Galway is a city on the edge of the ocean and on the edge of Europe. Here, on the west coast of Ireland, the rain-swollen Corrib surges past granite bridges on the way to the Atlantic. For generations, Spanish boats docked here to unload wines and citrus fruits. This was also where Christopher Columbus rested the night before sailing to America.
Under Galway’s fickle sun, with its serene pale light shining through low lying clouds, gray and heavy with rain, a nomadic mélange of tourists, immigrants, and students flow through its streets everyday. At some point, most of them end up at Charlie Byrne’s Secondhand Bookshop, a meeting space on Middle Street.
I spent three years working at Charlie Byrne’s, described by its customers as the best bookshop in Europe. “Is Charlie Byrne real?” travelers would ask us. “Are you Charlie Byrne?” they’d ask Vinny, Charlie’s longtime friend and manager. Charlie, a nomad himself, was an archeologist who worked for years on excavations in Dublin, Cork, and Galway, before opening his bookstore in 1989. Today he travels all over the US, Britain, and Ireland in search of books on history, architecture, crime, biography, film, archeology, and literature.
Growing up in Longford, Charlie would go with his dad, who loved to buy books at auctions, to all the secondhand bookstores in Dublin. “Our house was full of books. I liked the idea of the secondhand shop—where you never knew what you were going to come across,” Charlie told me at one Christmas party as we drank pints of black porter topped with laurels of cream. So, he put down his trowel and started selling books at a weekend market while “digging” for books during the week. Since then, his bookstore has served as a crossroads for travelers from around the world.
In ancient Ireland, crossroads, where two or more roads met in the windswept countryside, were worshipped as magical. At crossroads, sacred rituals and dances were performed and highwaymen were buried. These liminal spaces, ascribed with sacred powers of protection and healing, were believed to be in-between places where the spirit world encroached on the world of man, and where one could access the Otherworld. At crossroads, holy men and women could walk between worlds and were guardians of these “cosmic axes” which allowed inter-world travel. Charlie Byrne’s feels like a sacred meeting place where different worlds, cultures, and ideas come together through a discovered book or a chance encounter; a space where nomads of all types find solace, company, and muted conversation. Travelers dropped in to buy cheap copies of the Butcher Boy or the latest Roddy Doyle novel, but they also came because it’s a third place—somewhere between work and home where they can browse and learn, and seek inspiration and a friendly chat while they skim the spines of other people’s books.
While I worked, moving boxes, cleaning each book with Lysol until it shined, and dusting each one with a paintbrush, I’d eavesdrop on customers. From behind the cash register and around shelf corners, I’d listen to the smiling, rumpled, vagabonds who were drawn to this secondhand bookshop on Middle Street because they saw a kindred soul in Charlie who would sometimes stand at the back counter quietly pricing books he salvaged from someone’s attic. Or, they came for the company of other browsers and readers or for the chance to talk with another customer about Kennelly’s Great Shame or Heaney’s new poetry—or maybe just to daydream.
One young woman spent hours kneeling at the law section in her faded blue jeans and fleece vest. I admired her deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and wide face speculating where she was from. Tibet, Malaysia? She’d only come in to read and research, scribbling pages of notes, while customers and booksellers moved around her. I was surprised when I heard her American accent as she told an interested admirer, an Irish man with a crest of red hair and a shy smile, that her name was Allison. She was a Navajo Indian who grew up on a reservation in Arizona. She was here to do a Master’s in International Law. She told me later that the bookshop reminded her of home—back in the wide, open spaces of Arizona where her house was always vibrant and bustling. She liked to hear the murmur of voices around her, customers and staff talking and laughing. She loved the way the bookshop felt, as if everyone in it were related.
Allison came into the shop again, one Sunday to drop off her entire book collection. I scanned the books, which were in fairly good condition; Land and the Forest-Dwelling South American Indian, The Law and American Indian Grave Protection, and a tattered copy of The Federalist Papers. She was moving back to Arizona and was taking her Irish suitor with her.
Another regular was Bernard, from the south of France, who now lived in Kinvara. He rode a bus for two hours every Saturday to come to Charlie’s although he never bought or read very much. With his round, bald head and large eyes, he looked like a Buddha. He would come through the door and sweep the shop with his eyes, as if he were looking for someone to meet. Nodding hello to Vinny, Bernard would meander around the shop until he bumped into someone he knew.
Sarah once worked in the Peddler, Galway’s first but now defunct secondhand bookshop but now spent most of her spare time at Charlie’s. She walked unaccompanied through India from Kerala to Bombay, traveled to Peru, to Sedona, to the spiritual sites of the world. Sarah became a Reiki master and practiced bio-energy in Moycullen. She loved to come to the shop to read our auras and search through the archeology and spirituality sections for books on stone circles and megalithic burial tombs. Sarah once told me, as I priced secondhand romance novels, how she would go with her friend Pat to search for animal spirits in the fissured, limestone landscape of the Burren in northwest County Clare. Night was the best time.
As Sarah studied pictures of Shelia-Na-Gigs in The Heart of the Goddess, Bernard told her about his trips to the Egyptian pyramids and to Machu Picchu in Peru. He explained how the two places are astrologically aligned with Clonmacnoise in Ireland, and that he was organizing another trip to Egypt… something about opening energy portals…and asked if she’d like to come. Did I hear that right? Energy Portals? It sounded like that as I backed up, stepping on the toes of Sean O’Brien from Belfast.
Sean was a better looking Tim Burton, had an accent like a song, and was an object of my desire. He was a busker and an artist in one. He stood in the street on a wooden box, dressed as a Blues Brother. Standing motionless until a passerby dropped change into a hat, he would start to dance and groove to the music, lithe and loose-limbed. He’d spend most of his lunch break in Charlie Byrne’s.
“Howya Vin,” Sean would say as he walked in with hands in his pockets.
Vinny would look up slowly and say in his full-bodied, friendly way, “Sean, How ya doin’?” sometimes using a mock Brooklyn accent.
Sean loved the quietness of the shop, which allowed him to escape the noise and crowds of the street. He’d leaf through books on the Stanislavsky Method or a biography on Charles Laughton. Ever since he was eleven Sean dreamed of becoming an actor. Now, years later in Charlie’s, with each jolt of inspiration, he found his way back to what he always knew. That summer of 2004, his daily trips to Charlie’s helped him to make the decision: he was going to New York City to become an actor.
Grant was a young black man from a small village in the Congo who moved to Ireland in the late nineties to escape the war. An accomplished drummer, he was now learning to master the Bodhran. He wanted to be an Irish musician and in Charlie’s he read about Irish instruments and by night he played in a local pub, the Crane, where he was welcomed by other musicians. To help pay his rent, he offered African drumming classes. He would advertise by pinning his flyers to the communal notice board in Charlie’s.
Sister Josephine was an 82-year-old nun originally from Galway who at sixteen joined the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and was sent to Pakistan to work in an orphanage. In her seventies she was sent home to spend the summers in Ireland because it was too hot in the lowlands of Pakistan. She’d come in to the shop taking short steps and smiling to herself. She’d buy bags of thrillers and crime paperbacks from Stephen King to James Lee Burke. Vinny would greet her as she came in “Sister, welcome home! Don’t worry—the Pope hasn’t called in here for a while.” She liked the people in Charlie’s because we accepted her and her love for crime novels. At Charlie’s, she could embrace different aspects of herself.
Thousands of nomads come to Galway every year seeking inspiration, discovery, and ultimately transformation. They’re drawn to Charlie Byrne’s because they are offered vicarious adventure and good company; because the friendship between Charlie and Vinny is something people want to be around; because Vinny will call you by name and love you enough to slag you; because Charlie Byrne is a real man you rarely see, but want to; or maybe because that bookshop, with its books stacked high against the walls, stuffed in shelves, and piled on countertops feels familiar, like your grandparents’ attic where you once went digging through as a child, when you dared to be the magician at the crossroads—the walker between worlds—the cosmic traveler who moved lucidly and free on the axis of your imagination.
Adrienne Anifant graduated from Mount Holyoke College. She has an M.A. in English and Writing and an LL.M. in Human Rights and International Law. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews are published in Ireland, England and the U.S. She lives in New York City.
Photo by: Francesco Alesi
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i “The Enchanted Crossroads.” Rogers, Liam. http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/crossroad.htm, 1996. Last viewed September 2007.
ii Slag – form of friendly Irish exchange where the person who slags pokes fun in a humorous fashion
Towards the end of her transfixing travel memoir Down the Nile, Rosemary Mahoney remarks that Florence Nightingale—the 19th century British nurse whose image the author marvelously resurrects as an intrepid, edgy heroine—“strikes one as willing to try just about anything.” The same should be said about Mahoney, whose oeuvre is devoted to her own fearless travels to remote and inhospitable countries. This is a woman who has rowed across the Sea of Galilee in a rubber raft (The Singular Pilgrim); interviewed progressive women in Ireland about politics and sexual mores (Whoredom in Kimmage); chronicled provincial intellectual life in pre-Tiananmen Square China (The Early Arrival of Dreams) and, perhaps most famously, endured an entire summer taking care of the cantankerous and foul-mouthed American playwright Lillian Hellman (A Likely Story). In her latest book, Mahoney traipses off to Egypt by herself with the singular (and somewhat inscrutable) goal of rowing down the Nile.
Yes, the Nile—specifically the 120-mile stretch between Aswan (in the south) and Qena (north of Luxor). No matter that there have recently been several terrorist attacks in Egypt (some against western tourists), where Mahoney, an American, plans to start her journey. No matter that the U.S. State Department’s consular information sheet on Egypt warns of “extremist activity” along the Nile Valley, especially between Luxor and Qena. No matter that women are not exactly treated as equals in Egypt and that the sight of a single female captain “Egyptian or otherwise” on the Nile is so rare as to be unfathomable. None of this—not even the comparatively negligible fact of cockroaches and scorpions, which abound in this region—deters Mahoney, who has been rowing for a decade (mostly on bays and rivers in New England) and whose obsession with the Nile, which began on her first trip to Egypt in 1996, has endured during a two-year absence. Mahoney is undeterred too, by the jeers of local naysayers (“Impossible! You are a woman! The river is big! Not mentioning any crocodile! And dangerous ships! And the fisherman who can become crazy seeing a woman alone!”). Emboldened by their insistence, she determines to prove them wrong.
Like the best female adventure travel writers—Robyn Davidson, Ann Jones, Jan Morris, Holly Morris, and Kira Salak—Mahoney expertly melds travelogue with memoir, adding acute observations about gender stereotypes along the way. Since it takes Mahoney weeks of false starts and frustrating conversations with boorish Egyptian men (a constant refrain includes some variation of the following: “Where your husband is? You are very beautiful. I love you.”) to even find an appropriate rowboat, her actual journey down the Nile comprises only a small part of her tale. But that’s O.K. Mahoney is such an engaging traveler and vivid storyteller that you forgive her these digressions. In fact, her colorful encounters with Egyptians in Aswan and Luxor—many of which shrewdly expose the gender hypocrisies of contemporary Egypt—are what make this book such a delight to read.
In one memorable scene, Mahoney meets a handsome male prostitute named Ahmed, who has “big eyes the color of raw honey” shaded by “long, dewy, black lashes.”
With no trace of shyness…this young man stood on the street in the hot sunlight smoking a cigarette and telling me everything he knew about sex, everything he knew about those sex-crazed European women, mostly middle aged, who jumped off the cruise ships and went running through Luxor hunting for Egyptian men half their age.
Ahmed explains to Mahoney that many of the foreign women who seek out—and pay for—his company are married, but that their husbands have “weak benis” or are gay. With a stupefying lack of self-awareness, however, he insists that it is the foreign women who are prostitutes. Unable to let this slide, Mahoney gently points out that these women are merely fulfilling their desire while men like Ahmed are, in fact, the prostitutes. Fortunately for Mahoney, Ahmed’s reaction is subdued and miraculously, he acknowledges that she’s right. Mahoney excels at such honest exchanges—the daily braveries that make travel such an enriching, culturally provocative experience. The reader is heartened: even if Ahmed goes back to his carnal job as a sex god for 50-year-old sunburned Germans—which he surely will—at least he now knows one American lady who defies his preconceptions of foreign women.
Blunt conversations about sex are a recurring theme in this book, mostly because, as Mahoney explains early on, Egyptian men have a boundless curiosity and “breezy eagerness” to talk about the subject —and they can’t discuss it with Egyptian women. In Luxor, Mahoney has yet another sex talk with a 26-year old, Adel, who complains that he’s never seen a woman naked, but then professes shock at the “not normal things” he’s seen in a western porn flick. “Is true they do these things?” he asks a startled Mahoney. “I suppose, yes, they do,” she answers, with characteristic truthfulness, and adds that people all over the world do these things—not just Americans. His curiosity (and not just that) aroused, he asks Mahoney if women “actually” enjoy sex. After a short aside to the reader on the practice of clitoridectomy (still practiced in Egypt) she reassures Adel that most women do enjoy sex. Drawn into such an intimate (and maybe even inappropriate) conversation with a relative stranger, Mahoney wonders if Adel’s naiveté is “a trick or a guileless quest for information?” The answer inspires one of Mahoney’s sharpest observations about men in Egypt: “Both, I decided, and that was what made Egyptian men so vexing. You never knew whether to give them a brisk slap for their impertinence or to welcome the irreproachable trust they seemed to offer.”
Most Egyptian men are frustrating and wearying—talking to them is “like being poked in the face all day with a sharp stick”—but there is one exception that shatters Mahoney’s preconceived notions. Amr Khaled, a felucca (sail boat) captain in Aswan, instantly offers to lend Mahoney his skiff for a row around a nearby island—no questions asked. “His words…were surprisingly devoid of the usual distancing banter, the jokes, the sexual innuendo, or mention of money,” writes Mahoney. Amr is attentive and polite and doesn’t doubt Mahoney’s professed skill as a rower or wonder at her motivation. A week into their friendship, she confides to him her ultimate goal—to row all the way to Qena by herself. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?” asks Mahoney. “No, Rose…it’s a good idea. You likes do something different from usual. I also likes do something different. And I know you can do it. I see you row. And other felucca captains see you row. They say, ‘She looks like captain.’”
Nonetheless, Amr will not let Mahoney go on her own—he is worried she won’t get past the police, for one thing—so he suggests a compromise: she can use his skiff but he’ll trail her in his felucca to Edfu (almost half-way). This turn of events—not what Mahoney had planned or wished for—is auspicious, for her friendship with Amr, which spans cultures and genders, becomes the heart of this story.
Some of the loveliest and most vivid passages of Down the Nile involve Amr: the moment when he washes his hair in the river (“Amr applied a bar of Camay soap to his head like a rasp to a ball of wood, rubbing with such force that his head bounced and bobbed and jerked above his neck.”); the deck-top dinner that he and his co-captain cook for Mahoney and her friend Madeleine (Amr rejects offers to help with a laconic, “’We will cook. Please, rest.’”); and his poignant explanation for why he doesn’t travel abroad (Mahoney paraphrases: “when people from Aswan went away for a month to another country, they always returned to find their lives more steeped in sadness and longing than they had been before they left.”) Their parting at Edfu is bittersweet—Mahoney is eager for her dreamed-for solitude, but at the same time knows she will miss Amr’s companionship. Once Madeleine, fluent in Arabic, helps her secure a boat and returns to Cairo, Mahoney is finally own her own.
This book is more than a travelogue—it’s also a mini compendium of the Nile’s history. Mahoney draws upon the historical accounts of 19th century travelers such as Flaubert, Amelia Edwards, and Nightingale, all of whom journeyed down the river in dahabiehs (private cruising boats) in the 1850’s, when Egypt was all the rage. She deftly intersperses their observations from letters and diaries with her own, creating thematic sections on everything from the police to hashish to the plundering of ruins (something that should interest modern-day readers who’ve been paying attention to the raging debates about cultural patrimony). But the biggest revelation to the reader—and to Mahoney—is Nightingale, who Mahoney rediscovers when she comes across her published letters in a Cairo bookstore. Well traveled, well-read, and able to speak several languages, Nightingale, according to Mahoney, was “far from being an insufferable saint.” In fact, if she were alive today, we’d call her a global nomad. Mahoney also admires her powers of description, saying they rival Flaubert’s. Her writing is “keenly observant,” opinionated, clear-eyed, and “bristling with intelligence.”
Just like Mahoney’s writing. Mahoney has a novelist’s precision for capturing the world around her—her unusual use of language injects energy into what would otherwise be pallid descriptions. The banks of the river are “rotisseries of broiling vines and vegetation” and the night sky is “a metropolis of its own, an enormous velvety parabola embracing the earth.” Like Nightingale, Mahoney doesn’t mince words when describing the people she encounters. Self-important Egyptian officials “were often plump and distracted and made an ostentatious show of reading their portable pocket-sized editions of the Koran, which reading consisted of a lot of hectic flipping of the pages, liberally interspersed with minute inspections of their fingernails and watches.” Mean, yes, and a tad mischievous. But she has conjured the official, down to his grooming habits.
In our consumer culture, authenticity has become a prized notion—a “buzzword” in the travel industry, it’s used to market everything from high-end resorts to spa treatments. In such a climate, Mahoney’s bracing adventure—her ease with chatting up strangers, her resourcefulness when confronted with an obstacle—is a refreshing reminder that travel can still be authentic, if you’re willing to take risks.
Hannah Wallace is a senior editor at Janera.com. For more info on Hannah see ABOUT or hannahmwallace.com.
In his treatise about the gentle art of eating, The Physiology of Taste, the 19th century gastronomic philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin can be more than a tad de trop. However, there is considerable merit to his contention that fine dining ought to combine Attic Elegance, Roman Luxury, and French Subtlety.
In our own age, I have often despaired that fine dining more usually evidences a less exalted trinity: an aesthetic of oriental minimalism, wacky American nutritional paranoia combined with pastoral fantasies of small family farms and deep sea fishing, and—especially when it comes to the selection of ingredients—a geography that seems derived from the major airlines’ notion of the functional proximity of hub-cities (ignoring all the places in between).
Obviously there is much to be said in favor of throwing off the shackles of distance and the order of the seasons, even in the kitchen, but the legerdemain of assembling the foodstuffs of five continents at a single sitting has seldom managed to entrance me, regardless of how well it may be done.
In fact, even after a decade’s residence in Italy in the 1990s, I continued to maintain a tourist’s strongly prejudiced preference for traditional regional specialties. While many of my Italian friends loved vaunting their comparatively new class of celebrity chefs, and were proud of the innovations of Italy’s “creative kitchen,” both invariably seemed far too reminiscent of all I left the United States to escape. And accordingly, for a long time, the more I heard about Cesare Giaccone— Piedmont’s most singular celebrity chef— known to the world, like Michelangelo or Raphael, solely by his given name “Cesare” (pronounced, CHEY-sar-ray), the less I liked the sound of him.
*
But Cesare was a name that kept coming up, especially among the leaders of Italy’s wine trade. The stories that circulated about Cesare suggested a somewhat erratic eccentric. “An artist, not simply a chef,” they’d say. “Someone who styled himself an Academician of the Kitchen.” “Pazzo!” (Completely crazy!) you’d hear, the speaker circling his ear with a forefinger. (When applied to chefs, however, this word always conveyed considerable affection and a measure of respect).
There were the three years that Cesare had spent living without watch or mirror. His period of heavy drinking. (At one point, according to the generally accepted legend, Cesare’s four-bottles-of-wine-a-day habit would begin with two bottles of the world’s most celebrated dessert wine, Chateau D’Yquem, for breakfast.)
Then, there were Cesare’s dealings with the Guide Michelin. Awarded a star soon after opening da Cesare at a modest and hard-to-find location in the tiny Piedmont hamlet of Albaretto della Torre, he had called Paris to complain, and begged his name be removed from the famous red directory of Europe’s best restaurants. Michelin, though apparently surprised, reluctantly agreed. However, since there was still almost a year to go before the next edition, Cesare felt obliged to post a sign on his door in several languages warning “If you are here because you read about me in the Guide Michelin, please don’t enter.” Press accounts of Cesare (at least when his efforts to discourage attention failed and there were press accounts) tended to reinforce the portrait of him as a xenophobic iconoclast.
One Italian journalist asked rhetorically, but declined to answer, whether Cesare was Italy’s Greatest Chef, and then went on to describe the physical torture Cesare routinely underwent in his invention of a new dish—an ordeal the description suggested was not unlike childbirth and involved at least two days of fasting and a fever.
Nonetheless, Cesare’s fans and defenders were adamant in their praises. Angelo Gaja, generally regarded as the country’s leading wine maker, was among the most skillful of those who argued Cesare’s case. While he conceded Cesare’s restaurant was comparatively modest with family style service and a wine list that was “nothing special,” Cesare himself, Gaja maintained, was a talent with almost unimaginable technical skills. Besides, said Gaja, Cesare’s genius for inventiveness rooted in local tradition was without rival. Gaja was particularly impressed by Cesare’s ability to prepare—alone and without the usual army of assistant chefs—thirty or more five-course meals at a time. And, said Gaja, every plate would be perfect—each course, each sauce, each flavor at once harmonious but distinct. “But was he Italy’s Greatest Chef?” I asked. “Well. . .,” said Gaja, “yes.” If cornered, he was prepared to argue even that.
Convinced I had conceived the most daunting of protocols I countered, if Cesare were really as good as all that, he should have no difficulty keeping one entertained for a week of meals running—after all, once upon a time, this was counted among a typical housewife’s major duties. Gaja was amused and thought Cesare would be intrigued. Gaja decided he’d call him. Thus, a few days later I found my dare had been taken up and everything arranged: a room at the restaurant, a bicycle or some way of getting around, and seven day’s board.
**
When I imagined that week, I saw myself with my “golden fork” in hand at a damask table with oversized crystal glasses and an endless shuffle of fine china being laid out before me. In a notebook, I’d enter my disinterested appraisals of a succession of dishes, coolly assessing their presentation, judging their faithfulness to tradition.
Day by day, I assumed, my sated self would grow more critical whilst a belt notch thicker, leaving my corner somewhat reluctantly to go the next culinary round. Oddly enough, I gave little thought to life beyond this imaginary table. And I never focused on the pleasures that might await me. Odder still, I failed wholly to wonder what Cesare might be like or what it’d be like to spend an entire week at his side.
***
But whatever I might have imagined, the reality of my arrival at da Cesare—four o’clock one hazy afternoon, after a nine-hour railway journey in the damp heat of late summer— came as something of a surprise. Cesare opened the beat-up screen door to his kitchen to greet me. Short, middle-aged, with thinning sand-colored hair, he sported a magnificent, carefully groomed mustache. Cesare’s simmering stockpots made a strong first impression. Veal, rabbit, carrots, celery, chicken, beef, tomato, bay leaf, basil, sage, and rosemary swam in huge copper pots on a pair of oversized square stoves, and filled one’s consciousness with something at once friendly and ambrosial— redolent of hardy rural versions of Mom, Love, and Home.
Cesare cordially offered me a glass of Arneis wine. He was standing at a cutting board, trimming a beef filet with a knife, sharpened over years of use to a pointy sliver. He looked up, regarding me pleasantly. “How, exactly, do you want to spend your week?” This was not an unreasonable question. Perhaps, I suggested, feeling my way, in vaguely poetic but not particularly grammatical Italian, I could be “your. . . shadow.” Cesare beamed and appeared somewhat relieved. “Bene,” he said. “Andiamo.”
And go we did. As soon as we’d stepped outside onto the unpaved parking lot, Cesare lit an American Parliament (which I would find he chain-smoked almost incessantly, especially while driving), and donned a baseball cap with a cardinal red brim, motioning me into his battered gray diesel engine station wagon. Cranking up a cassette of early ‘70s Italian pop music and the air-conditioning, we sped out of the gravel parking lot and down one of the winding two-lane roads that link Piedmont’s sprawl of tiny villages. We were heading to one of Cesare’s several butchers, a couple of towns away. “He’s the best for goat,”Cesare said, taking his hands off the steering wheel for emphasis, tipping his cigarette into a very full ashtray, and looking me in the eye when he spoke, to avoid being impolite.
Cesare’s veal and beef, he explained, came from another butcher. Chicken or more precisely, capon, came from a farm about 40 km away. There were also hunters, men who raised truffle dogs and searched with them for wild white truffles in the local woods, mushroom sellers, a variety of cheese mongers, bakers, chocolate makers, and vintners—all of whom had to be visited personally on a regular basis.
Endless rounds of such long distance afternoon shopping figured prominently in Cesare’s weekly schedule, followed immediately by Cesare’s initial round of preparation for the evening. Then Cesare would take his daily two-hour afternoon nap, and return to a whirl of activity after downing a medium-size pot of oil-black espresso in a rapid series of gulps.
Since the restaurant policy required customers to make reservations at least a day in advance, and since 10-30 covers was the norm, (with no table turnover), there was almost no guesswork involved in Cesare’s shopping. He really was the ultimate one-man symphony orchestra of the Piedmont-cooking world.
He asked me about living in Venice and New York. And as men will, we talked about women, before moving onto Italian politics, music, and other cities we both liked. Invariably he egged me on with an enthusiastic “Porca Miseria!” or “Caspita!”— rough colloquial Italian equivalents to “No way!”
Cesare and I found ourselves swapping endless stories, and gradually I began to piece together his saga as a chef—a career as fraught with unlikely twists and turns and as many ups and downs as the two lane highways we traveled.
His father had lived in the same village as Cesare, kept a milk cow, raised a few chickens in the backyard, grew vegetables in the garden, and operated a modest trattoria offering simple home cooking. He also did a little barbering on the side to make ends meet. The place was a favorite with local workers, and far too simple to be called a “restaurant” (which really did not come into existence in rural Piedmont until the late 1960s). As a teenager, Cesare had left home to work in hotel kitchens and fancy restaurants around the country, and eventually became a private chef to a number of wealthy families in northern cities like Genoa.
Ultimately, Cesare was hired by a flamboyant priest who ran one of the country’s first retreats for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. The two men grew close enough that Cesare was allowed to borrow the padre’s Rolls Royce on his days off. But the appeal of opening his own place and the lure of his own village beckoned, and Cesare eventually opened “il Ristorante Dei Cacciatori” (one of Da Cesare’s several alternate names) in 1980.
By now, Cesare had a family and his wife functioned as the restaurant’s hostess. But, since theirs was an especially stormy marriage, their noisy fights mid-evening not infrequently disrupted the tranquility of diners. They even closed the place for days on end when one or the other stormed off, vowing never to return. Despite this, Cesare and his restaurant gained a following, and especially during the fall truffle season, regulars drove from as far away as Germany and Switzerland for his spit-roasted kid, peaches and porcini mushrooms, tagliatelle in a sauce of cream with fresh truffle, and a steadily growing list of other simple but sublime signature dishes.
Part of the appeal of da Cesare, even today, comes from its location. This is not to say that Albaretto della Torre itself (pop. less than 100) or its immediate environs has much charm or any sights to speak of, but the town is very much in the heart of Northern Italy’s most remarkable gastronomic zone, the Langhe, a rural area southwest of Turin.
Unlike most destinations within Italy, the Langhe has no churches of any architectural distinction, boasts no grand country houses, offers neither masterpieces of sculpture nor painting, and has almost nothing in the way of opera, theater, or entertainment. But for most of its recent history, the Langhe has been a rustic Italian Eden where an almost perfect balance between wild and cultivated nature supplies its kitchens and tables.
Its vineyards produce Barolo and Barbaresco, long ranked among Europe’s most noble and celebrated reds (not to mention a dozen lesser but first rate wines— Dolchetto, Barbera, Arneis, Spumante, and Moscato among them, variously, red, white, dry, sweet, and the latter either sparkling or still). The white truffles of the area are regarded as the very best in the world, and wild mushrooms, berries, game birds, hare and boar thrive in local woodlands. Hazelnuts are cultivated on the hills above the vineyards, and unlike in Tuscany, small family farms have survived the encroachment of large-scale industrial farming.
Like Burgundy in France (with which the Langhe is often compared), the business of food and wine is more than just the means to a prosperous livelihood—it is essential to the area’s current identity. And chefs, winemakers and those involved in the truffle trade are local heroes whose affairs are known and discussed almost constantly by everyone.
Before the early 1970’s, Italian food and wine to the rest of the world meant a slice of pizza (quite as foreign to Piedmont as it is to Honolulu) or a cheap night out—of red check table clothes, smarmy waiters, breaded veal under slabs of Provolone cheese swimming in canned tomato sauce, and straw covered flasks of flat, utterly indifferent Chianti.
By contrast, France in the same period had a reputation for sophistication and a virtual monopoly on top-priced comestibles, and its missionaries in the United States—ranging from Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher to Frank Schoonmaker and Alexis Lichine—who could be so eloquent in their praise and promotion of Escoffier and his descendants, snobbishly dismissed all cooking and viticulture south of the alps as cheerful, pleasant peasant fare that might be hearty and satisfying in a crude way, but possessed of little real interest to the aspiring American gourmet.
Early dissenters like Elizabeth David (the author of Italian Food in 1954) and Waverley Root (whose history, The Food of Italy, came out in 1971) were few. But as the car designers and coach builders of Turin, fashion houses like Gucci in Florence and Valentino in Rome began to build flourishing, high-profile international businesses in the 1960s, and a worldwide mania for Italian design caught on, perhaps it was inevitable that food and wine would follow. That French prestige and prices would be the benchmark which the food and wine community would consciously strive to emulate.
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My only real mistake the first night of my week with Cesare is to tell Cesare’s son Filippo that I am hungry. Preferring the theatrical potential of surprise to ordering from the menu, I cannot guess that four very substantial courses and dessert have been planned for me. Nor that dinner will be a four-hour event.
Tall, dark haired, good looking, and in his early twenties, Filippo is da Cesare’s maitre d’ and lone waiter. His quiet younger brother Oscar, who helps his father in the kitchen, is employed most afternoons making fresh pasta, while Elisa, the youngest, waitresses and writes up da Cesare’s menus in a neat girlish calligraphy. In sum, Da Cesare is very much a family business, obeying what amounts to a national imperative which still holds sway and determines the professional fates of most of Italy’s young. The restaurant staff usually also includes either a local teenage girl or (in spring and summer) a young Swede who’d been coming several years running. But, Cesare confides to me, the Swede is home this month because of some family trouble back home. Nonetheless, he says, she is “una brava ragazza.”
Watching Cesare in his kitchen, before dinner, his momentum is striking. Around seven, he functions with an andante moderato con brio, then shifts to a tempo of spirited allegro before dinner actually begins at eight, and then explodes into an all out, frenzied prestissimo that lasts until the final round of entrees, around nine-thirty or ten.
Wielding a heavy wood-handled knife, Cesare assumes something of the aspect of a badly out-numbered Samurai hero, as he quarters chickens and bones rabbit, and cuts racks of lamb or goat into wafer-thin chops. By now he has seven burners, two ovens, and a broiler going. When he’s not chopping vegetables, porcini and chanterelle mushrooms, fresh sage, rosemary and garlic, or distributing the result among the simmering pots, sizzling pans and old clay casseroles, he’s cleaning, or adding ladles of broth, butter, oil, vinegar, wine, and even orange juice to the various dishes in preparation. Sauces and bottles appear and return to shelves or refrigerator. The contents of fry pans are tossed and shaken. Occasionally, a momentary column of orange flame leaps upward.
Dishes are checked, fine adjustments are made, and finally, before the first guests are due to arrive, there is a brief calm pause for a change of clothes. Cesare dons freshly starched whites monogrammed with his name. Filippo appears in a jacket and tie, and Elisa wears a white blouse trimmed with lace and a black skirt.
Since I am technically the night’s first customer (of about twenty expected) a Post-it, headed “Giornalista,” is taped over the prep table by the door that leads into the dining room. Filippo shows me to my table, as his sister starts cutting bread and begins to ready the greens for the Insalata della Fattoria (farm salad), the first dish I’ll eat that night. We agree I should try a Barolo—a Ca’ Bosco special selection called “Maria di Brun” with a handsome sepia label featuring an old fashioned portrait of a woman.
Farm salad turns out to be a Cesare favorite. He mixes clover sized watercress with warm cubes of porcini, slivers of pan-roasted rabbit, guinea hen, turkey, and finely shaved Parmesan. The light dressing is Ligurian olive oil, salt, pepper and an unexpected dash of orange.
A remarkable Fritto Misto, as delicate as Japanese tempura, follows. It consists of cauliflower, yellow bell pepper, eggplant, apple, sausage, calves liver and a baby goat chop. The secret, Cesare tells me later, is a coating of béchamel sauce beneath the batter.
Then come Gnocchetti alla Bava, tiny gnocchi dumplings in a pale yellow sauce of Parmesan with a rich hint of sweetness. After this, I am served one of the most theatrically presented dishes to be encountered anywhere— Filetto alla Pietra (literally, “filet of the stone”). He takes a slice of veal nearly an inch and a half thick, so tender it can be cut with the edge of a fork, and tops it with a cool sauce of raw tomato and fresh basil. It arrives at the table smoking on a red hot slab of smooth stone. Charred sprigs of fresh rosemary beneath the veal add a subtle flavor.
As my Barolo has finally opened up, and the battle between noble fruit and harsh tannin has been resolved in favor of the former, the combination is, well, sublime. Finally, a little before midnight, I tackle peach and watermelon sorbet dusted with chocolate and crumbs of hazelnut, and waddle very slowly and carefully to my bed in a pension a few blocks distant.
*****
The next morning, Cesare decides to take me to the funeral of a local wine maker named Finnochio. It’s foggy in the hilltop village of Monforte d’Alba, and we join a ghostly procession of several hundred men, most involved in the local wine trade, walking up the village’s winding cobblestone main street toward the town church. In one yard, I see a black Labrador, wagging his tail while lying on his back, playing dead, unaware of the dark but appropriately poignant humor of the moment. Finocchio had been almost exactly Cesare’s age. No one says very much, except that Finocchio worked hard. Cesare mentions his two young children. In front of the church, I see an expensive new stroller with an elaborate sun visor covered with white and blue hearts. In it, an infant coos happily, rocking back and forth.
In the car, Neither of us mentions the funeral. Instead, Cesare and I speak about several famous Italian restaurateurs. But I have learned to read between the lines with him. “Good at business,” is his only comment about most of them. But what he means is that life needs to be about many things other than making money. I find myself asking Cesare about the Guide Michelin. His explanation boils down to his feeling, that after thirty years in kitchens, he only wants to cook for friends. A few new customers might wander in from time to time. But the accepted ideas of worldly success—wealth, fame, accolades from experts— have little appeal to him anymore. Michelin’s imprimatur had attracted people with the wrong frame of mind. With folded arms, they’d arrive to judge Cesare against their expectations. Or they were “snobs” who would brag later about their gourmet experience. In any case, Cesare said, what he really hoped for was to be less a restaurant than a gathering place for those who loved the Langhe and understood its wine and food. He hoped it would be a place where some latter-day Brillat-Savarin might ponder a new philosophy for eating, debating its merits over grappa late into the night.
On the way back, we stop to see an artist friend, and discuss, over espresso, Cesare’s current plan to turn the restaurant into a four-room inn that would be open, at most, six months a year. Cesare would serve only one meal a day, of his choosing.
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Over the next four nights, I continue to sit in a corner of the kitchen, sipping Arneis, and watching Cesare at work, with sustained awe. I eat a steak seared with hot coals, baby goat slowly roasted over an open wood fire, fresh pasta with truffles, hare, a faultlessly grilled porcini mushroom, fresh green figs in a caramelized glaze, zabaglione made with the local Moscato d’Asti. I drink several bottles of Barolo. Before the week’s end, Cesare vociferously approves of my fondness for a wine traditionally regarded as difficult for foreigners to appreciate. He says I am a “gran barolista,” and that I remind him of an Italian army general who was a long-time regular.
One morning, Cesare and I drive to the French Alps and up several miles of narrow dirt roads to buy a sheep milk pecorino from a farmer. Another morning, we leave Alboretto del Torre an hour before sun up to visit an outdoor market where we spend an hour with the man who’d been selling Cesare mushrooms for the past dozen years.
On Cesare’s day off, we drive to the Riviera resort town of Portofino for lunch, stroll along the quays of the harbor, and enjoy aperitifs at several cafés. Finally, one evening, Cesare takes me to a big country dance in a giant tent. He tells me that at the turn of the century the Langhe was so poor that children were often given wine for nourishment. Some winters there was nothing else to give them.
On my last night, I sit alone on his porch, gazing at a black summer sky ablaze with stars and muse about the strangely delicate balance that has made the Langhe the current gastronomic pilgrimage destination it is. I decide that the question of whether Cesare is Italy’s best chef is, for me, largely beside the point. And however apposite they might be, in Paris or New York, I don’t think the Langhe will ever have much use for Attic Elegance, Roman Luxury or French subtlety. You like da Cesare out of love for Cesare, and perhaps because he knows better than most of us that, however difficult life may be, its realest pleasures are very simple.
Ristorante dei Cacciatori
12 Via Umberto, Albaretto della Torre; 39-0173/520-141
www.cesaregiaccone.com
Guy Lesser has written for Harper’s, the Economist, the New York Times, and the Herald Tribune among a score of other publications, on subjects ranging from food and wine to law and the arts. He is currently completing a year-long music project with Mike Rathke, Rob Wasserman, and a dozen other musicians associated with Lou Reed. He is confident, regardless of its critical reception, it will beneficially alter weather patterns in the northern hemisphere.
