The culture of food

First, let me say that Saveur is batting a thousand. We had dinner at another restaurant recommended in the article, Trattoria Anna Maria, and it was great - the food and the service and the joint, itself. One of those real neighborhood kind of trattorias where the food tastes like aunty's - if aunty happens to be Bolognese - and the walls are lined with hundreds of photos and autographs of the famous folk who have savored Anna Maria's tortelloni and ragu.

Speaking of tortelloni and ragu, Wanda had tortelloni in pomodoro sauce and I had tagliatelle ragu. She had a pork chop - more about the pork chop comin' up - and I had something I haven't had in probably 25 years, maybe longer - vitello tonnato - and it was certainly much, much tastier than I ever remember it being in New York. It's a popular summer dish here - veal pounded extremely thin and covered with a smooth tuna sauce and capers, served cold. Don't make a face. If you haven't tried it you have no idea how delicious it is when properly prepared. For dessert, we had to try the panna cotta just in case, Marcia, we needed to add Bologna to Battle of the Bands: Panna Cotta. Well, no need for concern because it was not panna cotta but flan or creme caramel or whatever else you want to call it. It was luscious. But it was not panna cotta. A couple of nice touches worth mentioning tonight - with the bread came a couple of paper thin slices of fantastic mortadella; before dessert, came a small bowl of fresh cherries - with one ice cube to keep them cool - lovely.

Okay, on to the culture of food. No server in Italy will ever, ever, ever ask you if you'd like to take the rest of your food home with you. NEVER. You can take two bites and leave the rest on your plate. It is NOT going home with you. NEVER. Now, having said that, we have since I've been here on two occasions - once with Marcia and once with Wanda - asked to take home the remainder of a portion of food. The first time, the waiter just plainly said, "no," and then thought better of it when we asked him about the next plate that went largely untouched. The second time, the owner - I think she was the owner - looked at us as if we'd asked her to empty the cash register. But we got the pasta.

Tonight, with small amounts of pasta left on both our plates, one of the servers - a charming, older, tiny man who has probably been working at Trattoria Anna Maria for a couple of decades - looked at us quite sternly and pantomimed that we'd get lickin's if we didn't finish. I finished my pasta; Wanda did not. After she'd eaten about a quarter of her pork chop, she announced that she was going to remove the paper napkin from under the bread, wrap the pork chop and take it home. "Do you think he'll believe you ate the bone?" I asked. "I don't care," she said, "I'm takin' this meat." And she did. It is sitting on the desk right next to me at this very moment. I hope she eats it for her midnight snack.

Here's another example of this that I've experienced. At La Bitta last Saturday night. We ordered both panna cotta and tiramisu for dessert. Wanda went to the restroom and I was left with the less-than-half-finished tiramisu. The owner - her name is Debora - came over when she saw it and here is how the conversation went (please imagine her charming Italian-accented English):

D: "What are you doing...with this dessert?"
B: "Too full. Ate too much."
D: "You cannot order food and not finish it."
So, I eat it - I am so stuffed, I can't breathe but I'm going to finish the frickin' tiramisu.
D: "Grazie."
and on her way to another table a few minutes later she taps my shoulder and adds:
D: "Also because then people think you don't like it."

So, the moral of the story is. People in Italy have three or four courses of food at least for dinner every night- sometimes for lunch, too - and they savor it and sit with it and sip their wine and they finish it. They know how much they want and that is what they order. And if by some chance they don't finish it, they DO NOT CARE what happens to it. THEY DO NOT TAKE IT HOME.

I asked the Contessa about this and she assured me "it's cultural."