Various beefs

Faithful reader criticalfart will be glad to hear that the only McDonald's in Fidenza seems to have been one of the town's COVID casualties. It was located on the town's outskirts, and we'd pass by it on our way to and from some of the supermarkets we trek out to every so often for items that aren't available at the one down the street. It never seemed very busy. Now it's an empty shell.

Fidentini craving a Big Mac can still visit the chain's ritzier store at the big tourist-serving outlet mall outside of town. When I looked online to confirm that one was still open, I noticed that Italian-American food celebrity and restaurant titan Joe Bastianich has endorsed the fast-food behemoth's new range of "gli hamburger" made with Italian beef and some industrialized version of Italian cheese. I can't find any evidence that Bastianich is linking himself to McDonald's back in the USA, probably because hawking jumped-up Quarter-Pounders might tarnish the rep of his Michelin-star restaurants in New York and California.

While Fidenza proper is currently McDonald's-free--nor is there any other American fast-food franchise, as far as I know--the local kebaberies are alternative sources of low-cost, high-calorie comestibles. A few years ago we liked a kebab place down the street from us, a spot also favored by local teenagers of all backgrounds.

I don't know if I've become more picky or their food has declined, but I now find the seasoning on their doner meat off-putting (it has that "made in a chemical plant in New Jersey" quality, although I'm sure it was concocted more locally) and I'm not even sure it's actually meat or some kind of soy protein. Worst of all, they--and all the other kebab shops--now add a big handful of french fries to every sandwich.

I didn't say, "Senza patatine, per favore" quickly enough.

Until recently french fries were not a feature of Italian cuisine, but nowadays they seem ubiquitous wherever people go for cheap and satisfying. Kebab places used to all serve rice as part of their platters, but now it's always fries. And french fries are the defining topping of an  "American" pizza. (Can we sue for defamation, or is this something we deserve?) I couldn't imagine who would want to eat such a thing until I repeatedly witnessed Italians doing just that. 

I should note that my food-snob husband still likes going out for doner sandwiches, with or without fries, and looks forward to doing just that whenever my social schedule requires that he eat by himself. Why he enjoys them is one of those mysteries that keep a long-running marriage from becoming too boring, I suppose.

Speaking of meat, last weekend we finally got back to a restaurant out in the countryside that we visited with Pam and Romano some years ago. It was a country trattoria that on Sundays served a bollito misto feast, a bunch of different meats--beef, pork, veal, sausage, tongue--all simmered together. After a first course of little cheese tortelli in the broth the meats had cooked in, two young women with well-developed arm muscles came around with a big cart and carved each patron's meats of choice to order. The dining room was crowded with big multi-generational Italian families enjoying Sunday lunch. Danny ordered roast guinea fowl while the rest of us had the bollito, a decision he quickly came to regret, since the bird was (like many Italian meat courses), simple without being particularly good, while the bollito was both tastier and a lot more fun. He's been talking about going back ever since.

This time we went by ourselves, since Pam and Romano were otherwise engaged. The restaurant had changed its name, and when we got there we saw that its style had changed, too. Although the tables were farther apart (as a COVID precaution), there were still plenty of Italian families in the house. But there was now a written menu that not only listed the offerings but extolled the chef's credentials and expertise--the chef being a man and not someone's grandma--and the cart that brought the bollito misto around was now manned by a fellow wearing a dashing red-and-black chef's outfit with a very tall black toque that made him look like a Shinto priest. 

The clearest evidence that the osteria had moved from down-home to upscale came when the cart arrived at our table and the meats we chose were served to us on...square plates.

Did anyone's Italian grandma have square plates? I think not.

Clockwise from the upper left, that's veal shin, tongue, cotechino (a boiled pork sausage), beef muzzle, mostarda di frutta, a slab of ripieno (literally stuffing, a big dumpling of breadcrumbs and Parmesan boiled in the meat broth), Black Angus shoulder, and a rather gristly piece of beef belly.

Shin, tongue, muzzle, and cotechino all stand up to being boiled. The steak meat, however, was dramatically less tasty than that gigantic bistecca we had in Florence. The appeal of a bollito misto, however, has less to do with the individual items than with the variety and the condiments. At our last visit the restaurant had offered only mostarda di frutta, a traditional but genuinely strange preparation of brightly (artificially) colored, very candied fruit mixed with fiery mustard oil. It tastes like something you'd give an annoying neighbor kid on Halloween to teach him to never trust anyone ever again, yet when eaten with boiled meat it's kind of addictive. The new chef had added another traditional sauce, a tangy mix of anchovies, parsley, garlic, and olive oil, plus a bright orange salsa that tasted exactly like my very WASP-y grandmother's delicious piccalilli relish. For all I know Italian grandmothers make it, too.

It was an enjoyable if not transcendent meal, and the Guttorno we drank along with it was good, too, and our lunch wasn't too costly--they hadn't used their square plates as an excuse to triple their prices. But for us the restaurant had lost the charm of its older self. Also, since we don't have a car we took a taxi there and back, and unlike the meal, the cab fare was shockingly expensive, which made the prospect of returning to the osteria that much less appealing. 

Foreigner that I am, I'm still puzzling over whether the driver brazenly cheated us or I just don't understand how to read an Italian taxi meter. In the normal course of things here I rarely feel the vulnerable helplessness that can be so much a part of trying to live in a country where you don't speak the language very well and don't grasp all kinds of things that everyone else understands automatically. I'm grateful it has happened to us rarely and I surprised myself by how upset I was when it did. 

But not upset enough to reach for the all-American comfort of a Big Mac. Or an "American" pizza. Instead I soothed myself with a big plate of pasta.