My entrée to Piccolo Mondo, and to Rome itself, came through an old friend from my Serrano Gay Bar days. One of the few women who sometimes showed up at John Stachowiak’s house was a pretty, statuesque young woman of Irish and Italian origins named Karen Kelly. She had known the Serrano regular Allen Daviau since grade school, and he sometimes invited her to join us for one of our dinners out, or for one of my Sunday evening meals of spaghetti with hamburger meat and canned corn.
Karen ended up marrying John, and they moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills. The two traveled a lot in Europe and the Middle East in the first years of their marriage, and then, in the early seventies, Karen went off by herself to study Italian in Rome for a few months—and more or less stayed there. She and John eventually divorced, and she found a good-natured Roman boyfriend named Gianfranco, who sold Ferraris for a living, and a dreamy old-fashioned fifth-floor walk-up apartment with whitewashed walls and red-tile floors in the heart of the city, near the Piazza del Popolo. We stayed in touch, and when she learned that I was planning a trip to Paris, she insisted that I make a detour and come visit her in her adopted city.
I fell in love with the place my first day there. It felt both exotic and familiar, Mediterranean and Californian. I liked the radiant terra-cotta-colored buildings framed by vivid blue skies; I liked the way the streets smelled—that weird, alluring bouquet of diesel fumes, roasting meat, the moss in fountains, the piney cologne on small men wearing pastel shirts with pastel sweaters tied around their necks; I liked the Roman light, warm, thick, ancient. It excited me to be able to take a casual walk through the urban center and traverse not just centuries but millennia, from Caesar to Mussolini, St. Peter to Sophia Loren. I felt benevolent envy at the way people lived in Rome, or at least my perception of the way they lived—unhurried, sybaritic, sometimes bawdy, usually equanimous. And of course I loved the food.
Traditional Roman cuisine is rarely mentioned as one of Italy’s best or most important culinary traditions, but when it’s good—as it certainly was in Rome in those days (less so now, I think)—it is wonderfully accessible and immensely satisfying. To begin with, many of the pasta sauces that have become favorites all over Italy and in the United States and beyond claim Roman origins: carbonara (made with the cured pig’s cheek called guanciale, along with pecorino romano, egg, and lots of black pepper, a reference to the charcoal sellers for whom it is supposedly named), arrabbiata (“angry,” a tomato sauce with lots of garlic and red peppers), amatriciana (from the town of Amatrice northeast of Rome, made with tomato, guanciale, and pecorino), Alfredo (invented at the restaurant Alfredo alla Scrofa on Rome’s Via della Scrofa, and correctly made with only butter and parmigiano—no cream, and certainly no ham or peas), cacio e pepe (Roman dialect for “cheese and pepper,” a wonderfully minimalist seasoning, more than sauce, of nothing but pecorino romano and black pepper). I ate all of these and more in trattorias all over the city and its surroundings.
I also devoured saltimbocca, little veal scallops topped with prosciutto and sage, whose name means “jump in the mouth,” and the stewed oxtail called coda alla vaccinara. I ate kilos of the roast baby lamb dish abbacchio (whose name derives from abbacchiare, meaning to beat down, which some say is a reference to slaughtering the tiny animals with blows to the head), the defining protein of the city and its region. In America, artichokes were big elongated globes that you ate by pulling off leaves and scraping off a thin film of meat with your teeth; I never saw the point. In Rome, the artichokes were either small and poached alla romana, in olive oil with garlic until they were as soft as butter, or were larger but prepared alla giudia, Jewish style, deep-fried and splayed out like delicious blossoms that crackled when you bit into them. I tried literal blossoms, too, fiori di zucca, squash flowers filled with mozzarella and anchovies, battered, and deep-fried—unbelievable. I steeled myself and tried trippa alla romana, tripe in tomato sauce flavored with nepitella, a relative of mint; I even sampled rigatoni con la pajata, in which the little ridged tubes of pasta were tossed with other little tubes—sections of milk-fed veal intestines that still contain cheese-like coagulated milk (to my surprise I actually liked this better than the tripe, though I didn’t go out of my way to order it subsequently).
To call these food experiences revelatory would be a gross understatement. For a young American, even a comparatively experienced restaurant goer like myself, eating like this in the 1970s was sheer exotica; I might as well have been sampling the cuisines of Ethiopia or Nepal. You have to remember—or imagine—what our perception of Italian food was in America back then: A sophisticated Italian meal meant “shrimp scampi” and veal parmigiana. Unless you came from an Italian family that had maintained strong culinary ties with the old country, you very likely would simply have never heard of, much less tasted, porcini, pancetta, mozzarella di bufala, sun-dried tomatoes, or even arugula (called rucola in Italy). Radicchio, which now gets tossed into salads at McDonald’s, was a pricey import. My old friend Piero Selvaggio of Valentino remembers buying radicchio from Italy for seventy-five dollars a crate, including air freight, and having to throw half of it, wilted and moldy, away when it arrived; when he’d put the good leaves into salads and charge a bit more than usual for them, he says, customers would ask, “What’s so special about a little red cabbage?” You couldn’t even buy baby greens; when I gave a dinner party and wanted to serve an Italian-style salad, I’d go to a nursery and come home with little pots of seedling lettuce meant to be planted in the garden, then uproot and clean the leaves and toss them with some shredded beet leaves (standing in for radicchio) in good olive oil; that was as close as I could come.
At home when I was growing up, mushrooms were rubbery little nubs that came in tiny cans and squeaked when you chewed them, and I couldn’t stand them. I’ll never forget the first time I saw big porcini mushroom caps, the size of steaks, grilling on hot coals at Piccolo Mondo; I found it hard to believe what they were at first, and it took me a few visits to be brave enough to order them, but the moment I finally did, I became an instant mushroom lover. Spaghetti, even in the better Italian places in the States, tended to be slippery noodles unevenly coated in a thick, sweetish tomato sauce (American recipes in those days invariably called for the spaghetti to be rinsed off after cooking, an idiocy that flushed away the starch that helps the sauce to cling), usually garnished with big, bready meatballs. In Rome, spaghetti was more likely to be sturdy, rough-textured, maybe even square-cut strands, cooked just north of al dente—a texture Romans call filo di ferro, or “iron string,” meaning that there’s a firm, wheaty core to each piece of pasta—tossed with a few flavorful ingredients.
When we ate “garlic bread” in America, it came in the form of spongy loaves, halved and sprinkled with garlic powder and maybe powdered industrial-strength “parmesan”; Karen and Gianfranco introduced me to real garlic bread, a Roman specialty called “bruschetta”—slabs cut thick from a big rustic loaf, toasted on the grill, rubbed with raw garlic cloves, then seasoned with olive oil and salt. One place we went to sometimes got fancy in the summertime and served it with some chopped fresh tomatoes on top. (How this simple, definitive rustic specialty became the “broo-shedda” served in America today, which typically involves multi-ingredient toppings on insignificant pieces of toasted bread, sometimes lacking even the garlic and the oil, is a mystery to me. It is now common to see containers of chopped tomato salad labeled “bruschetta” in the supermarket, as if this extraneous accoutrement were the thing itself.)
I ALWAYS STAYED with Karen when I went to Rome, sleeping on the couch in her apartment near the Piazza del Popolo. Our days were built around food. In the mornings, as soon as we woke up, she’d call the latteria downstairs and say a few words in her by then fluent, Roman-accented Italian, then put on the espresso pot. By the time the pot had finished sputtering, the delivery boy would have shuffled up the stairs, bringing us a tub of warm, just-made ricotta. We’d spread it on slices of crusty, lightly toasted
country bread, either salting it generously or topping it with little spoonfuls of apricot preserves. We’d sit there and drink our strong, muddy espresso between bites and talk about where we were going to have lunch.
We’d end up at places like La Buca di Ripetta, a neighborhood trattoria a few blocks from Karen’s place, where we’d have penne all’amatriciana or fettuccine with clams (or porcini, if they were in season), then saltimbocca or roast chicken. Or we’d go to Ambasciata d’Abruzzo and attack the huge basket of assorted mountain-style sausages presented the moment we sat down, before moving on to linguine with artichokes or spaghetti alla carbonara and some thick, juicy veal chops or roast suckling pig. Sometimes, around one in the afternoon, Gianfranco would come by and spirit us off in a borrowed Ferrari (or a battered-up, traded-in Land Rover) to a place out on the Via Appia, one of those famous old Roman roads that lead you-know-where, to an eighteenth-century country inn turned restaurant called Casale. There, we’d pile our plates high from a long, two-tiered antipasto table—meat-and-rice-stuffed vegetables, borlotti beans in olive oil, fresh ricotta and bufala mozzarella glistening with olive oil and sprinkled with spicy red pepper flakes, marinated anchovies, grilled squid, grilled zucchini, grilled radicchio, marinated beets, thin slices of hard sausage in several varieties, three or four kinds of olives, and on and on—then move on to something like tagliatelle with baby shrimp or spaghetti sauced with squash blossoms cooked down nearly to a marmalade, and always slices of rotisserie-roasted baby lamb accompanied by rough-cut potato chunks cooked in the dripping fat beneath the rotisserie.
One lunchtime we went to another of our favorites, Sabatini, on the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, sitting on the terrace and eating grilled scampi, pan-fried slices of porcini with crisp bits of garlic, spaghetti with clams, and coda alla vaccinara. There seemed to be some to-do around the old octagonal fountain in front of the church of Santa Maria: twenty or thirty people milling around, frames of pipe being erected with big lights attached, a little Fiat van pulling up. Suddenly a clutch of motorcycles roared out of the background and started circling the fountain, their engines revving, their tires squealing. Then we noticed a big movie camera emerging on a dolly from the far side of the fountain, and as the crowd parted, we saw a robust-looking man with a leonine profile standing on a step like an orchestral conductor. It was, I realized, Federico Fellini, directing a scene from what we later learned was his paean to the city, Roma—a film which was ultimately to feed my fantasies of the place even more than La Dolce Vita had done.
Of all my Roman restaurant experiences, though, nothing more vividly defined the cooking of the city—and the city itself—to me than my many meals at Piccolo Mondo. Piccolo Mondo was opened in 1954 by one Tommaso Camponeschi, who came from a mountain village not far from Amatrice. His timing was perfect. He set up shop just as the Italian economy was beginning to recover after World War II, and the massive Cinecittà film studio, founded by Mussolini, was beginning to thrive as a major European production center, luring even American filmmakers. (Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet were to come out of Cinecittà, as were most of Fellini’s films, including La Dolce Vita.) As the alluring, self-indulgent Roman “sweet life” flourished, with the Via Veneto as its main artery, Piccolo Mondo—unpretentious but still glamorous, near the Via Veneto but refreshingly not quite in the thick of things—became a kind of celebrity nerve center, an institutional expression of the giddy spirit of the era. It was the Chasen’s of its place and time.
The restaurant’s walls, when I first ate there, told the story: Two decades’ worth of photographs, faded, cracked, and curling, were taped or thumb-tacked haphazardly around the dining room—glossy shots of Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Marcello Mastroianni, Gina Lollobrigida, Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, and other stars, but also studio portraits and large-format snapshots, mostly taken at the restaurant’s tables, of scores of heartbreakingly beautiful and optimistic-looking young men and women who are now long since forgotten.
By the seventies, production at Cinecittà was slowing down, and Rome no longer drew the big-name stars, and I never saw anybody I recognized at the restaurant. But the dining room always bustled furiously, at lunch and dinner both, full of models (real or aspiring) in high-heel shoes and gauzy dresses, fat-cat businessmen or politicians with open shirts and potbellies, artsy-looking earth mothers in shifts and copious costume jewelry, sun-darkened septuagenarian roués with long gray manes. I used to imagine—and I’m sure I was right—that more than a few of them had been habitués of the place in the good old days, and still came back regularly to forget, if only for a few hours, how much their world had changed. I used to imagine that I was one of them.
We had a regular waiter at Piccolo Mondo, a round-faced, bald-pated little fellow named Guido, who clearly loved Karen. We’d typically arrive around one-thirty for lunch, or close to ten o’clock for dinner. Someone would show us to our table, always one of Guido’s, and he would appear in an instant with a bottle of the red house wine and a basket of bread, which included the first focaccia I’d ever had, a Roman interpretation of this basic bread, seasoned with olive oil and salt, which they called “pizza bianco,” white pizza. Next would come a dish of mozzarella bocconcini—little bites—about the size of plump cherries, and some pinzimonio, which was more or less what restaurants in America used to call a “relish tray,” an assortment of cut-up raw vegetables, but here served with a metal bowl of olive oil seasoned with lots of salt and pepper, into which the pieces of carrot, fennel, red pepper, and the like were to be dipped.
After we’d nibbled for fifteen minutes or so, and probably worked our way through most of our first bottle of wine, Guido would reappear and ask, “Now, what would you like to eat?” Whatever we decided on, we’d get more. We might order the penne all’arrabbiata or the homemade meat-filled ravioli tossed with butter, garlic, and a confetti of tomato bits. Then, before it arrived, Guido would come by with the remains of a platter that he’d just served to another table and say, “Have a little lasagne,” or “I bring you some cacio e pepe.” If our main course was, say, abbacchio al forno, we were likely to be treated to a few scampi quickly cooked in olive oil or some strips of porcini fried with garlic first. I loved this way of eating: simple, savory, relaxed, appreciative, joyful. I loved just being in this ancient city, and part of me, as I sat there, would sometimes get a little sad, knowing that in a day or two, or even a week or two, I’d have to pack up and leave and go back home to real life, whatever it might have been at the moment. But then another part of me would remember that, hey, at least for the foreseeable future, I could always come back.
BY THE MID-SEVENTIES, I had become something of a traveling fool. When I had a steady job, I would work business trips into the routine as often as I could. When I was freelancing, I sometimes spent more days of the year on the road than at home, carpentering together complicated transcontinental or overseas itineraries based on whatever assignments I could cadge. What I liked so much about traveling was the wonderful sense of dislocation it brings. I’d let myself get sealed into a gigantic metal tube, then hurtle through the ozone for a few hours or overnight and step out into another place entirely, with different smells and sounds, different people, and, of course, different food.
On so many occasions over the years, finding myself someplace else, someplace other, I’d get suddenly flooded with a kind of euphoria, a rush of figurative and quite possibly literal adrenaline. I remember standing on the quai above the Adige in Verona at sunset in the warm springtime air, watching the old stone buildings on the other side of the river luminesce for a minute or two in the falling light and then turn cool blue-gray, and feeling unreasonably, simplistically happy. I remember stepping out of a water taxi, driven by a beautiful dishwater blonde with an amber tan and stevedore hands, onto a stony beach framed in tamarisk and myrtle trees and sprawls of rock roses on the Île de Porquerolles, and turning almost breathless with wonder at the idea
that not even twenty-four hours earlier I’d been sitting at my desk on Sixth Avenue in New York City editing an article about common crackers from the Vermont Country Store.
One time, lunching alone at Harry’s Bar in Venice, I was so overcome with sheer joy at the music of the multilingual chatter and the clink of silverware on china all around me, and at the aromas of the food, and at the sight out the window of gulls perched on the blue-and-white-striped mooring poles rising up from the Grand Canal and the sparks of sunlight leaping across the water, that I started clawing my fingernails across the pale yellow tablecloth, like a dog pawing for a bone, until I realized how silly I looked and made myself take a sip of Soave instead.
Some of my more exotic eating was in Finland, where I went at the suggestion of my girlfriend Lyn, who had a boutique in Beverly Hills devoted to a Finnish designer. When I got to Helsinki for the first time, I quickly figured out a few key food terms in the Finns’ impenetrable language, and I ate pretty well. I learned to savor, and pronounce, pöronpaïsti (thin-sliced, smoked reindeer tongue) and tried stewed bear at a Russian restaurant (once was enough). I ate herring with mica-thin onion slices in curried oil and pike-perch in red wine sauce at Havis Amanda, then the city’s leading seafood restaurant; reindeer steaks in Madeira sauce at the Hotel Marski; roasted riekko, or willow ptarmigan, at the Hotel Hesperia. At a lively bistro near the opera house called Bulevardia, I had what I described in my notebook as “the best steak tartare I have ever encountered,” which had shredded beets added to the mix.
On one occasion, I flew to Bulgaria, as a guest of the government tourist office. My flight connected through Brussels, with a layover of almost twenty-four hours, so I had the chance to enjoy two consecutive meals there, dinner and then lunch the next day. I took both at a place called Au Filet de Boeuf on the rue des Harengs (Herring Street), which I’d read about in one of the British wine merchant Harry Waugh’s entertaining books about his travels. He had singled it out not only for its more than decent cuisine but for the fact that the wine list was packed with excellent Burgundies at surprisingly low prices. My dinner was escargots, filet de boeuf Clément (in a sauce of cream, tomatoes, and tarragon) with potato croquettes, chèvre, and vanilla ice cream, accompanied by a half bottle of Chapitre de Beaune 1970 and a full one of Drouhin Grands-Echezeaux 1961, topped off with two framboises (lord, but I could drink in those days) and a Don Pedro cigar. My more modest lunch, before I headed to the airport, was smoked salmon, quail with Armagnac sauce, and meringue Saint-Hubert, along with a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne 1966 and a cognac.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 14