From: Leonardo Lucarelli
To: Michele Savio
Date: March 6, 2009, 12:28 a.m.
Subject: irmão
Hello, my wonderful chef friend!! What can I say? I’m happy, happy, happy.
Everything fills me with joy: the weather, the people, even the Italians I’ve met here working on the project, the carnival, the women, smooching like a kid, the samba, the food, these incredible mornings, my Italiany Spanish that’s turning into Italiany Portuguese and seems to be working out just fine.
And I’ve met a beautiful mixed-race girl, Aymara. Even her name is beautiful. A vivacious, silky-soft 22-year-old with hair that’s a mass of tight curls.
But you don’t need to worry, you really don’t. I’m drunk on happiness, but luckily I haven’t forgotten that even back in Rome I used to say I was happy, which eases that nagging fear of coming back that’s already creeping into my mind.
Yesterday I went to a favela and cooked for the whole neighborhood, and I even managed to bake some great bread thanks to the Italians who’d brought the starter over with them on the plane. Here everyone eats just one dish, and it’s taken me a while to make them understand the concept of appetizer, main, side dish, and dessert. It’s like … you know, when you can’t quite decide if what you’re feeling is joy or pain, maybe both. Anyhow, try to imagine a whole community made up of 150 families living next to a dump, with no running water, no bathrooms, no fridges (and mind, we’re at the equator), no social dignity (many don’t have documents and don’t know how to read or write). These people have absolutely nothing and yet they have these huge smiles, and you know your camera is worth 5 years’ income for a family of 10 people…
So how about you?
All cooking, love, marriage? How about the Testaccio, any new chefs? What’s happening? And the waiters?
Oh, and do you miss me in the kitchen? Just a bit?? Are my text messages getting to you?? You never answer them, you dog…
See you soon, buddy. Let me know what’s going on in my beautiful home town and get everything spick and span for when I get back.
Seu irmão,
Leo
From: Michele Savio
To: Leonardo Lucarelli
Date: March 6, 2009, 1:16 p.m.
Subject: irmão
Thanks for your great e-mail — I got a real kick out of it!
Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. It wasn’t to make you think we’re so busy I don’t have the time. It’s just that we really are, busy that is, but I’m happy just the same. We’re doing well, things are moving along, and the atmosphere is relaxed and peaceable, at least as far as the chefs are concerned. Francesca, the new waitress, kicked off with the usual “… nooo … yeees … I know you said those dishes were for table 10 but I took them to table 5 … because, well, because they ordered them first … but, but …” In here we need people who aren’t just willing and able, but won’t mess up the restaurant or, more important, me.
No one can be a prima donna in here, especially a newcomer, and when the going gets tough, we all have to get our act together. There are certain displays of respect that make me truly admire people. Take Sampath: Sri Lankan rice is one example of his strength of character. When asked, “Who cooked this rice?” he proudly answers, “All of us,” which is partly true, and partly it’s an answer that looks ahead to a place we are all aiming to reach. I mean, what’s more important than Sampath becoming famous for his rice or whatever is that we all recognize and reproduce the same excellent food. And it would be a major step forward if everyone could genuinely comprehend the secrets behind the great dishes that someone puts out before they become famous for being so talented. You asked about the others? Well, Fabrizio (the chef who’s replacing you) has an incredible gift for remembering orders, he’s without equal. Perewa still believes in precision and attention to detail — which I deeply appreciate (unlike you). Mamun manages to wash mountains of dirty dishes and pots and pans all by himself, and yesterday he celebrated his eighth wedding anniversary by phoning his wife who had just finished saying her prayers at 5 in the morning. Even though he’s exhausted, he always gives me a smile when he hands me a cup of tea. And I’m sincerely grateful to him.
When you get back, we’ll have to talk, because Fabrizio and Perewa have actually managed to make themselves useful without carrying on like prima donnas. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, Leo. I’m learning this now, and it was partly you who taught me. I imagine (and hope) you can read between the lines.
I’m glad to hear you’re so happy.
Ciao!!!
Mic
I was wearing shorts and black-and-yellow Havaianas, a backpack sat next to my chair, and the whole of Brazil was at my doorstep. I reread Michele’s e-mail because I wasn’t sure I’d understood it properly. My head was throbbing and not because of the humidity. Michele had just screwed me over, among the winks and nudges and exclamation points, this was what I gleaned: I’d been let go from a contract I didn’t have. If only I weren’t so full of shit, I could become a great chef. Sandro had been right all along.
Michele was an asshole and a coward who didn’t have the guts to tell me to my face during those last few months, and waited until I had left to send me this shitty e-mail. That was my first thought. My second was: Maybe I’m just not good enough. Which anyone with the slightest sense of reality sooner or later ends up muttering to himself in a crisis situation. Sooner or later you have to face up to the possibility that your ambition might outweigh your talent.
Shit. I’d return to Italy without knowing what to do next. On the other hand, all this made perfect sense. Usually most people’s greatest achievement is to feel adequate — big dreams are just crap. My worst sin, since moving to Tuscany, had been to make Michele feel nothing but inadequate. How long did I think he’d put up with feeling that way? When you play Russian roulette, the problem isn’t whether the shot will fire or not, it’s when.
In the end, the one who had to go was me, because it doesn’t matter what you think you’ve learned. What matters is who the chef is, and that’s life.
39.
Going out for a run the next morning helped to soothe my troubles and fears. Michele’s wasn’t the only e-mail to reach me in Brazil. I also received a message from a Neapolitan chef I had met years before. He was considering taking up an interesting offer and wanted to leave the restaurant he was currently working in, a pretentious little place with seating for thirty, situated at the end of Via Veneto. He asked if I’d like to replace him, but I hadn’t answered yet. I’d also received a half-baked proposal to open a new restaurant in Costa Rica.
The Neapolitan’s offer didn’t strike me as much of an opportunity; in fact, it told me I had dug myself into a fucking hole that was entirely of my own making. The idea of being the chef in a new restaurant in Rome terrified me. Working at Sessanta or in Michele’s kitchen had felt reassuringly temporary, there was nothing tying me down, the sky’s the limit.
According to Mendel, genes have a plan for us; for Darwin, it’s the environment; for Karl Marx, it is history. My grandma is convinced that only Almighty God has a plan for us. My plan is to travel through life without being weighed down.
When it comes to important decisions, I stall and dream of the most outrageous situations in the kitchen. Sometimes, I remembered those dreams, other times I didn’t, but I knew I had them because I’d wake up with my heart in tatters. Going for a run can help, which is why so many people are out there pounding the pavements every morning.
“Yo.”
“Oh, hi, Matt.”
“So what about the Via Veneto gig?”
“Nice place.”
“Are you going or not?”
“Don’t know. It’s my life we’re talking about.”
“What life?”
“A life where I’m free to travel, to move around, okay?”
“Ah. So that’s your life? I had no idea. I thought it was bei
ng a chef. Who knew?”
“Okay, I got it. But I need more time to decide.”
“You always give yourself plenty of time, that’s why you’re always late.”
“You’re right.”
“So, are you going or not?”
“Well, yeah, I’m going.”
The restaurant was called Castore e Polluce. It was built on the ruins of a Roman temple, and the floor in the dining room was glass so you could make out the remains of the old walls below. Red curtains, fancy silverware, porcelain plates, Doric columns — just walking in made me blush. The owners were a couple of laid-back twins, in suits and white shirts, who wasted no time getting straight to the point. They asked me to prepare a trial dinner by myself for them, their two other brothers, and their parents. If they hired me, I’d have a yearly contract paying €700 per month, plus another €1,600 under the table. Fourteen months of pay, with the cash payments to include bonuses and holiday pay. The restaurant was open for lunch and dinner and closed on Sundays. I would work every dinner service and do lunches only when needed. The kitchen staff included Aref, a Moroccan cook who was fast and very experienced, but sloppy, and Tommaso, a thirty-year-old with some high-class experience as a commis chef and very little self-confidence. Aref took care of the appetizers and mains, Tommaso was responsible for the entrées and desserts. I could carve out my role in the kitchen as I pleased. The twins didn’t care if I got behind the burners or not, all they wanted was good food and for everything to run smoothly.
40.
Badrinat, also known as Nat, was fifty-two, wore thick-lensed glasses, and had been busted on a murder rap, forcing him to flee Bangladesh, where he risked a death sentence.
He got up every morning at seven in the house he shared with ten other fellow Bengalis in the rough neighborhood of Centocelle. He waited his turn to use the bathroom, got dressed, and took bus number 105 to Termini station and from there hopped on metro line A to Piazza Barberini. Then he walked the rest of the way. At nine he punched in, and his day began by snaking out the drain in the ladies’ restroom that got blocked on a regular basis. Then he mopped the dining room floor and polished the silverware. At nine thirty, Aref and Tommaso arrived. They started prepping for lunch, and Nat began washing the pots and pans. If the restaurant was busy, he’d be chained to the dishwasher; if it was quiet, he would go into the kitchen to give a hand with prep. During the afternoon break, Nat sometimes managed to go home, but on public transport it was a long, drawn-out procedure, so he usually stayed at the restaurant to rest and clean out the fridges. At five o’clock, the second shift started, I arrived at six, and we closed the kitchen at around midnight. Nat hardly ever made it in time to catch the last metro, so he’d walk to the station and wait there for the number 50 night owl bus that passed every forty-five minutes. If you missed it, you were screwed. One evening I gave him a ride as far as Termini station on the back of my bicycle, but the bus had just left so I hung around with him until the next one came.
“I left because big problem at home. No money, big problem. Everything possible overseas. Much work, much money. God willing, life better overseas.”
Nat’s journey to Via Veneto was predicated on the belief that Overseas was a country in itself, whence all good things came: money, canned meat, Colgate toothpaste. In his country, the houses made out of brick and stone were built with money from Overseas. He and his family lived in a wooden shack. Nat was part of that multitude of money and mankind that ceaselessly crisscrossed the globe, a flow every bit as complex and ever-changing as the climate. He had no contract, and at the end of the month he pocketed €650 in cash. They couldn’t give him a contract because he didn’t have a residence permit, and he couldn’t get a residence permit because he didn’t have a job. On Fridays and Saturdays, the two nights we stayed open later, I would leave my bicycle at home and take my motorbike so that I could give Nat a ride home. Occasionally I would go up to his place for some rice with chicken and cardamom and listen to his incredible adventures while the others slept.
I didn’t get on so well with Aref, although we managed to respect each other. The problem was that he was forty-two, married, and had two kids, and he was working alongside a chef ten years younger than him who did half the number of hours and earned twice as much as he did. Those kinds of thoughts tend to ruin your day and generate conflict. The owners were two nice enough guys from a very wealthy family, a fact that set everyone’s mind at ease. Before long, Tommaso became like a brother, Aref turned into a chef I could count on, and Nat was a good friend.
Working at Castore e Polluce, I realized that there was plenty of stuff I didn’t know I didn’t know. The owners shared my ignorance and appreciated my experiments. The difference between Tommaso and Aref was that Tommaso wanted to be a chef because he loved the profession and believed in passion, while Aref had to send money back home to Morocco every month and hadn’t yet found a simpler way of doing it. I cooked to stay clean and out of trouble, earn money, and have fun. I still believed that food was my alibi and not my destiny, even though Matteo continued to tell me the opposite. When I cooked, I neither feared nor needed to avoid dark alleyways on my way home. And anyway, I didn’t cook to hang stars on my résumé but to blend into the background. The difference between me and Tommaso was that he, sooner or later, would make it to the top, whereas my cooking would never create the kind of buzz that attracted the attention of so many bombastic foodies.
Without me around, Tommaso would have become more and more withdrawn, and without him, my menus would be a stale version of the Verve’s, or San Pietro a Sieve’s, or Sessanta’s. Tommaso was one of those people who never aspire to a better life, who get along with everyone because they fit in wherever they go, and have nothing even remotely to do with the drug addicts, weirdos, megalomaniacs, and unfulfilled bastards I’d become used to working with over the years. He was a reliable, honest guy, in love with Rome and good food. I couldn’t wrangle a wage increase for him, but I did treat him like my de facto sous chef, and he, in exchange, spared me the hassle of double checking whether this or that problem had been solved. This or that problem was regularly solved. In the kitchen, we listened to the Roman crooner Franco Califano.
Late one night, I checked my online bank balance and found more money than I’d ever had in my entire life. I remembered the job in Costa Rica and wondered how I could ever have taken the offer seriously. I bought a new motorbike, another black Japanese number with the same inline four-cylinder engine, but with more grunt. Nat said the old bike was more comfortable and he sat bolt upright behind me, clinging on for dear life.
In 2009, America inaugurated its first black president, and Italy gave undocumented immigrants a chance to become regularized on the back of an amnesty for illegal foreign housemaids and carers. What actually transpired was the latest in a long line of tactics for the government to make and move money with no respect for the reality or needs of illegal workers. I heard about the amnesty on the news, and Nat explained it to me. First of all, the amnesty was directed at a specific category of workers — dishwashers, waiters, pizza makers, bricklayers; therefore, a huge proportion of foreigners who had been working in Italy for years were not included. Second, the paperwork could be submitted only by employers willing to pay a €500 lump sum as a penalty for failing to pay the social security contributions of their “employee.”
The result was that a mammoth system of scams was set in motion, where the first in line were the Italians, closely followed by the Senegalese and the Egyptians. Nat asked our bosses to file an application in his name, passing him off as a cleaner at their luxury villa in Piazza di Spagna. Not possible, they already had three cleaners there who were on the books. So he asked to borrow €1,000, so he could pay someone else to regularize him. Not possible, they did not lend money to employees. Before talking to Nat, I made a few inquiries at the local employment bureau: I couldn’t sponsor anyone myself because I was below the minimum income threshold and, apart
from my motorbike, I owned no assets and lived in financial no-man’s-land.
I wanted to help in some way so Nat would not have to pay for something he was entitled to and shell out €500 for social security contributions that his employers should have paid. Then it struck me that there was one thing and one thing only that I could do for him: Give him €1,000 to get a residence permit as per the new anticrisis legislation. I will give a Bronx cheer to the next person who tells me that foreigners are stealing our money and our jobs.
The kitchen was clean. Nat dipped the mop into the bucket I had filled with water from the boiler, and I went out so he could wash the floor. Aref had already left, Tommaso pulled on his crash helmet and said good night. I took my apron off and went down the three steps that led to the pantry and the back of the kitchen. I entered the change room and took off my black jacket, remaining in my undershirt. I laced my fingers together and stretched my arms above my head until my shoulder blades creaked and cracked. I put on my sweatshirt, grabbed a glass while the maître d’ finished balancing the cash register, poured myself a beer, and went outside. I pressed my nose against the window and cupped my hands around my eyes to shade them from the reflection of the streetlamps. Inside, some of the diners were lingering over dessert or coffee or a liqueur while they enjoyed the warmth of the open fireplace and the soft lighting. In my mind I could hear the echoes of jaws chomping on food that had come out of my kitchen. Every table had its own story to tell, and I had been part of them all, at least in some small way, this evening.
Doing a job you love is a punishment. It prevents you from doing any of the other things you might like or might have felt drawn toward at least once in your life. It’s that illness of mine that goes by the name of dignity and manifests itself in highs and lows. I sipped my beer and looked at my burned and calloused hands. One of the twins gave me a big friendly smile from inside the restaurant while he was clearing a table, and I acknowledged him by tipping my glass to him. As I was saying, this job, my job, is all about crests and troughs, comings and goings. It’s not hard to work out when you’re content with what you’re doing. You look at the people around you and sense that you’re holding them in the palm of your hand. Deep down you know we are not all equal, because you can stand outside and watch them, knowing that their satisfaction or disappointment is all up to you.
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