21 February 2015 – Stammtisch

We have recently become friends with a new family to our neighborhood.  They have two kids who are about the same age as our kids and we all get along well.  The wife is American, the husband is German.

The husband recently suggested we start following a German tradition called “Stammtisch”.  This is when the men of the village get together at the local pub or biergarten, have a beer, and discuss important (and unimportant) matters of affairs.  Do I want to participate in an old German tradition of drinking beer with the guys?...Uh, ok, that kind of seems like a no-brainer.

The taverns in the little German villages and towns set aside a specific table for just the occasion.  This table, the “stammtisch”, is always left open for the locals no matter how busy the place might be.

There is also a kind of unwritten protocol about who participates.  You don’t just sit down and declare yourself “a regular”, you have to be invited or maybe “accepted” as such.  Often, the group is comprised of the 60-and-older men of the town, who have probably lived in the town their whole lives, probably just as generations of their fathers before them.

What is discussed at these important gatherings of the “tribal elders”?…..women.  (Shocking, right?)  Also local politics.  The weather.  Property disputes.  Old family grievances.  Beer.  Local sports teams.  Planning for local town festivals and fundraisers.  Status of their children.  Etc.  I don’t know if this is fact or not, but I strongly suspect that what is discussed at stammtisch, stays at stammtisch.

I looked up the translation of “Stammtisch”.  “Tisch” translates to “table”.  “Stamm” has many translations eg. stem, root, trunk, tribe, clan, regulars, regular patrons.  It’s interesting to me that the same word can be used for those different meanings and connotations.  I think that probably says a lot about the meaning of the “stammtisch” tradition.

This tradition is more common in Southern Germany, where it seems most traditions are more commonly found.  The same type of thing is seen in a lot of Italian towns and villages too, although it seems like it’s usually more a couple of benches in the central piazza, or maybe a small table at the local coffee bar.

We started our little stammtisch in our local town of Arcugnano.  Just up the street from where we live is our local birreria/pizzeria.  It’s a 2-minute walk for both my new German friend and I, even though we are coming from opposite directions.  We come home from work, have dinner with our families, do the kid-nighttime routine, take a quick walk up to the top of the street for a beer or two, and then walk home.

I say that like we’ve been doing it for awhile – we just had our first stammtisch the other night.  And it was a pretty modest one at that, being just the two of us and all.  {Since writing the first draft of this post, we’ve met again and have started to expand the circle with some new blood.}

Also, as I write about the proximity of our local birreria, it dawns on me that having “a bar/restaurant” in a residential community could be seen as a detractor in the U.S.  Here, it’s a really nice benefit.  It’s clean, smoke-free, and quiet.  It doesn’t generate tons of new car traffic, people don’t leave trash in the street, there are no neon signs out front, there is no graffiti, and there are no piles of cardboard boxes anywhere to be seen.  It’s a family-run restaurant where we’ve come to know most of the people there.  One of the sisters who works there has children who go to school with Isabel and Josh, so we often see her at school-dropoff in the morning.  It’s not uncommon for some of the neighborhood kids to go there on their own to play cards, grab a gelato, or pickup their family’s carryout order of pizza.  It’s just a chilled-out place that serves good food, offers good beer, charges family-friendly prices, and has a very ‘part of the neighborhood’ feel to it – the perfect kind of place to host Stammtisch.

ct

Josh's Asillo Class Jan'14

I love all the names.
ct

2Mar2015 – Lunch at Da Angelo’s

It was one of my favorite trattorias when I lived here from 1995-1998, and it is one of my favorite trattorias today.  The place is virtually the same, with only some recent renovations including a few new fresco-type paintings on the wall.  The food is the same – delicious, authentic, and awesome.

The people are all the same.  The same family who ran the place then, runs the place now - same women working the coffee bar, same guy preparing meals in the kitchen (one of the owners/brothers), same guy working the pizza oven (another one of the owners/brothers), same guys serving the tables (the nephews).  There are three generations of “Angelo’s” working there.

The family is from Amalfi and they are very, very proud to be from Amalfi.  Of course, Amalfi has the best food, the best sea, the best life.  And oh, mamma mia, if they ever have anything on the menu “al Amalfitana”, order it.  Trust me.

Like a lot of places in the area, they offer a fixed lunch menu for 11 Euro.  For 11 Euro you get: ½ liter of bottled water (natural or frizzante), ¼ liter of house wine (always a bit more for me, because they know me), a basket bread, a first course (usually pasta), a second course (usually meat or seafood), a side (which can be a large mixed salad, cooked/roasted seasonal vegetables, or potatoes prepared different ways), and an after-lunch coffee (Italian style, of course).  No tip, no tax.  Total = 11 Euro.

Now, let me try to explain what that really means.  Yesterday, I ordered one of my favorite pasta dishes, penne alla arrabiata.  It comes out on a huge plate, perfectly made pasta (not too soft or chewy like too often in the U.S.), plenty of sauce with actual chunks of cherry tomatoes and a healthy amount of olive oil, and piping hot.  It’s served with freshly grated parmigiano – not the uniformly-grated supermarket stuff, but the fresh stuff that has little chunks and flakes of cheese in it from being grated by hand.  And because they know me, they automatically bring me some of their homemade olio piccante – spicy olive oil that comes in what looks to be a re-used olive jar, which has been marinating with a bunch of hot peppers still in the jar, where you use a teaspoon to spoon out as much as you want and drizzle it over your plate of hot, flavorful pasta.  So good!  So good, in fact, that it is only natural to take some of that fresh bread and sop-up all of the oil and tomato sauce and essence that’s left behind after the pasta is gone.  Oh my Lord, I am going to miss that simple dish when we leave here.

That’s just the first course.  Also remember that we are still talking about a random, weekday lunch.

The salad is delivered.  It is a big glass bowl of fresh, green lettuce - the kind of green lettuce you’d see coming out of your grandmother’s garden.   Flavorful tomatoes.  Shredded carrots.  No need for a bath of dressing.  Just lettuce, tomato, and carrot with real extra-virgin olive oil and a little splash of balsamico.  Why does a simple mixed salad taste so much better here?

Now the second course.  Normally, I order the mussels.  A big, hot plate of plumb, beautiful mussels that have been perfectly prepared.  Normally, I save room to take a couple pieces of that delicious soft bread and soak-up as much of that lemony, garlicy, peppery, seafoody scrumptiousness of liquid that sits in the bottom of my plate.  Not today.  That’s normally a Friday special and today is Monday. 

Today, my friend and waiter, Pasquale, started given us our choices.  The fixed menu doesn’t come with a menu, but usually 3 or 4 choices for each course given to you verbally at your table.  The first choice he offered was “Pesce Almafitana” which is fish served with roasted black olives, roasted cherry tomatoes, olive oil, lemon, capers, and roasted garlic.  I told him he could stop right there.

What he delivered was a thing of beauty.  It was a plate the size of a small pizza with a large salmon fillet, a trout-like fish served whole (head and tail attached), another large chunk of salmon, and another large chunk of white fish.  The olives were to die for.  The roasted garlic.  The capers.  The cherry tomatoes that just oozed flavor so well-suited with the olive oil.  The fish was perfectly prepared, not over-cooked, but flaky, tender, moist, and full of flavor.   It was a feast.  That plate alone, served at any decent restaurant in the U.S. is at least a $22 entrée, and I doubt that it would be prepared that well and taste that good.

The table wine isn’t great, but it isn’t awful, and there’s plenty of it.  Then, after lunch comes the obligatory coffee, an Italian style espresso that is believed to be a digestive (digestive), but also serves to coat the palette like melted dark chocolate.

Speaking of chocolate, lunch doesn’t come with dessert.  The strange part, though, dessert doesn’t even occur to me.  It’s just not needed.  In fact, it’s only now that I think about how healthy that meal was.  It was the classic “Mediterranean Diet” meal, but without the label or promotion or trendiness or marketing.

I gave big “complimenti” to Angelo (the elder) and he gave me the wink and the nod and the pinched fingers to the pursed lips sign meaning, “yeah buddy, I hooked you up, didn’t I?”

How many meals do you finish and think, “I can’t let these people charge me so little for what they just served me”?  11 Euro…for everything?  Come on!  The kicker is that for these folks, their real gratification comes not (just) from the profit, but instead from the appreciation of their effort and their craft.  They enjoy serving good food, made in the style of their home region, and have it appreciated by the people who come to their restaurant.  For all of the American in me, it is so nice to have this simple joy of anti-commercialism woven into the day.

And my description of Da Angelo’s cannot be complete without two other side notes:

1.      My friend and waiter, Pasquale – his name translates to “Easter”.  His brother is named Natale for “Christmas”.

2.       Giovanni is the big, loud, ultra-gregarious cook.  He is the prototypical large Italian personality in a family restaurant, who everyone knows and who treats you like a favorite Godfather from the moment he meets you.  With so much love and generosity and Almalfitana pride, you are forced to excuse him for the big, double-cheeked kiss greetings he gives you (men too!) that leaves you a little scratched from the stubble on his face and sopping wet from his sweat.  Summertime is particularly bad with the sweat.  The first time I took my parents there and introduced them to Giovanni, he made such a production out of greeting them, and took my Mom by such complete shock with his bear hug and big, sweaty kisses (it was summertime), that I honestly thought she was about to scream and/or pee herself.  

  

ct

No Work Talk -15Feb2015

Imagine the scene: Friday night, after a week of work and school, a group of parents from the 1^st grade class bring their kids to a class gathering at the local pizza parlor.  Maybe 8 or 10 families are there.  All the kids gravitate to the playroom inside the pizza parlor, the adults sitting at a long table with a beer or glass of wine.  The men generally congregate toward one end of the table, the women to the other.   A random selection of public school parents hanging out, getting to know each other. 

A couple of hours later we pull our over-tired kids away even as they cry bloody murder that they are entitled to five more minutes.  We finally get our kids in our cars, they instantly crash, drive home, piggy-back rides up to bed, pretty typical scene.

Back in the kitchen recuperating in the quiet, a few things dawn on me.  First, the past 2.5 hours of socializing was done in 100% Italian language, for the kids and the adults.  There were 0 other Americans present and most of the Italians spoke little to no English.  There was no hesitation or trepidation from anyone in our family to attend an event like this, knowing it would be all in Italian, which is pretty cool by itself.  It is still pretty exhausting to have to concentrate for that long, especially at the end of an already long week, and doubly especially with so much noise and distraction at the party.  {I lag behind everyone else in the family with Italian language skills and I am far from fluent.}

The second thing that dawned on me is that for the past 2.5 hours of conversation between 7 or 8 first grade fathers who don’t know each other very well, there was not one minute spent talking about work.  As a matter of fact, besides their curiosity of me and my role on “the American base” (which always generates a lot of curiosity among the locals), no one asked anyone so much as what they did for a living.  It never came up…in 2.5 hours of random conversation…ever.  I couldn’t tell you what most of them do for work and not because of a lack of comprehension.  I think one guy worked with the mechanical parts that are used in drilling equipment.  The only reason there was any reference to that is because Italians (most foreigners we’ve met) love to tell you about their travels to the U.S.  This guy had been to several places in the U.S. like Kansas and Texas and Louisiana – not exactly top 3 U.S. tourist destinations – which generated the question of why he went there.  His trips to the U.S. were work-related and I finally figured out the part about the drilling equipment.

There was never any declaration of “no shop talk” either. It’s not as if someone said, “Please guys, let’s not talk about work tonight.”  Nope.  It wasn’t even as if there was an unspoken understanding that this wasn’t the place to discuss work.  Really, it was more as if it never even occurred to them to talk about work.  It wasn’t on their radar.  Imagine that.  That would NEVER happen in the U.S.  There is no way 8 random dads get together for 2.5 hours of conversation without someone asking someone else “So what do you do?”

What did we talk about?  We talked about our kids, the school, the curriculum, the economy, and the weather.  We talked about the differences between Italian dialects and American accents.  We talked a lot about activities in the mountains nearby.  One guy in particular is an expert “powder skier” who spends most weekends in the winter exploring some “off piste” slopes, and was full of interesting information.  He showed us the “avalanche app” he had on his phone that provided up-to-date, detailed information on all of the avalanche conditions in the Dolomites.  I never knew so much about avalanches as I learned that night.  We talked a lot about favorite vacation spots, good food combinations, wine (which everyone here seems to know a lot about), and extended families (who all seemed to live nearby).

When I mentioned this observation to our good friend Eros, he looked at me blankly and couldn’t understand why I thought that was interesting.  Eros is a retired electrician, who spent a lot of time in the past playing soccer and hiking the Dolomites, and who is among lots of other things a regional expert in mushrooms.  He’s been married for over 40 years, spends a lot of time with his granddaughter, and keeps busy with his “honey-do” list from his wife.  His explanation was simple: for most Italians, work is something that goes on in the background to pay the bills.  It is just not such a central aspect of most people’s lives.  Why would it be?  We only have one life, he explains, why spend it so focused on work and money when there are so many other things to be passionate about?

That’s a generalization and I know it’s not true for all Italians.  Everyone falls on a spectrum.  But where most Italians fall on that spectrum is pretty far from where most Americans fall on that spectrum, for good or bad, and it was never so evident to me as our time at the “First Grade Pizza Night”.

ct