Any American tourist who objects to rude service is an idealist who might have made a good minor character in Candide. I believe they tend to be crushed in gleeful sadistic ways. Rudeness goes with the territory. It has for centuries.
The thing is this: what I experienced last night in Rome at the restaurant Gusto could be just that, traditional rudeness. But Billy Vivos is no ordinary American tourist either. Aldo is, yes. Aldo has a recurring dream - he had it at our hotel –– that he dies and goes to heaven and heaven is EuroDisney. The seraphim all look like Minnie Mouse. But Billy Vivos likes to look for the bigger picture; he likes to discern the patterns in the sediment at the bottom of his wine glass; and I tell you what I experienced at Gusto is new and deserves its own new word: “eutitude,” short for EU attitude.
“Eutitude” is bad behavior borne not of culturual condescension, hostility or insecurity, but of the slicing sharpening knives of competition. Am I an economist you might ask? No, I am not. But I can smell things in the Roman air the way other tourists say they smell bread baking outside their hotels. I smell eutitude!
And what would that be, eutitude? It is a tensing and corruption of commercial dining’s emotional atmosphere caused by the use of international business models, spreadsheets and currency charts. There! I hammered it out in one dense sentence. I feel like a psychic coming out of a trance.
About Gusto: Gusto is a grand and apparently successful food complex, all passionately upscale: There’s an upscale kitchen store, an upscale wine bar, and an upscale restaurant than spills out onto a white-marbled, doric-columned portico serving as a dining area for people who are proportionately upscale themselves. They sit in the Roman night air, happy in anticipation of being fed by an establishment written up in all the magazines, and while waiting to order they can sample history at its most chic as they look out toward the Altar of Augustus. The A of A, you see, is encased in a gleaming pale Richard Meier gallery that currently houses an exhibit that pays tribute to Valentino, the designer. Aldo thought he must be a late Caesar, possibly the one Russell Crowe killed at the end of Gladiator.
Tonight Gusto is packed with a sophisticated European and American crowd, all speaking English to the wait staff before lapsing into German or French or English among themselves. The wait staff appear to me to be frantic, hopping from table to table and diner to diner like teenage employees of a mall pizzeria. And here comes our sommelier, who also happens to be one of our waitresses: She is wan and thin and asthetic looking, as if her relations dropped her off outside a convent expecting her to be a novice, but somehow she never made it through the convent gates. Since then, she has been working hard in the thankless food services industry, bringing international diners their primi and secondi courses of vaguely Italianate cuisine.
I order a Colle di Maggio “Turlino,” a new soft-styled Lazio syrah, from this young lady, and she returns with it briskly and cheerfully. With a faraway, deadened look of Charlie Chaplin in the factory in Modern Times, she uncorks it with fearsome dexterity. She doesn’t show me the label; indeed, I have to grab it from her to make sure it’s the bottle I ordered. She barely waits for me to look at the bottle and smell the wine before she thunks the bottle onto the table. Now here’s the thing. She isn’t being a snob: It’s not that she doesn’t care whether I like the wine or not – she doesn’t have time. She instead must leap to her next task, bringing a prosperous, polite, middle-aged German couple next to us a beer and a glass of champagne, and then to the prosperous German couple next to them an ice bucket for their white wine. This is a strange and pointless contraption, this ice bucket, and the poor girl must set it up like a child’s booster seat: Rather than a freestanding model, it has to be clamped onto the table’s ledge. There isn’t much space separating any of our tables, so our smiling empty-eyed automaton without apology moves us all a few inches further apart: She seems to be lost in some strange dream. We are jostled, put out, annoyed; but how would she know that? She is busy, she listens to some other inner voice or command: I wonder if someone in Brussels isn’t communicating telepathically to an Italian finance minister, who in turn beams out an encoded message that blips urgently in the sommelier’s mind:
The Italian economic miracle depends on you! The euro must maintain its strength against the dollar! Maximize your table turnover! Who knows where the American tourists will be tomorrow – heading for China for the Olympics!
This isn’t a sommelier, it’s a flight attendant on a major airline.
This is A Clockwork Orange with a corkscrew.
On La Cienega below Melrose. A still, clear Saturday evening. Me, Aldo and an old friend of his. She has cut her hair, and it’s very becoming. Aldo is wearing a little hat that he says makes him look like Justin Timberlake, which is not so: He’s more like Bing Crosby in his mid- to late forties. By that point Bing may have been doing his commercials for orange juice. I don’t recall.
Sona has a dining room so understated and muted in its soft lighting and palette that you might walk straight through it and back out onto the street without realizing it. The L.A. dining experience is so different from New York’s: In New York, no matter how fine the establishment, you can never quite escape the impression that the maitre d’ is really Pol Pot and you stand a strong chance of being re-educated somehow, and not pleasantly. In New York, in other words, you tend to wait for the lurking comeuppance. The Table of Doom by the kitchen door. The basket of bread that one never stops longing for and that never arrives, like Come Back Little Sheba with carbohydrates. That does not happen in Los Angeles. You sit, you eat, you drink, time passes in a calm, measured flow: It is like sitting through a nice piece of classical chamber music.
I start with a glass of Audoin de Dampierre Ambassadeurs 1er cru at the bar. Light, persistent mousse with a hint of mushroom. The bartender is handsome and young and athletic-looking and I feel like a moth crushed against a lamp, but no matter. With dinner, we have the 2004 Domaine Weinbach Gewurztraminer “Altenbourg” Cuvee Lawrence. I love the wines of Weinbach, and the richness of this wine pairs superbly with the appetitizer, a delicious corn soup so corny it makes me want to hum something from Rodgers and Hammerstein; and then the entrée, macademia-crusted opah, which I keep calling “oprah.” Oh, Weinbach! Have you made me silly? The opah comes with roasted pineapple and coconut curry emulsion.
Aldo observes that “coconut curry” sounds like an unsuccessful drag character.
A delicious evening that sent me back to the hotel happy.
