New York: do Americans cook better than Italians?
The Old World is better at wine, beauty, smoking, imperialism, social democracy, manners and romance. The New World – and I am really talking about the Americas – fares better on freedom, organised crime, extreme weather events, war, capitalism and genetically modified crops. Which you prefer is a matter of taste. But who makes a better lunch?
It is a question so glib, so gargantuan, so impossibly unfocused that it would be foolish of me to attempt to answer it. And so there I was, somewhere between Brooklyn Heights and Red Hook, with a perfect view of lower Manhattan across the East River, ready to give it a go. I have seen your letters; I hear you: “Get out of London, broaden your horizons, there is more to the world than the wonders contained neatly within the boundaries of the M25.” OK, OK. Enough already!
Yes, Silver Spoon takes on New York, New York (jazz hands). Americans are a literal-minded people – just look at that unromantic, un-mysterious urban planning in its favourite city. The grid system might help the cognitively dull navigate Manhattan, but at the expense of intrigue and happenstance and obliquity. As for the big park slap bang in the middle of the borough? What should we call it, fellow pilgrims? Central Park? Such is the cumulative effective of this conurbation: as if you had asked an accountant to have a go at laying out St Peter’s Square.
So when I was told about a great southern Italian restaurant on the waterfront in Brooklyn, I should have known not to expect caponata, cime di rapa, those funny tripe sandwiches found on the roadside in Palermo and anything else stereotypical of the provinces south of Lazio. No, I quickly worked out that “southern Italian restaurant” actually meant the American Deep South meets the culinary universe of Italy. If, like me, you are a fusion-sceptic, then you will understand that this was a troubling discovery: Caravaggio takes on the bayou, Giuseppe Tom Sawyer di Lampedusa…
Subscribe to the New Statesman for £1 a week
I went in, closed-mindedly. On the menu at Popina: scallops (Italy has a coast, so I suppose they also have scallops) with avocado and onion and lime (Giorgia Meloni would have something to say about that and we all know it would not be kind); arancini – so far, so Italian – with honey (argh!); pappardelle with ham hocks and collards. I can’t tell you what it was like because why would I order that? And then, the star of proceedings: hot chicken Milanese, an act of gastronomy so many degrees removed from the Capitoline Hill it might as well be from the moon.
I will say, by the time we started eating, my bad attitude softened considerably (though that may be a chronic disposition) – because Popina is a batty conceit executed with typical American precision and standards, which is to say: yeah, fine, whatever, good restaurant. I was pleased to see the bread came from a bakery demurely named WINNER. Yup, that’s the America I know and love.
You might think that a boots-on-the-ground investigation into the New York food scene should have sent me looking for $1 pizza slices, bagels, giant corn-fed steaks and robust red wines. But I think in Popina we can access something else about the place: a New World city grasping for the old boot in search of the kind of authority only the Old World can confer; a restaurant almost Trumpian in its nature, with that well known mix of erratic confidence and naked self-doubt; a people who might be the most Catholic puritans I’ve ever met.
It would be gauche of me to dispute the thinking of the great American novelist, but I just don’t think F Scott Fitzgerald got it right when he said New York contained “all the mystery and the beauty in the world”. No, anyone familiar with the relentlessly crotchety inhabitants would know neither adjective applies. What we have is something altogether more charming: a kind of swaggering machismo and desperate need to be liked.
So back to my original question: who makes a better lunch? Advantage (real) Italians on that one, I’m afraid. A statement sweeping, absurd, unscientific and entirely befitting of a New Yorker.
[Further reading: The Everyman: cinemas make bad restaurants]
Content from our partners
Related
