strips, reminiscent of trippa alla romana, a Roman dish in which the tripe is simmered with tomatoes and wine. The presence of those two particular ingredients would have helped tremendously, in retrospect; both are highly acidic, obviously, and would have served to soften the stomach tissue. Perhaps poaching had not been the best course of action.

                I was interrupted from my reverie by Dave, appearing behind me. “Hey man, Theresa [a dear and valued customer and, significantly, the chiropractor of choice for those of us who stand for hours at a time] wants to know what smells like ass.”

                “She actually said ‘ass?’”

                “Well, no, obviously not. She wanted to know what smelled like butt.”

                Ah, Theresa.

                “It’s the tripe.”

                “Still? That shit’s been off the stove for like half an hour!”

                “I know, even the hood seems to hate it!”

                The smell lingered for several hours more. The tripe was duly “tossed in some marinara,” my hands were washed, oh, nine or ten times, and the awful offal was relegated to a dark corner of the walk-in to macerate.

                A week and a half later, it was still there. And by then, it was hairy. There was a full blown penicillin farm sprouting in a plastic tub sitting in my cooler. I mentioned this to the chef.

                “Ah. Too bad, I guess. Toss it.”

                This surprised me. Throwing food out, otherwise known as “shrink,” is verboten in the restaurant industry. Obviously, we don’t serve moldy food, but the fact that it got to that point was odd enough. Tim is a man who eats anything- I’ve seen him eat moldy pasta, rather than waste it- and I’d expected him to try it.

                “There isn’t enough beer in the world,” he later told me, “to get me to eat stomach. Or lung, for that matter. But now we can say we tried.”

                I pointed out that we could have simply lied, said we’d tried without actually having done the thing.

                “Aaron, we’re honest here.”     

                Long story short: You won’t ever find tripe at Questa Lasagna in Mount Morris, New York. When the cooks won’t even eat it, it manifestly isn’t meant to be eaten. Stick with steaks, if you have a hankering for cow.

                Please tip your server on the way out.

Next up: Vegans. Why chefs love them and cooks hate them.

A deadly romance

                Kitchen life. It’s romantic. Being a cook is one of those careers that everybody gets. It requires no explanation. “Hi, what do you do?” I am often asked, followed by “Are you a student?” Life in a college town gets repetitive. “Well, I was,” is the canned response. “Now I’m a chef.”

                Then people ask where I work, I plug the place, and usually it’s good for a free beer if I spin the food well (though it frankly needs no spin- our food speaks for itself).

                What I’ve never had to do is explain what it is that I do. People know what a cook does: knives, white coats, hot stoves, the whole shebang.

                And thanks to Anthony Bourdain and all the other chef-writers out there, they know the life too- and what a life it is.

                The cook’s life is, to be blunt, unhealthy. Many of us smoke, and all of us drink. Show me a teatotalling cook and I’ll show you a liar. The problem arises from pacing: from the moment the cook walks into the kitchen, he- and increasingly, she- has to move. And he has to move fast. People are hungry and they want to be fed. The cook is working against the peoples’ expectations, and he has to exceed them. Allow me to explain:

                The guest walks in and sits down, thoroughly ready for a good meal. The cook is out back smoking a cigarette. Or maybe he’s racing against the clock to get his prep list done. Maybe he’s hitting on the waitresses. Some are drinking already, though the trend has, to our credit, been to sobriety during working hours. The guests are hungry, the cook is not yet in the mindset to feed them.

                The guest orders. The waitress sings out “Order in!” or the printer starts chirping. Then the cook swings into action. Dinner has begun!

                On a busy night, the cook is staring down six to fifteen orders at a time, depending on house size. Every order needs to be perfect, or as close to perfect as possible. And every order must hit the table between twenty and thirty five minutes after it’s placed. Guests are not patient.

                So your standard cook is firing on all cylinders, moving as efficiently as possible, focused and cranking out wonderful food for the hungry people in the dining room. A typical rush goes like this:

                Six tickets fluttering in the wind, I fire the fagioli, check the oven, light up the marinara and drop three orders of pasta. Thirty seconds down. The garlic breads in the oven are almost crisp; they need a minute. Fire the greens, stir the pasta. Add garlic to greens, simmering with pancetta, bring to aroma, deglaze with wine. Look at the garlic breads: crisp. Tabs on the lasagnas, sitting on the bottom oven rack, broiling oh-so-slowly: half done, another five minutes. Kill the fires, kill the sauce (don’t want it to burn, it’ll stay hot for ten minutes or so), agitate pasta. Plate fagioli and cheese lasagna. “Order up on six!”

                Pull garlic breads, rough cut, plate. “Apps up on three, nine and ten!” Five minutes gone by.

                Pull five lasagnas, plate, pull spaghetti and sauce with meatballs. “Order up, table four!”

                Waitresses are running, taking their food and delivering it smiling to tables.

                Fire the oil for scampi; it heats with a pinging sound. When the oil is still, it’s boiling. Drop in shrimp, allow to sear, drop cappellini to put it on. T-minus three minutes.

                “Bruschetta on five!”

                Fire the scallops, denature the protein, allow it to caramelize. Add butter to scallops and shrimp, cook until brown- beurre noisette- and deglaze both with pinot grigio. Lemons, tomatoes, tarragon, garlic, parsley, fistfuls of herbs and fruits, salt and pepper, mount with whole butter, pull pasta- not even thinking at this point, fists on autopilot- plate, “Nine is up!”

                Spike tickets, look at cleared board, smile, grab dishwasher. “Smoke break,” suck down cigarette and cup of stale coffee.

                “Order in!”

                Repeat. Repeat six, seven, eight times. Repeat for five hours, or six hours. Move, move, move.

                Move.

                Closed.

                Then, slow down.

                The unhealthy bit of cooking is the pacing. The cook moves hard and fast for hours, stressing his mind, his body, the stove. Then it’s closing time and the pace slows to the cleaning crawl, and the cook’s heart is beating quickly. His hands are twitching, his eyes darting left and right, haunted. Sometimes his hands clench of their own accord, holding a knife no longer there. He reaches for a beer.

                The moment the suds hit his lips, he slows.

                The next beer slows him more.

                Five beers later, he’s at a normal level, the adrenaline blown from his system by braking booze.

                Of course, after he strips off his fetid whites and walks into the real world, it’s dark and late. Ten thirty, eleven at night. But he still wants to be sociable. He wants to chat, hang out, get laid, tell jokes. Where do you do these things at eleven P.M.?

                At a bar, obviously.

                The cook’s life is glamorous for the same reason a soldier’s life is glamorous: it’ll kill you as surely as a bullet to the brain. It’ll just take a little longer.

                And you’ll love every moment of it.

Bienvenue a l'enfer

There's a little town south of Rochester, NY, that you've likely never heard of. The people who live there- the ancient Italians, red-blooded Old World stregas and good old boys, the type of people who actually enjoy tripe- insist it's notable as the hometown of Francis Bellamy. You've likely never heard of him, either, though you may be familiar with the famous pledge that he wrote. But I digress.
The point is, this town is like so many other Eastern towns: small, unremarkable, choked with antique shops and beautiful old buildings that are one stiff breeze away from utter destruction.
But Main Street, Main Street is lovely. Facades in the old federal brick style rise with stately grace from the hill that gives the town its name. Beeches- replacement troops for the elms that withered away decades ago- march down the street as it slopes gently down to the Genesee River. If you ignore the lingering insinuation of Rust Belt malaise, you might imagine yourself shifted to another time or place.
And on Main Street, hanging from one of the brownstone facades, there is a sign that says "Questa Lasagna," announcing an enclave of Italian cooking in an old Italian town. And in the kitchen, French knife in hand, there is usually a young cook cursing at a pile of vegetables or a joint of veal.
Of course, that'd be me.