Nowhere In The Larger Italian Cities, Except By The Exercise Of A
Most Tremendous Determination, Can You Get Any Real Italian Cooking
Or Any Real Italian Dishes.
At the hotels they feed you on a pale,
sad table-d'hote imitation of French cooking, invariably buttressed
with the everlasting veal and the eternal poulet roti.
At the
finish of a meal the waiter brings you, on one plate, two small
withered apples and a bunch of fly-specked sour grapes; and, on
another plate, the mortal remains of some excessively deceased
cheese wearing a tinfoil shroud and appropriately laid out in a
small, white, coffin-shaped box.
After this had happened to me several times I told the waiter with
gentle irony that he might as well screw the lid back on the casket
and proceed with the obsequies. I told him I was not one of those
morbid people who love to look on the faces of the strange dead.
The funeral could not get under way too soon to suit me. It seemed
to me that this funeral was already several days overdue. That
was what I told him.
In my travels the best place I ever found to get Italian dishes
was a basement restaurant under an old brownstone house on
Forty-seventh Street, in New York. There you might find the typical
dishes of Italy - I defy you to find them in Italy without a
search-warrant. However, while in Italy the tourist may derive
much entertainment and instruction from a careful study of table
manners.
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