at Le Madri, had taken one look at my chef de cuisine, shaken his head
and warned, "Watch out for dees guy. He'll stobb you inna back," making
a stabbing gesture as he said it.
"What? What's his problem? He's Sicilian?" I asked jokingly, knowing
Gianni's preference for all things Northern.
"Worse," said Gianni. "He's from Naples".
I had yet to understand that I was surrounded by blue-eyed Northerners,
people who felt that even I—though not Italian—was still preferable to
someone from the South. Shrewd, conspiratorial, absolutely obsessed
with which way the tide was going, by who was in and who was out, and
by the daily mood of our leader, some of these characters lived and
breathed the kind of existence you'd expect of a Medici. These guys were
good! Good at the politics and shifting alliances of a big, essentially
Italian business, good at the kind of stuff I though I'd always been good
at. They were expert at keeping the boss as happy as he needed to be,
while at the same time deftly neutralizing potential competitors and
detractors. I was in way over my head—and we're not even talking about
my relative ignorance of the cuisine. This was a jungle that, however
beautiful and exotic, was decidedly not my jungle.
Gianni was right about everything, and perhaps I should have listened
more carefully. But Pino—and I'm sorry to disappoint his enemies here
—was always perfectly correct with me: charming, straightforward,
generous and truthful. He never said he'd do a thing for me and then
failed to do it. I liked the guy, and if I bumped into him today, I'd say so.
I liked that he could tell you all about exhaust fans, electrical outlets,
point of sale and the history of pasta, that he knew everybody by name in
all of his many restaurants, that he knew about the faulty compressor in
the number two freezer in one of them, and that he could list every
ingredient of every dish in every restaurant. He was on top of things—if
relentlessly so. I had to respect that after working for so many