Fork It Over by Alan Richman

Author:Alan Richman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

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

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, which is the way we enjoy it in America.

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