Dirty Dishes Read online

  A young guy in an expensive suit was coming my way. “Excuse me,” I said, calling on my growing but still meager vocabulary, “I’m lost.”

  “I’m Alan,” he said with a smirk, and kept on walking. It took me a few minutes to decipher what he had said and realize that he was making a joke at my expense. Standing there like an idiot in the middle of the sidewalk, with people moving past me like rushing water around a rock, I felt more lonely than ever.

  But the most upsetting aspect of life here continued to be the food. Everything that had to do with food depressed me. I’d walk by restaurants and see what people were eating: in neighborhood joints it was green salads with grilled chicken on top and in fancy eateries it was nouvelle cuisine, with its silly kaleidoscopic presentations.

  Hungry for home, I decided to visit one of the restaurants in Little Italy downtown, a famous place specializing in seafood that had been there for decades. My walk through the neighborhood caught me off guard: the little souvenir shops with miniature Italian flags and soccer shirts and Frank Sinatra posters for sale—the most superficial, stereotypical depictions of Italian and Italian-American culture. And when I got to the restaurant, I didn’t know what to make of it: there were huge fish tanks in the dining room that made it smell like an aquarium. The food was unfamiliar to me: clams oreganata and other Italian-American dishes that had no true antecedent back home. They also served pastas that were overcooked and all seemed to be swimming in the same red tomato sauce, and were presented in huge mounds; in my opinion, even great pasta should be served in portions no larger than one hundred grams.

  That indulgence was especially disappointing because I was so broke that I ate most of my meals in diners, or tried to: all I wanted was eggs, sunny-side up. Someone told me that occhio di bue translated as “cow’s eyes,” so I’d take a seat at the counter and, with my thick accent, order “eggs cow’s eyes.” More often than not, the waiter would look at me like I was crazy and proceed to ignore me until I gave up and left. I’d sometimes come back to our apartment and call my mother to check in; eventually Papá and I began to speak again, as well, but it was always strained.

  Fortunately, after some sleuthing about, I was able to reconnect with two old friends from Rome who had come here before me. Oreste, an acting-schoolmate of mine, had chased an American girl to New York. They had gotten married and while he still had his roguish good looks, his acting skills were of little use here and he had taken one of the most common immigrant paths and become a cab driver. The other guy, a James Dean lookalike named Claudio who had come to attend the famous Actor’s Studio, had failed in the theater and become an executive with Agip, the Italian oil company.

  When the three of us got together and hung out, we reverted back to our old ways, chain-smoking, laughing about our friends back home, and killing bottles of wine in quick succession.

  But I could see that they were living very different lives. Essentially, they had become different people. Our get-togethers aside, they had been comprehensively assimilated into American society. In particular, Oreste peppered his conversation, even otherwise Italian sentences, with American slang like “asshole” and “motherfucker.” And they dressed like Americans, less conspicuously than they had previously. Maybe they couldn’t afford more expensive threads, but they seemed deliberately conformist in their jeans and knit shirts. There was an air of anticlimax about Claudio and Oreste: so alive and creative just a few years earlier, and now resigned to their workaday lives here in the United States, cogs in the capitalist wheel. I adopted a cinematic reference for these guys who looked familiar but were relieved of their vitality: Body Snatchers. I had nothing against America, but I liked myself Italian and wasn’t interested in becoming an American.

  I’d come back to our apartment after spending time with these pod people and sit on the sofa in a stupor that was only partially brought on by the red wine coursing through my veins. I was confronting the specter of my own ambition. Back in Rome, after being cast in Antony and Cleopatra, I had been on the cusp of theatrical success. Would I have become a celebrity? Who knew? But the possibility had been there. Now, I was a step away from becoming one of the invisibles who drove cabs and sliced meat at the delicatessen and made deliveries.

  To help maintain a strong connection to Tuscany, I’d wrap up my daily vagabonding around New York (job hunting, followed by lunch, followed by wandering the streets) with a trip to the local supermarket, then come home and make dinner for myself and Patty. I felt like my mother, cooking dinner for my father, although the state of supermarkets in America—this was long before the rise of chains like Whole Foods—demanded some creativity to even approximate what we ate in Italy. It was almost impossible to find a good, imported brand of dried pasta (meaning something made from durum), so after one gummy experiment, I gave that up for a time. I began to cook with tougher cuts of meat, punching up the flavor with spices like clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, and cumin—which isn’t Italian but makes a big impact. In time, I developed my in-America repertoire of vegetable soups, stews, and pot roast, and whenever I cooked, I played my cassettes of Italian pop artists such as Venditti, Battisti, and Dalla in the background. In this way, for a few hours each day, it sounded and smelled like home.

  JUST AS I was loath to unpack my suitcase when we first arrived, the truth was that I was terrified of committing to a job here for fear that it would set me on the one-way path to obscurity. But eventually I came to grips with the fact that my stay was open-ended and that any self-respecting man had to go to work in the morning and bring home some money at the end of the week. So, with some help from a family connection, I hooked up with the owner of a small men’s clothing boutique, another transplanted Italian happy just to be in America. He ran a shop in the East Sixties, near Lexington Avenue, and he hired me as his right hand.

  I have no idea how this guy made any money because the shop did precious little business. The mirrored walls were lined with long, steel racks that had men’s suits hanging from them, and in the center of the store were additional racks, suspended from the ceiling, on which hung imported slacks and sport shirts. He’d have me occupy myself by sweeping the floors, wiping down the mirrors and windows, and straightening the suits. Once I finished doing it all, he’d make me do it all again, even though sometimes nobody had entered the store since I had begun the endless loop in the morning.

  After less than a week of this, I had had enough. On Thursday, I left for lunch and decided that I would never go back.

  It was, on its face, an insane decision, but there are times in life when you have to make a change. I had to leave that boarding school, I had to leave Italy, and now I had to leave the boutique. I couldn’t quite put words to my rationale. If I would eventually be allowed to return to Italy, who cared how I paid the rent during my brief time here in the United States? And if I couldn’t return to Italy, then I might as well make peace with the fact that my acting career was at an end, and that I’d need to at least begin life here with a job like this.

  All I knew was that I had to get out of there. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I walked south, downtown. I took a right on Fifty-seventh Street and passed Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany’s.

  Up until that moment, being in such moneyed neighborhoods had depressed me, but not anymore. The opulent surroundings inspired me, made me hungry for success. My bearing and stride took on more purpose. I stood up straighter, puffed my chest out, held my head high, and marched west on Fifty-seventh Street. In those moments I was transformed from a lost soul bobbing through the sea of people into that most classic of New York characters: a striver, somebody looking for his moment, his opportunity, and sure that the city was keeping it tucked away for him somewhere, if he just took the time to go looking for it.

  I turned left on Seventh Avenue and headed downtown, past the Theater District, where the theaters were dark in the middle of the day. I kept forging downward, through the Sodom and Gomorrah they called Times S
quare, through the Garment District and Chelsea and into the West Village. I cut over to Sixth Avenue, the Avenue of the Americas, and, gazing east across it, something caught my eye: just above Houston Street there was a little restaurant with a canary-yellow awning stretched over the door with the name Da Silvano stenciled on it. Da Silvano means “Silvano’s Place,” but in a way that only Italians would understand. It actually means “to Silvano,” as in “let’s go to Sil-vano’s place.”

  I crossed the street and walked up to the restaurant. I looked at the menu in its little windowed box outside: it was in Italian, and the food was the stuff I missed, like fegato alla salvia (calf’s liver with sage) and cacciucco (fish stew). This was a real Italian restaurant, like the ones we had back home.

  I had never thought of working in a restaurant. Those summers back at my uncle’s place were fond memories, to be sure, but I thought of that as just something I had done when I was a kid to get away from home and make some money. But staring at that menu, and looking through the window as the waiters served food to the customers and cleared away the dirty dishes, I suddenly realized that this was where I had been headed when I had left the boutique.

  I opened the door. There are two small dining rooms at Da Sil-vano today, but back then there was just one little room, with a bar in the back corner that looked like a confessional. The size of the room was irrelevant to me: it was the smells that sealed the deal: garlic, rosemary, and that sweet, tannic, primal scent of cooked wine and meat.

  I identified the manager, a stocky young Italian guy named Delfino whose diminutive size and rigid posture reminded me of a jockey. Speaking in Italian, I introduced myself. He spoke with a thick Southern Italian accent that was a delight to hear. I didn’t waste any time and went right ahead and told him I was looking for a job.

  I guess it was clear that I was new to the States, because he asked me what I was doing here in New York. I told him I had just arrived.

  “Hai lavorato nei ristoranti?” he asked me. What restaurant experience did I have?

  I told Delfino about my uncle’s restaurant. I got a bit carried away, explaining how much I’d done there and how natural I was at it, all of the memories reconstituting in my mind as I relayed them for the first time in ages.

  I might have oversold myself, because he said to me, “But you don’t speak English. All I can offer you is a busboy job.”

  I looked around at Da Silvano. It was small, but there was a real attention to detail, an authenticity and familiarity, from the exposed red brick wall to the simple white tablecloths to the espresso machine behind the bar and the pressed-tin ceiling. I didn’t want to leave.

  “Va bene, busboy sia,” I said. Fine, I’ll be a busboy.

  Delfino told me to come back at four o’clock the next day and we shook on it.

  On the way out, I took another look at the menu. There it was, under Antipasti, third from the top: pappa al pomodoro.

  I’d come to the right place.

  INTERLUDE

  WE STOP AS a waiter brings us our puntarelle, a chicory that tastes like a cross between celery and fennel. Pino prepares it after the Roman fashion, cutting it in long strips from the base of the stem and soaking it in ice water, which causes it to curl and become crunchy. He dresses the puntarelle with a vinaigrette of minced garlic, anchovy, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

  I take a bite, and it occurs to me that it’s pretty unusual to see puntarelle in the United States.

  “Where do you get this?” I ask.

  “From Italy. You can also get it from California, but it’s more green, and less wide.”

  As usual, we stop doing business as we eat. But as we approach the Sil-vano chapter, I feel the need to say something, because for such a loquacious guy, Pino has always been strangely stingy about the details of their relationship, which has been built up as a cold war of sorts in the press for almost three decades now. Yet whenever I’ve mentioned Silvano to him over the years, all Pino does is lapse into a derisive, marble-mouthed impression of the man’s distinct speech pattern: “Eh, Pino. How ya’ doin’, eh? Eh. Eh.”

  I’ve always been intrigued by the question of exactly what transpired between these two men. In 2001, I was hired to help Silvano Marchetto rewrite his first cookbook, and I got to know him a little. One cannot observe them and fail to notice the similarities: Silvano ran an authentic Italian trattoria before Pino moved to New York City. He has a knack for showmanship and a gift for drawing celebrities. And, though charming and gregarious in the dining room, he’s also a shrewd businessman with a keen eye for profit.

  Silvano also interacted with his staff in a way I’d never seen anybody do before. One day we were going over some pages when his eye was drawn to something behind me and he leaped up out of his chair. I turned to see that he was stepping up to one of his waiters who had just arrived for his shift.

  “No, no,” Silvano chided him. “That’s now how you come to work in a restaurant.” I missed what had offended Silvano, but that was no problem because he pantomimed a frown and slumped shoulders to show the guy what he looked like.

  “Go outside and come back in the right way.”

  The waiter left and did a one-eighty-degree turn under the awning as the door closed behind him. Then he walked back in with a fake but enormous smile on his face.

  “There, see!” Silvano said. “Now you’re ready to be a waiter.”

  It was exactly the same kind of thing that Pino might do, only with more good humor, and Silvano did stuff like that all the time. For years, I’d wondered exactly how much of Pino’s restaurateur instincts came from his uncle and how much came from Silvano.

  And so, as the puntarelle vanishes from our plates and the time approaches to discuss Silvano, I say: “Pino, you don’t love the guy, but didn’t you learn a lot from him?”

  He takes a long pause and stares up into the ceiling. Pino clearly doesn’t like to admit it, but, eventually, he does: “You know, you’re right. In his own way, that guy was some kind of a genius.”

  FOUR

  Home Away from Home

  I HAD NO IDEA at the time, but I’d just landed a job at one of the hottest, most exclusive restaurants in New York City. Despite its humble dimensions and design, Da Silvano was a magnet for celebrities, a canteen for rock stars, a hangout for downtown artists, movie stars, and directors, and one of the publishing world’s favorite destinations for literary lunching. It was an anything-goes, pocket-size downtown counterpart to the jacket-required uptown institution Le Cirque, where Sirio Maccioni hosted celebrities and the media elite long before they had that nickname.

  I was oblivious to all of this, but I was excited by what I had stumbled upon nonetheless. I left my impromptu interview with Delfino in a state of infatuation with Da Silvano, my heart aflutter, my capacity for happiness in America suddenly increased exponentially.

  The next day, I couldn’t wait to start work and was almost thirty minutes early. I killed the time walking around the West Village, which wasn’t far removed from its beatnik history, evident in coffee shops like the Figaro, with Italian newspapers shellacked to its walls, and the scent of sweet marijuana in the air. All of this added to the sense of rejuvenation and reawakening that I’d had since the previous night, a feeling that I was back in touch with my Italian roots and my heritage as an actor.

  When the time came to report for duty at Da Silvano, I pushed through the front door, instantly spotting Delfino. We shook hands and he gave me a tour of the place, which didn’t take long. I was struck that the kitchen was run entirely by South Americans with not an Italian in sight.

  I took a moment to peruse the menu in greater detail. Silvano’s probably had the most authentic Italian food of any restaurant in New York at the time. There were also some dishes that were decidedly not Italian, like oyster stew and duck with dry vermouth, but I was so excited to begin working that I didn’t dwell on these incongruities.

  Silvano’s place was nothing like my u
ncle’s restaurant, but the motor skills I’d developed and honed more than ten years earlier came right back and I began setting tables, making sure the place was spiffy when we opened for dinner.

  As I did this, the front door was flung open and in strutted a short man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a round face, leather pants, and a suede vest over a pink oxford shirt. In unison, the waiters stopped what they were doing and called out, “Silvano!”

  He seemed like something of a peacock to me, a bit of an exhibitionist. As he made his rounds of the waiters they each took their turn laughing at whatever he whispered to them.

  Delfino led him over to me and introduced us. Silvano looked at me curiously, not making eye contact. He said something but I couldn’t understand it because Silvano Marchetto speaks his own mumbled version of English that’s impossible to decipher until you’ve spent significant time with him. Think Popeye, crossed with an Italian accent, throw in a bit of slurring, turn the speed up to about twice as fast as most people speak, and you get the idea.

  After he said whatever it was that he said, I just stared at him, completely confused and unsure of how to respond or what to say. I didn’t want to get fired on my first day, but I literally had no idea what he was talking about.

  Throwing me a lifeline, Delfino told Silvano that, like him, I was from Tuscany.

  “Toscano, eh,” he said.

  “Si,” I replied, expecting that we might talk for a while. But he quickly moved on and didn’t say another word to me all through dinner.

  I found this rude, but as the evening wore on, I quickly developed a grudging respect for this guy’s unmistakable talent as a restaurateur. Watching him work the dining room—chatting up people, personally delivering food and wine to their table, and performing eccentric bits of business—I was at once reminded of vaudeville comedians, rodeo clowns, and the mimes and other street performers of Paris. He was hyper, irrepressible, and almost pathologically eager to please, with a real passion for interacting with, and amusing, his customers.