Two Steps Away
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

September 2005
The Awaiting Table Newsletter,part 5 of 10
Gracious Antonio, His Granite and What They Represent to You, Exactly.

If you close your eyes and squeeze them hard enough, you can already see the place I’m talking about, that small and immaculately kept, Old World café, you can all but smell the espresso. There’ll be those thick, elegantly etched aperitif glasses and solid espresso cups older than you are, the hand-painted signs, their blocky typeface clearly from the Fascist era. There will be ancient, funny-shaped bottles that line a back mirror. The music will always be a sort of slow Tango and mix perfectly with the sound of coffee cups clanking against one another, mimicking a finger flutter on the highest two keys on a piano. An espresso machine will hum and hiss. And a dignified and efficient bartender, someone that seems to be born for the job, will be there, treating your every need like it was the most sensible and well-chosen request in the world.
At our cooking school here in the south of Italy, this is actually the bar where we start each day: it’s where we gather together, first thing, to discuss yesterday, today, where we laugh and essentially wake up together over caffeine and fresh pastry, only to eventually refocus ourselves towards today’s trip to the market. In the cooler months the owner, Gracious Antonio, likely the sweetest man you’ll ever met, serves us espressi and cappuccini in cups hot enough to blister a lip, the way coffee is consumed here (they’re actually boiling in water behind the bar). In the summer months we bump up our visits to twice a day, for his famous granita, easily the best you’ll ever have. They’re excellent, yet still, what I'm about to tell you about them will likely forever change just how you feel about granita and even more so, about my little town of Lecce, Italy.

‘I was nine when I started working here’, he says, his smiling eyes meeting my gaze, his bar towel in constant motion. ‘I learned to make granita from the Gentleman from Sicily. Of course that was back before la Coca-cola, la Fanta. He taught me all three kinds, il limone, la fragola and il café, your favourite flavour’. I stop to scribble in my notebook, first in English, then switch to the Italian when I notice how much gets lost in translation, things like, la vostra preferita- your favourite flavour- a reference to me in the plural, a staggeringly formal gesture, yet not uncommon here in the South of Italy, and that he always refers to the man as il Signore della Sicilia, rendering their relationship oddly feudal.

Without a word he places a coffee granita on a small plate in front of me, the tiny spoon hitting the plate with a clink. Within seconds the glass begins to sweat. I rupture the cream cap and plunge in the spoon, pulling out a little of both the black and orange-flecked granita and the fluffy-white cap of cream on top. I situate my shoulder blades directly over the glass and lay the spoon’s contents on the surface of my tongue. Instantly, the texture combination startles me: the slightly sandy mouth feel of the sweet coffee flavoured crystals, contrasting perfectly with the silky and luscious unsweetened, hand-whipped cream. Half of the spoon’s contents melt immediately, half remains unctuous and rich. I take another spoonful. Even the temperature difference is pleasing, the play between the refrigerated cream, and the ice shavings, straight from the freezer. It is, in a word, perfect. No other food I can think of even comes close, so simultaneously contrasting- in the texture- and harmonious-in the flavours. No rocket scientist or Catalan chef could have ever come up with anything better than this.

He pours me a glass of tepid water, the anecdote to any potential head rush. He spins to make an espresso for a recently-entered signora and I take another spoonful. After two of these a day, four months of the year, and I already know enough to know that I’m only about 15 seconds away from the jolt, like a quick kick in the back of my skull, when the caffeine, sugar and brain-freeze all Hockey check my system at the exact same moment.

‘So when do you sell the most granita’, I ask, ‘August?’ ‘August I barely sell any’, he says, smiling. ‘Only the Leccesi order granita, and then they usually head for the seas come high summer. Younger people now days seem to prefer the kind that turns in the square plastic tumbling machine on the counter, the kind made from silver packages, don't you know*. I guess they like to see the machine’. I search his face as he says it, but there is none of that grandfatherly, kids these days. ‘Maybe it’s because you can see the machine on the bar’ he says again, like it’s the first time he’s ever thought about it.

But it isn’t. It actually weighs on him. Heavily. It’s this kind of quiet dignity that makes me so fond of Gracious Antonio, it's why I always leave his bar feeling better than when I walked in. That, and that he openly and genuinely weeps when our students bake him cakes and cookies. Then just like a cold germ, the weeping and emotions surge through the room and all the hugging and kissing can go on a good ten minutes. The blubbering is such that I usually just wait outside, looking cool leaning up against the wall, doing my best to ignore the hard dry knot that I can never seem to swallow.
‘I make three flavours of granita, all three by hand. The older Leccesi come, their children, don’t you know*, less so. Of course I realize that I’ll never be able to compete with the large-scale places with 50- meter long glass cases of different flavours. But it’s what I do, don’t you know*. For those that still want it, I’m here.’

I take a seat just as the rush hits me, and begin to scribble in a notebook.
It will not surprise you the reader that he starts his granite from scratch, buying both the lemons and strawberries from his nephew Simone (yes, that Simone, our trusted greengrocer, from Two Steps Away, Part One. Back issues are available on the site). He makes and maintains them throughout the day. He’ll juice the lemons by hand while chitchatting with a visiting symphony conductor, crush the strawberries and strain out the seeds while calling out the liquor order to his wife, and then later, when it’s slow, he’ll load the espresso machine, using the famous café Quarta, a extraordinary local brand roasted right within the historic centre of Lecce. For the rest though, he’s not telling. Nor me either.

The thing is, is that this is not just another quaint story about some little old guy that does things the old-fashion way. It’s actually the opposite of that, if only because Gracious Antonio is something of a renegade. What he is attempting to do is decidedly modern, the way of the future.

When my best friend (and business partner) and I started our simple, little school here in Italy, we had only one steadfast goal in mind and although we wouldn’t have called it that at the time, it’s what business people would call a ‘mission statement’. And it was simple, Reinforce, Never Dilute. It may sound obvious, but on deeper inspection it changes everything.

For starters, despite its history spanning 70,000 years, Lecce is also a modern city and of course does have a new large gelato parlour, with long and industrial banks of pretty-coloured ice creams in the gamut of flavours, everything from ginger to rice to passion fruit. Their banana gelato is yellow and if you’re not alarmed by that, you probably haven’t thought it through. The staff there is young and wears nametags, most likely because they need to. It’s not that the place is remotely substandard- savvy New Yorkers and Londoners would line up out the door, even at ten times the Lecce price- it’s just that each time one of us visits there, it weakens what makes Lecce special. Like all erosion, it’s not sudden or obvious, but one day you just wake up and what used to be here yesterday, isn’t any longer. And again like erosion, once it’s gone, everything else starts to break apart.

And Reinforce Never Dilute goes much, much deeper, than just some culinary artisan named Gracious Antonio. Salutations, Good day Madam, Good evening, Please, Yes, No, Thank you very much, I would like two kilos of Artichokes, Hey Sandro, Shut up already and give me 5 metres of sausage casings. By Day Two of standard week, we make a point of teaching our students enough Italian to chitchat with shopkeepers, greet people in the street and even give it back to our wisecracking butcher (who howls and just adores it). As our lessons are always already bilingual, those with past experience in the language go even deeper, using the week as a full immersion, actually spending their entire time here in the Italian. Yes, it would be easier just to follow the rest of the travel industry, to teach our vendors the same phrases in English, to ask them to dance for the tourists and ham for the cameras. But like catching butterflies in a net, at that point you’ve already destroyed the thing you came to see.

If you still doubt there is something special going on down here in Lecce, let me go a little further and tell you what Antonio’s granite really mean to you. After fifty years, he may stop making them.
Italy isn’t the static place that most of the tourist trade says it is. It’s changing, it always has been, just like every where else in the world. Your presence here in Italy can and does change the place. When we think about this, it’s usually only in the negative sense, which may be why we rarely see ourselves as culprits. You often hear people complain that tourists have wrecked Florence and Venice. Tourist are always easy to spot because you can define them by ‘everyone that was there except me’.

But a foreign presence can also conserve, salvage and even foster, if it’s focused right. When I take the staff and students out for granita everyday it draws attention- the group of us laughing and eating, giddy from the kick. Locals will pass and ask Gracious Antonio what’s going on and suddenly something that seemed dull and drab to the Leccesi compared to, say, ginger-flavoured gelato, seems new again. ‘You came all this way just to have one of Antonio’s granita?’ they’ll ask, ordering one, realizing that they do in fact have not only something worth eating, but something worth saving. Gracious Antonio is now selling more of them, even if you deduct all the ones that my money buys. That, of course, is the goal. We could lecture other Leccesi about eating ice cream made from powders from silver packages, or even get high- minded about it, stating that every act of importation is actually a rejection of the local. Worse, we could eat it ourselves. But there’s another way too. And that’s where you the reader come in.

Reinforce Never Dilute also means that, aside from never importing ingredients from other regions- Chianti, Aceto balsamico, parmiggiano reggiano, Barolo, San Pelligrino- that we cook and consume only the local products, many of which are no longer available even half an hour car ride from here. Some coo over lemons from Simone’s uncle’s tree, or tiny artichokes that we pick ourselves from Lilli’s grandfather’s fields, but that’s only a small part of why we source our school the way we do. As the only full-time cooking school in all of Puglia, and most of the south, we’re in a unique position. Not a day goes by where I don’t work intimately with a very small producer on his or her way from a small field and tiny tractor to a consistently- high quality product, up to the national and international standards, but perhaps even more importantly, towards something indicative of here, something that reflects what makes this part of Italy so special. And while many of these producers use our school as the first testing ground- the first people to taste their products that aren’t blood relatives- we never serve anything at the school that we didn’t actually pay for.

'Reinforce’ dictates that paying for quality is the best way to guarantee that it will be there tomorrow. And more importantly, it provides the dangling carrot to any producer that currently isn’t there yet, actually creating more of it for everyone to enjoy. Reinforce Never Dilutes guarantees that you the reader, your very presence here in Lecce actually preserves traditions and local food ways. Contrast this, with say, a cooking school in Tuscany, where the myriad of schools weaken the local cuisine by teaching things like pasta (contrary to the perception, there are virtually no Tuscan pasta recipes that go back further than the arrival of television) and other pan- Italians foods that have nothing to do with the lives of the locals. These students apparently don’t know enough about the situation to get angry.

‘Another one’ asks Antonio when he and I are alone again. ‘You have students coming in September right?’ ‘Yes, and many already reserved for next summer too’. ‘Will they be coming for my granita?’, he asks. ‘Yes’, I say, 'we'll be here everyday. Count on it'. I close my notebook and head for the cash register, where for two Euro and twenty-five eurocents I can buy something much bigger than any bar glass can hold.

For those that come in the months of June, July or September, you will have one of Gracious Antonio’s excellent granite, everyday, on us. You’ll meet him, get to know him a bit and perhaps get a first- hand understanding that good food traditions in Italy, just like in your home country, can’t survive neglect.
*Non sai is Italian for Don't you know, and if you ever hear anyone end all his or her sentences with the tag, you can be certain of his or her origin, the speech tick being so closely tied to the Leccese. We'll have you saying it too. The great culinary scholar Sidney Mintz maintains that, Every nation has the food it deserves. Chew the phrase for a second, then notice that ‘deserves’ is in the present tense.

Work the Olive harvest, Stay in a castle. We still have space in our olive harvest course, where for one week you’ll actually give something back to the nearby Mediterranean while deepening your own knowledge of the olive as a fruit, and olive oil as the world’s greatest elixir. We’ll work alongside farmers, wear rubber boots; maybe take a turn on a tractor. Still green and cloudy and unbelievably fruity, you’ll eat the new oil over semolina bread toasted over an outdoor fire, taste firsthand what the stuff does for grilled lamb and sea bass. You’ll meet the Baron himself, learn his favourite recipe. The castle, our cooking school here in Lecce, Italy.
Located in an 18th century aristocratic palace in the historic centre of the South of Italy's prettiest city, The Awaiting Table offers Day and Week-long courses, based on small classes of hands-on cooking and individual attention. If you'd like to see a different part of Italy, and see it in a different way, we encourage to find out more by clinking through to our site. You can also contact us simply by replying to this email. And don't forget to forward on this to your friends. They'll be thankful and you never know when you might need a kidney.

To sign up for future newsletters, click here - Mail List Signup.

Back to top - Previous Page