I have enjoyed writing for most of my life. While still living in Italy, I was planning to study journalism, until a beautiful French Canadian woman seduced me back to Canada to start a new life.
From time to time, I would return to journaling and writing with (some) dreams of glory and a genuine enjoyment for storytelling. Fast forward to the present day, I feel rather grateful to have a spot in this lovely little paper to share some of those stories.
Today, I am taking you back with a few excerpts from my personal journals during a particularly formative time in my career. It’s 2007, and I had recently moved back to Italy with the intention to stay. Getting a job, as often happens in the industry, was rather easy, despite the seemingly half-century-long recession the country was experiencing. Fresh from reading Kitchen Confidential, I landed a job as Chef de Partie at an iconic restaurant in the Versilia region in Northern Tuscany: L’Osteria del Mare in Forte dei Marmi.
Located right by the sea, with a dining room that seats about 150, divided between the inside dining room and the outside patio, the restaurant is one of the busiest in town. It is known as an enoteca—a small sanctuary for wine lovers—with over 10,000 bottles stored in a beautiful downstairs cellar, and it features a small Table d’Hôte, exclusively focused on seafood.
On June 13, I write:
“…We receive a fish delivery daily, and nothing, in the best of Bourdain’s tradition, needs to be put away. The cooks avidly jump on it, picking and choosing items for their daily specials. ‘Octopus!’ will scream the chef, and somebody will make their way through a labyrinth of cases of fish. ‘Seabass! The zucchini flowers are here, let’s go! We needed them cleaned yesterday!’
The vibe is chaotic and steamy, and the quality of each item that makes its entrance through the back door is a young cook’s dream. You can smell the sea in each case; things are still moving or just recently expired as they await their destiny. The menu is what you would expect from a region that makes purity the base of its cuisine: mare caldo (warm sea) is a variety of seafoods lightly blanched à la minute, finished with a lemon-infused olive oil, steamed langoustine, tagliatelle with scallops and porcini mushrooms, risotto with clams and zucchini flowers, warm octopus salad with pesto and potatoes, gnocchi with scampi and tomatoes in a champagne garlic cream, wood oven-roasted whole fish, fish baked in a sea crust, and so on. Damn…”
On June 12, I write:
“…On my second day, I learned how to cook beans. I learned that beans should only be stirred with a wooden spoon and that any other material would cause their overcooking. ‘This is how the elders have taught me,’ I was told. I nodded in both agreement and confusion. Tradition is not always knowledge, but I am a romantic at heart and oblige with ease at the request for a wooden spoon…”
And again:
“…The two dishwashers, Marina and Giulia, are, in reality, older housewives; they both carry endless cooking knowledge, as their title implies here. They are the core and soul of the whole operation. Mostly treated like crap, they are really known for their motherly kindness and patience—two highly valued qualities in an environment of mostly deranged individuals. They know better than most that most men are idiots, and they seem to navigate this tough environment with grace. Ironically, they are also the ones that the chef will consult first when stuck with a dish…”
On May 17:
“…‘Not even in Paris,’ Nicola told me today while finishing plating a dessert.
The mango semifreddo with caramelized green apple mousse is one of his most successful creations. It is a popular and beautifully presented dessert…”
About Booze (May 20):
“…Booze is easily available. Somebody’s last day? Champagne, please. A.C. Milan just won the Champions League? Beers all around. Lunch service is just about to start? An aperitif should put everybody in the right mood… and my personal favourite… ‘Is anybody thirsty?’ We actually have the freedom to open the fridge and help ourselves, but at the same time, nobody seems to abuse it. Or maybe everybody is drunk all the time. I just don’t know anymore…”
And again, on July 10:
“…The stuff we get in is simply a joy. Today I got to play with a 60-lb. yellowfin tuna that made its entrance around 10 o’clock in the morning. I almost embraced it as I moved it to my station. I smiled, put my gloves on, and got to work. Then, sea asparagus trickled in. Could it be that Italians eat seaweed? We served them with homemade spaghetti alla chitarra (‘guitar style’ spaghetti, slightly thicker than usual and cut with a guitar-like tool), basil, cherry tomatoes, a light garlic olive oil, and thinly sliced bottarga di tonno—cured tuna roe, which had been previously salted and shaped in a pancetta-like log. Doesn’t it sound delicious? It certainly tasted so.
And it is not only the food that is getting to me. I am finding my way around the kitchen now, and that makes me proud and very happy. The restaurant is busy, busy, busy; it helped to make that happen pretty quickly. And it’s the way things are done too. Sitting down at the end of the night, drinking Lambrusco, discussing specials, trying the new cheeses we just got in, and figuring out which supplier (we have 17 of them) will bring what tomorrow is definitely my kind of fun…”
About the strange people that you get to meet (August 17):
“…The lemon guy walks in the back door with 10 juicy kilograms of beautiful lemons. You can smell the lemons as he walks in. ‘Once you try them, you’ll never go back,’ he says smiling, with crooked eyes, extremely short shorts, and a slight hunch on his back. A partisan during the war, he proudly shares stories of delivering messages across enemy lines in baskets full of his intoxicating lemons. He definitely looks like somebody that has lived through some stuff. The chef hands him 20 euros, and he will happily do that a couple of times a week. Because the lemon guy’s lemons have the colour of gold and the smell of summertime embedded in their skin.
From mussels to fresh herbs, forest strawberries, anchovies, sardines, somebody out there has caught something and will try their luck at the restaurant’s back door—a surfer dude with no shirt on or an Armani-dressed rep. It’s fun to see this small procession day after day.
On July 27:
“…And then it happened, that feeling that reminded me I wasn’t at work, that I was just a kid playing…”
On August 28:
“…I am having a cigarette in the back with Salvatore—a soldier that served in Iraq and that has plenty of stories—and I hear Remo, the maître d’, asking for the chef, Filomena.
‘My name is f**g Alessandro, you son of a bh. How many times do I have to tell you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, Filomena, Alessandro, don’t bust my balls… Piero is on the phone.’
When the owner is on the phone, it usually means that something fun is going to happen, and naturally, our attention turns to him.
‘Pronto? Piero, what do you have?
Swordfish?
Yeah, yeah, we can use it.
What’s the weight?
You don’t know?
Well, how the f*** does it look? Around 50?
OK… send it down.’
He hangs up the phone and starts swearing. He can’t say no to Piero but also knows that when Piero calls him directly, it means something is up.
Sure enough, an hour and a half later, the company’s van pulls over. Two guys struggle with a large body—95 kg of fish, sword first, and then the massive, endless, silver body, bug-eyed and still staring at you. You’re almost afraid to touch it because it’s so fresh it might bite.
We don’t have a counter big enough to cut it. Filomena is still swearing. Tuscan people are known masters in the matter of swearing. Andrea and I hold the thing up, while Filomena grabs the scimitar. His right arm quickly sinks inside the body before emerging again, his voice echoing throughout the kitchen… ‘About 50ish… he said about f*****g 50 kilos, the moth*******r!’”
On September 12:
“…Everybody sings. It kind of bothers me since I AM THE SINGING CHEF, damn it!!…”
My experience at Osteria del Mare would end in November of that year. As the season wound down, I had made my choice to leave Italy and go back to Canada. While I learned so much from this experience, I found myself at odds with a culture often toxic and highly racist. Time would prove to me that I made a good choice.