Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh

by Unknown

  Tancredi shrugged off this disturbing flaw as irrelevant, although she did not deny its existence. “I like wet,” she said. “That’s because I dip the 1 6 0

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  round (the outer crust) in the middle, where it is wet. We dip a lot in Naples. When we eat pasta, we dip the bread in the sauce. I have three babies, and they all dip. My husband dips. We dip a lot in our house.” After sampling nearly twenty pizzas, I figured out what made them so wet: everything. The cooks of Naples are generous with oil, and a lot of vegetable (not olive) oil is poured onto each pizza before it is baked.

  Mozzarella has a high water content, and so do crushed tomatoes. Add up all that liquid and what you get is a puddle in your pizza. Trianon, which had the most flavorful pizzas in Naples, also had the wettest. The even-more-famous Brandi, which has a photograph of Chelsea Clin-ton adorning its walls, made medium-wet pizzas. It also made the worst pizza margherita I tasted, which was unfortunate, since it claims to have invented the pizza margherita to honor a visit by the Italian queen Margherita in 1889. A lesser-known pizzeria, Luigi Lombardi a Santa Chiara, made admirable specialty pizzas topped with mushrooms or lightly smoked provolone cheese. We had a wonderful waiter there by the name of Ciro, but don’t bother asking for him, because half the waiters in Naples are named Ciro.

  The place that brazenly cheated on our check was Pizzeria da Mimi, on Via Speranzella in the heart of the Spanish Quarter, which slopes up from the Via Toledo and was built in the sixteenth century to garri-son troops. A friend and I decided to explore the narrow, uneven streets, despite having been told the area was dangerous to outsiders. One of the streets of the Spanish Quarter, Via Concordia, is allegedly the principal habitat of the foot soldiers of the camorra. An elderly fruit peddler who spoke a few words of English—he told us he’d once been to New York with the Italian merchant marine—warned us to get out for our own good.

  The Spanish Quarter reminded me of Boston’s North End, particularly the shrewd efforts by residents to reserve parking spaces in front of their tenement buildings. One particularly resourceful woman had placed two clothes-drying racks filled with wet laundry on the street, end to end, taking up space just large enough for a car. About the time her husband returned, the clothes would be dry (if grimy from passing F O R K I T O V E R

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  traffic). This part of Naples respects the code of the Curba Nostra—

  Our Parking Space.

  Mimi’s is on nobody’s list of the best pizzerias in Naples, but my friend and I sought it out after hearing that it attracted authentic citi-zenry, not tourists like us. The place wasn’t much to see: wobbly tables, a hideous fake-stone vinyl floor, and freaky walls with tile on the bottom half and wood up top. We took one of the seven tables in the back room and ordered two Cokes and one pizza to share. Almost all the regulars were drinking Cokes from bottles. The waiter brought us two holiday promotional cans decorated with pictures of Santa Claus, even though Christmas was long past. Clearly, outdated inventory was being unloaded on unwelcome guests.

  Service was agonizingly slow, and not only for us. One elderly lady called over a waiter (who was wearing a baseball cap with bronx on it) and said, “Today?” The pizza margherita, when we finally got it, was about the same as the other pizza margheritas we’d been eating. Then we were handed a bill that was twice what it should have been. When I demanded an explanation, the waiter said, “Service charge.” I paid up, figuring we were being punished for trespassing in a section of the city where tourists aren’t wanted. Somebody had to teach us a lesson, and Pizzeria da Mimi did it well.

  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.

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  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, F O R K I T O V E R

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  which is the way we enjoy it in America. Ciro a Mergellina stays busy until well after midnight, and the scene is engrossing. Beefy young guys who should be named Sal or Rocco (and would be in South Philly) waddle in to eat with one another, and suave older guys who look like Vittorio Gassman strut in escorting girls who look as if they should be in parochial school.

  What I realized after a week in Naples was how much I loved being there, except when I was going out to eat. Everywhere I wandered, I saw something that made me think of another place, a side effect of a city bursting with history. The high-rises on the hills reminded me of Hong Kong; the crumbling stucco villas, of Old Havana. I never felt threatened or uncomfortable, even when I was traversing the narrow-est footstep-echoing alleys or challenging the surly staff at Pizzeria da Mimi.

  I enjoyed walking around Naples, an activity that could only have been more pleasurable had the sidewalks been passable. The better neighborhoods have a dog-poop problem of Parisian proportions, and elsewhere the pavements are blocked with illegally parked cars. I invariably walked in the streets, which is a challenge, since the drivers are criminally indifferent to pedestrians. Now and then, I would duck into one of the magnificent Baroque churches to look around, and while there I would offer a small donation in thanks for not becoming a traffic fatality. The police, for all I know, are the darlings of Interpol, regular Eliot Nesses, but they appear to do nothing except stand around in clumps and reminisce abou
t Maradona’s debut against Verona in 1984.

  I used to think Bologna had the worst restaurants in Italy, but Naples deserves the title. I suppose I should be disheartened, considering that I had arrived with such high expectations, but I am not giving up my quest to find an Italian metropolis with acceptable eating establishments. There remains one more major city on my itinerary—

  Palermo, the urban heart of Sicily.

  I’ve heard wonderful stories about the food of Palermo. As I under-1 6 4

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  stand it, the port area is paved with trattorias that offer still-writhing fish from which one might select a fine lunch. I recently read that the sautéed breaded veal chops “in the style of Palermo” are unsurpassed, and I’ve long wished to try a few cassata siciliana, the famous pastries rolled in almond paste. Yes, I’m sure Palermo is the answer. It has to be. The next city to the south is Tripoli, and I’m not going there to eat.

  GQ, may 2001

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  My friend Wing Nin Chan picked me up at the airport, and we drove directly to Xi’s Garden, where he ordered pig’s tail, chicken feet, duck tongue, preserved goose, dried marinated fish with scallions, sesame-flavored bean curd with pot herbs, dried duck intestines with pepper, wild-rice stems in oil, snails stuffed with chopped pork and snail meat, and a chicken soup filled with cubes of duck blood—a horror-film version of Jell-O.

  Shanghai used to be called the Paris of the East. This kind of meal wasn’t the reason why.

  Fortunately, I was so tired from nearly twenty hours in the air I didn’t know what I was eating. Anyway, only the bean curd repelled me, for I dislike tofu as I do no other Asian edible. The real shock came the next morning, when my tour of the city began. I rode a subway from my hotel to the “special economic zone” of Pudong, climbed the stairs, and stepped outside.

  I was aware that Shanghai had been turned into the financial and commercial heart of an imminent New World Order. Now I was seeing firsthand what had come to pass. Never before had I gazed upon such vastness, ambition, and audacity of scale. It made the city I came from, New York, seem outdated, or at least old-fashioned.

  To one side of me was the third-tallest building in the world, the Jin Mao Tower (1,380 feet), a kind of neo–Empire State Building, and 1 6 6

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  on the other was the world-of-tomorrow Oriental Pearl TV Tower (even taller, but not a building and thus ineligible for world’s-highest competitions). Encircling these monuments to aspirational central planning was a modernized district of apartment complexes and wide avenues.

  Soon to come, I learned, was the Shanghai World Financial Center, planned at 1,518 feet, which would make it the tallest building in the world. (In display models it resembles a fraternity pledge paddle, which will assure it not being named the most beautiful building in the world.)

  Shanghai has always gleamed in my fantasies as a magnificent curiosity, one of the world’s most alluring and mysterious destinations.

  I knew times had changed, but I was soon to find that the storied city I had traveled so far to explore had essentially vanished. It had been replaced by a metropolis I had no idea could exist, not in China or elsewhere. I had arrived at the anointed showplace of modern Asia.

  A decade earlier, the economic district I was walking through was nothing more than primitive villages with black-tiled houses and rice paddies. Elsewhere, the transformation of Shanghai has been less startling but equally dramatic. The Socialist-modernist skyline of the new-sprung city has comic-book overtones—fanciful buildings topped with spires, fins, needles, and tiaras. Shanghai today is hubris unbound, and it has been constructed with such swiftness one might be tempted to believe the fragile and unholy alliance of capitalism and communism that spawned such a massive project could be the most efficient ideology of the twenty-first century, replacing the outdated fundamentals of tired old democracy.

  The rebuilding of the city seems to have been for a clear purpose: to eclipse Tokyo, Singapore, and even China’s very own (but secretly despised) Hong Kong as the preeminent city of Asia. Throughout the centuries, cities that have achieved world prominence have boasted historical importance, grand scale, an industrious (or easily manipulated) populace, and, not least, an impressive cuisine. (Every city but London, that is, where the principal culinary triumph of the empire was the importation of tea.) Inasmuch as millions of American tourists have F O R K I T O V E R

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  returned from packaged trips to China complaining that the meals they ate couldn’t compare to the delicious fried wontons drizzled with duck sauce they’d enjoyed back home, I decided to assume a great responsibility. I would find out whether Shanghai qualified as a culinary capital of the world.

  The cuisine of Shanghai is unfamiliar to Americans, who are most comfortable with variations on the theme of Cantonese. That means a multitude of shrimp as well as sauces with plenty of cornstarch bounce.

  Shanghai was once known as the land of fish and rice, but its cooking has evolved far beyond such simplicity.

  Restaurant meals invariably begin with cold, marinated appetizers that take some getting used to, because they’re often made from animal parts unfamiliar to American palates. The courses that follow are more accessible, consisting of stir-fried dishes, hot pots, and dim sum.

  Steamed white rice is rarely consumed in restaurants, because it has come to symbolize both unseemly poverty and starchy corpulence.

  Glutinous rice, which is heavier and stickier than white rice, is often a component of casseroles, and black vinegar is a cherished condiment. Eels, turtles, and crabs are prized, and so is bony fish, considered sweeter than a simple fillet.

  I tried snake, thanks to Wing. He owns nine Chinese restaurants in New York City, but one of the reasons he often visits his birthplace of Shanghai is to eat dishes he can’t find back home. We were at Xiao Nan Guo, one of his favorite restaurants, which seats 1,100 and is a cross between a banquet hall and an amphitheater. The decor incorporates elements of latter-day Italy (Tuscan-like window treatments), merrie old England (rough-hewn stone walls), and contemporary Miami Beach (neon palm trees). The cuisine of Shanghai’s Chinese restaurants is much more coherent than the decor of Shanghai’s Chinese restaurants.

  “How do you eat snake?” I asked Wing.

  “Like eating spareribs,” he replied.

  Indeed, the chunks of snake did have a meat-on-the-bone quality, although snake meat is much chewier than rib meat, probably because 1 6 8

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  snakes wiggle around a lot and pork ribs do not. Snake, despite what I’ve heard, does not resemble chicken. Snake eating encompasses elements of skate wing, beef jerky, and old cowboy movies.

  A few days after this experience, I was touring an ancient garden when I attempted to impress an attractive young guide by boasting that I’d eaten some fine snake.

  “I think if you want to eat snake,” she said, “you should go to Guangzhou. It is very famous. They eat the cat, too. The cat is like the tiger, and the snake is like the dragon, so they eat it together in one bowl. But I don’t like it. I am afraid.”

  I later asked Wing if he’d ever eaten cat in Guangzhou (formerly Canton). He had, of course. He’d been the guest at a dinner party with cat meatballs on the menu. His only complaint was that the stingy host had skimped on them. You know what they say about cat meatballs: Bet you can’t eat just one.

  I arrived in Shanghai, quite by chance, during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. In the United States, news of APEC generated the excitement of a tristate trade fair, but Shanghai was tingling. Two million pots of flowers and 7,500 trees had been planted along roads and in parks. American president George Bush showed up, and his scheduling people had already referred to one event as a “Chinese fire drill,” but the Chinese were so pleased he’d come nobody became testy at the affront. He was reported
ly eating room-service burgers after a tentative and unsuccessful foray into Chinese cuisine.

  Westernized food can be found throughout Shanghai, mostly at Starbucks, KFC, and McDonald’s, which have become almost as commonplace as stands selling pan-fried juicy buns, the justifiably beloved street food of Shanghai. A vigilantly patrolled, carefully regulated, painstakingly restored outdoor complex called Xintiandi is Shanghai’s showplace of Occidental restaurants, bars, and shops. The first time I walked into Xintiandi—famous as the site of the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party—a very efficient loudspeaker system was sere-nading visitors with Sister Sledge singing “We Are Family.” F O R K I T O V E R

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  My first meal there was at Luna, which serves disastrously bad mid-dlebrow Italian fare; its chorizo-and-chicken-liver linguine with a creamy meat sauce might be the worst Italian dish ever conceptualized. The jarringly chic T8 features an eclectic fusion menu; its sautéed mushrooms with shaved Parmesan and asparagus on “charred sourdough” came on bread so badly burned it was inedible. After those two meals, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I was that the “authentic Bavarian microbrewery and restaurant” about to open in Xintiandi was still weeks away.

  My next Western-style meal was at M on the Bund, located a few floors up in one of the gorgeous early-twentieth-century buildings built by the British during their enslavement of Shanghai. The Bund is the embankment of the Huangpu, and the view from M on the Bund’s open terrace across the river to the towers of Pudong is mesmerizing. Unfortunately, the food is not.

  We arrived twenty minutes late for a six p.m. reservation and were informed that our table would be needed at eight p.m. I felt right at home, since this is how diners are treated in New York. Service was a disconcerting amalgam of fawning servitude and the bum’s rush. The low-ceilinged main dining room, minimally decorated with a Chinese screen and a few Art Deco touches, was crammed with undersized tables so close together only the whisper-thin Chinese waiters could comfortably squeeze through. I shimmied sideways to get by. The “famous slowly baked salt-encased selected leg of lamb” was dry. Roast duck came with a sauce so sweet I regretted not having ordered this dish for dessert.