30 marzo 2007
Pedaling Wine:
Tropea: Distance and What it Teaches

I’m here in Calabria, in the beautiful town of Tropea, a charming, white-sanded, beach-town, most associated in the Italian mind, with the sweet red, almost candy-like onions of the same name. And it just so happens to be onion season, the knee-high green shoots ran in perfect rows alongside the road into town the entire morning and afternoon, when I arrived here. And even though it’s actually the red onion bulb that is so famous all over Italy, it’s the green tops that flavour the air here, the entire countryside charged with the smell of freshly-cut chives and scallions.

Last night I had dinner at a place benignly-called La Hosteria Italiana, which I chose only because the owner happened to be out in the street, really eager to meet me and had invited me in to try some local wine, even if I chose not to stay for dinner, he said. He said that there was a lot of great wine being made here in Calabria these days, and he said it in a way that was completely free of any sort of locale-based chauvinism. There was something contained in the way he said ‘qua’- ‘here’, something that you don’t always necessarily hear a lot in the south, that there is a sense of ‘la’ –‘over-there’- to which to compare it. He was about my age and his name was Fabio. He grew up in Tropea, he said. What he didn’t say but I still knew was that he also spent most of his life living outside Tropea. You could tell it in the food, in the way he talked about wine and the way he ran his business. Those that never leave never really run this kind of restaurant. They never know how to. Or maybe it’s just that they never want to.

It’s curious how few of the great food authorities around the world became so by staying put, especially those that cook, teach or write about just that one place. To the Americans, Marcella Hazen is the definitive Venetian culinary authority, yet she didn’t grow up there. She moved to Venice later in life, and doesn’t even live in Italy any more. Yet each of her books is considered definitive on the subject. To the Brits, Antonio Carluccio is the man, though he’s lived in England more than he hasn’t. Julia Child, it’s been said, was neither ‘French’ nor a ‘Chef’, yet was able to explain her subject in ways that a real French Chef wouldn’t have been able to, regardless of language. These aren’t exceptions but the norm.

I ate some bread-crumbed, fried goat cheese, topped with a sweet onion relish, a portion of squiggly pasta in zippy, ‘nduja’-spiked tomato sauce and then grilled sword fish served with a sort of instantly-pickled zucchini, a variation on a sort of vegetable scapece (escabeche in Spanish). The techniques were clean, the plates oversized and white, the flavour pure and straightforward. There was a whiff of ‘tall food’. A few sauces were drizzled, just so. Yet the overall effect was the food from Calabria, not reinvented but simply updated. Keep the painting, just update the frame. It was the best meal I’d had in a week, and I was the only one in the place.

Fabio recommended that I drink a wine from Cirò, but one not made in the Cirò-style, something I haven’t seen since Marsala (wine zones famous for producing a single wine that had fallen out of favour, now producing newer styles).

I lived 15 years in Bologna, Fabio said. I ran my own restaurant there but I just moved back. Now I feel recharged about the foods I grew up with. I really love them all over again. I see the dishes clearly and I want to express them in ways that those from outside can really, really understand.

I knew the move hadn’t been easy, as Tropea is stunning, but still a small, southern town, the kind of holiday place that is great to visit but difficult to which to relate on a daily basis. It’s the kind of complaint you can never find sympathy for, that you live in paradise and that everything is quaint, charming and painfully, painfully provincial. He poured me some dessert wine as we discussed the difficulty of opening one’s own business, the modern dating dearth in the south of Italy, the occasional pains of bachelorhood-- his open vulnerability over the matter of having recently turned into a gee-whiz resolve, not unlike my own. I feel asleep listening to the waves lap the white sandy shore, the open pane of my hotel window perfectly reflecting the moon.

As I pulled out of town this morning, I passed several menus posted out in front of other restaurants in Tropea. A few dishes sounded good, the mention of ‘nduja’ on one even caused my mouth to fill with a salty gush of saliva. But I know as well as you do, that the next time you’re in the dentist office or waiting for an airplane and you flip open a magazine with article about Calabria, it will be Fabio’s place you read about, not the more traditional places maintained by those who have never left. It’s always a simple matter of ‘la’ and ‘qua’.

to Basilicata

Commenti: