About that time I accidentally ate soba noodles and raw squid in ink broth

I'll meet you any time you want in our Italian Restaurant; except in Tokyo

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Two, Issue 66

A bottle of whites, a bottle of red
Perhaps a bottle of rose instead
We'll get a table near the street
In our old familiar place
You and I, face to face
A bottle of red, a bottle of white
It all depends upon your appetite
I'll meet you any time you want
In our Italian Restaurant

The Sunday Reader, Feb. 25, 2024

I was born on The Day The Music Died into a family so Sicilian no one would have noticed if that wedding that kicks off The Godfather had taken place at one of our family gatherings.

I was fortunate to grow up with all four grandparents; I had one of each: One born and raised in Italy; one born in the US; one born in the US during a family vacation; and one born on the boat from Italy to Ellis Island.

The latter was Eva. She was the youngest, and the smallest: four foot ten, and maybe 95 pounds soaking wet.

Everyone was terrified of her. Rudely reach across the table to grab something? Eva would stab you in the arm with a fork. Even if you were eight.

But you weren’t rude again!

Wednesdays and Sundays were pasta days, but we ate Italian every day. There were sporadic desultory efforts to get us to eat American food, which were met with an enormous lack of enthusiasm. Which was quite understandable, in retrospect; I thought rice was inedible until I got to Japan in my 20s, at which point I discovered that a) I’d been eating Minute Rice, and b) No one in Asia thought Minute Rice was actually rice, or would eat it.

Then there was Thanksgiving, that most American of holidays. It divided our family every year. The women insisted that we celebrate this quintessential American holiday by eating the traditional turkey with all the trimmings. The men said if that happened they were going to an Italian restaurant.

The kids did not get a vote. If we offered a suggestion, we were always told the traditional Sicilian joke: If we’d wanted your opinion, we’d have beaten it out of you.

Cooler heads prevailed, and a compromise was reached. It was simple, actually. We just had two Thanksgiving feasts.

First came the turkey, with all the trimmings, yams, green beans, ham, mashed potatoes…all of it. And you had to eat at least a plate full, or Eva would stab you with that fork before you could grab anything from Feast Two.

Which was an entire Italian holiday spread: homemade ravioli, spaghetti and meatballs, skinny sausages, fat sausages, braciole…

Desert all came out at once: pumpkin pie, cannoli, pecan pie, eclairs, espresso in little demitasse cups…Basically we ate for 6 hours, with everyone talking Italian and English interchangeably.

So while I was not fluent in Italian in the classic sense, I could order food and swear, which is really all you need to be a proper Sicilian. Of course, if you did swear, even if you repeated something an adult had just said, Eva would whack you with a wooden spoon.

So it wasn’t surprising decades later when some friends knocked on my Hardy Barracks door in Tokyo looking for my help. There was a new and fashionable Italian restaurant, but all the menus were in Italian, which none of them could read. Would I come along and translate?

Why of course!

It was a short walk from Hardy Barracks across Roppongi to the restaurant. When we got there we found an Italian restaurant that would have fit right into a Billy Joel song or a Godfather movie, complete with the striped tablecloths and the rounded bottles of Ruffino Chianti wrapped in whicker.

The view from my room in Hardy Barracks, Minato Ku, Tokyo

And the menus were filled with familiar dishes described in Italian. I helped everyone choose, then ordered Linguine Con Calamari for myself.

This was a mistake, all the way around. We’d forgotten that one of the interesting things about living in Japan is their take on other cuisines. Italian restaurants in Japan when I lived there didn’t serve Italian food; they served what Italian food would be if Italy was entirely populated by the Japanese.

When I first got to Tokyo to work at Pacific Stars & Stripes a group of colleagues took me to dinner at a Japanese pizza chain that was clearly a Pizza Hut knockoff. They ordered a supreme pizza; I was worried it would come with pineapple, which is a crime against all things Italian. (And do not ask me about Chicago Deep Dish, which is a fine casserole totally unrelated to this discussion.)

Good news! There was ZERO pineapple. Yay!

But besides mushrooms and pepperoni, the toppings also included raw squid rings and baby corn-two ingredients no Italian in Naples or New Jersey would ever use.

I should have remembered this, ordering at that Italian restaurant. Perhaps I was lulled by the Italian menus, or, more likely, the Chianti. And while Italians don’t eat raw squid rings on pizza, we do eat lots of calamari – squid – cooked in a variety of ways.

My mother’s people are from Palermo, on the island of Sicily, while my father’s people are from Isola di Ponza, an island off the coast of Naples, where the public beach is named Cala Feola. So I grew up eating a lot of fish, and a lot of calamari: fried calamari by itself; calamari cooked in red tomato sauce, calamari cooked in olive oil over pasta; calamari cooked in butter over pasta. So I was confident I was prepared for whatever variation the chef prepared.

Hubris. I was unprepared for the dish that appeared in front of me: a soup tureen filled to the brim with warm squid ink in which swam raw squid and soba noodles.

Did I eat it? Of course I did. I’ll try anything.

Once.

The next time we were in the mood for Italian cuisine we headed back to that Pizza Hut knockoff place.

Turns out baby corn are actually pretty good on a pizza.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Tuesday February 27th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup

Thursday February 29th - The PE Vlog: We’re taking a couple of weeks developing marketing graphics for Feola Factory as an exercise to understand how and when AI tools are useful. This week we’re finishing up the steampunk camera we built in Photoshop. Eighth in a series.

Friday March 1st - Foto.Feola.Friday

Sunday March 3rd — Tick-Tock on the clock. Bet the mortgage on this one: The Game of Thrones books will never be finished. There’s a new Marvel Universe entry every week; if you miss one none of the rest make sense. The Wheel of Time guy died before finishing all 14 books of his trilogy. There are apparently no book editors left anywhere; every successful novelist fluffs 300-page novels out past 1,000 pages. It’s no wonder TikTok is so popular when long-form entertainment simply isn’t worth the investment.