The One Where I was Spoon-fed Pasta by My Italian Grandmother

I will remember Milan for its beauty. For its coffee. For its fashion. And definitely for the exasperated waitress who fork-fed me pasta.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. It all started with my guidebook. La Lattería was featured in my guidebook as a restaurant with typical homemade Italian cuisine. A word of warning: guidebooks aren’t exactly liars, they just don’t tell the truth either. (My explanation is forthcoming.) My guidebook told me a lot (of true) information. The menu changes daily. If you’re looking to escape the touristy clamor of the city, you should definitely go to La Lattería; get there late and you can dine with the locals elbow-to-elbow in crunched seating. But what I didn’t know, I would soon find out.

I started out with a friend in search of the restaurant. It took us forever to find Via San Marco, 24. Even when we were on the right street, the restaurant appeared to be nonexistent. Only a completely boarded up shack resided under #24. We walked up and down the street a few times, when we noticed a clapboard shack roll up. ? The warm glow of lights and the loud chatter of people all talking and laughing at once escaped as a woman dipped her head out from underneath.

“Are you looking for La Lattería?” she asked. She was one of the last English-speaking people we heard all night.

We nodded and ducked inside. The restaurant was packed – elbow-to-elbow, just like the guidebook had promised. The line ended at the door and snaked all the way up to the tiny, smoking kitchen ahead of us. As tables cleared, the line broke off and hungry diners moved to the empty tables. It was about 10 p.m. when we arrived, and we were among the last people who’d be served before they turned people out.

As we seemed to have quite a bit of time before we’d actually get one of the handful of tables in the one-room closet-sized restaurant, I asked for the bathroom. This request required a number of hand gestures and sign language, but eventually another diner who was Italian, joined me in the request, and we both followed the waiter out the door. I expected to find the bathroom nearby and was slightly surprised when we continued down the street, into a courtyard, through another building, into a second courtyard and to a shed.

I began to wonder if maybe we had both failed in our request. But then the waiter unlocked the door of the shed, showed me inside, and uttered a few hurried directions in Italian (which of course, I didn’t understand but I nodded, and said, “Sí,” anyway). Then he left.

Seeing a sink I searched for the toilet. The door shut behind me and I was immersed in total darkness. I groped for the light switch, found a metal pull, and well, pulled. It worked! A 20-watt bulb (I exaggerate not) flickered on and by the wee glimmer of light I made out the sink. From there, I searched for the toilet. Not a toilet in sight. But there was a porcelain-covered hole in the ground.

I hadn’t exactly expected a hole for a toilet. I’d traveled in Asia the past two summers and seen my fair share of squatters, but it’s different: in Thailand and India, you expect squatters. And you dress accordingly. Now, in Milan, I struggled with a dress and leggings.

Nevertheless, as I’d spent little time in the city and didn’t want to appear unable to conform to Milanese lifestyle (I was, in fact, in a non-touristy section of town, according to my guidebook), I had two options: 1) don’t go, or 2) struggle and deal with it. I struggled and dealt with it. You can deal with a lot of things when you really have to go.

Before stepping back outside, I checked myself in the mirror (because apparently no bathroom is complete without a mirror, but a toilet, on the other hand, is unnecessary) and composed myself. I was sure to smile at my bathroom-using companion as I slipped through the doorway; I tried to give an un-phased, undaunted look, and I apparently succeeded.

I was only a few steps outside the bathroom and struggling with the locked courtyard gate (probably that had something to do with the instructions I had ignored) when I heard a piercing scream. A scream that conveyed all the horror, fear and anguish that naturally come with discovering that there is no toilet in the bathroom.

The scream was followed by the shuffling of feet. I was still struggling with the gate when it magically opened. I stumbled forward. My bathroom companion whipped us both through the double-courtyard gates as if the non-existent toilet was chasing us. We were back at the restaurant before I’d processed that I was also now running.

I swear the waiter’s mustache twitched when he saw us re-enter the restaurant. My companion returned to her seat without a word of her ventures to her friends. I found my friend seated at a table upon my return (and it was all I could talk about for the next ten minutes). The only problem with our table was that my chair was squished between the table and wall (with the swinging kitchen door right beside it), and I had no way to actually get to it.

The waiter motioned my friend up from her seat, lifted the table (vase, silverware and bottle of olive oil balancing precariously on top), shoved me into the seat and shoved the table back on top of me in one swift motion that said he’d done it a thousand times before.

I was wedged so tightly between the table and the wall that I promptly lost feeling from the waist down.

The waiter placed menus in front of us and instantly demanded our orders.

We returned blank-faced stares.

The only word I understood on the entire menu was rigatoni. We asked for more time.

He rolled his eyes, threw up his hands and yelled a few things in Italian. Then he got another waitress to intervene. She too rolled her eyes, threw up her hands and yelled in Italian, so that it became a chorus of two rolling their eyes, throwing up there hands, yelling in Italian, repeat.

We furiously studied our menus. Still, only rigatoni.

And then: I heard words I actually understood! At first I thought I was having one of those before-the-Tower-of-Babel moments where my two semesters of Italian finally paid off and I was fluent! Then I realized that the Italian couple beside me was speaking to us in English.

“They really ought to have English menus,” the woman apologized – a mighty generous apology considering that we were in Italy, but I appreciated her gesture all the same.

“Do you have a suggestion of what to order?” I asked. They both seemed very happy with what they were eating.

“The xxx is quite lovely,” the man smiled, rattling off the name of the dish in Italian.

“The what?”

“Raw meet salad,” he said. “Would you like to try it?”

I stifled a grimace in my napkin. “No thank you,” I said.

“Or you could try the pasta con prosciutto” the lady said.

“No suggestions!” the waiter cried – suddenly, miraculously, speaking English.

“Why not?” the woman demanded.

“They might not like it!” he said and stalked off.

“We’ll take our chances,” I told the woman. “What do you suggest?”

With my the pasta con prosciutto.

I ordered the pasta and ham bathed in a light sauce and my friend ordered a Mediterranean-style cooked fish – both the couple’s suggestions. (They were a little disappointed that we hadn’t ordered the raw meet salad.)

My pasta came out first. We’d decided to share the two dishes (mostly because my friend was slightly concerned about the potential rawness of her fish), so I waited. After all, my Mother had taught me good Southern manners, and you never eat before everyone is served. (That’s etiquette 101, Darlin’.)

I’d waited a good two seconds when I suddenly heard another scream. At first I thought that it was my bathroom companion, who’d found a porcelain hole in place of her plate. Instead, it was our waitress (Eye-Roller-Hand-Waver #2). She approached me with all her usual reactions, as I sat, rigid in my seat, hands folded, completely unconscious of what crime I’d committed but sure that I’d broken some incredibly sacred Milanese law.

And that’s when she shoved my plate forward, grabbed my fork and spoon and proceeded to twirl my pasta. She jerked the fork toward my mouth and I opened on command.

Between mouthfuls of pasta, I tried to explain in broken Italian my rather awkward Southern position.

She would hear none of it (although she appeared to understand all of it – even the English interjections – proving that some sort of pre-Babel-esque situation was at work here). She intimated that the pasta would get cold, would be ruined. She brought out the fish.

“But it is not ready,” she said, rolling her eyes and waving her hands. Then “EAT.”

And that’s when I made the fatal mistake. I took a knife to my pasta. That is, I picked up my knife, it was poised over my plate, and the waitress lunged across the table and seized it from my hands. (Cutting your pasta is a big no-no in Italy – something I knew but had forgotten in my state of cultural bewilderment.)

“Compartire, compartire” I repeated the verb “to share” – trying to explain my seemingly inhumane action.

She returned with another bowl and sat down at the table beside us, carefully spooning equal measurements of pasta between the two bowls and heavy-handedly dousing both with olive oil – all the while shaking her head and talking furiously to us in Italian. She did the same with the fish.

She then proceeded to warn us that neither would be good. We had waited too long and besides the fish was not ready.

We smiled anyway and took tentative bites, as all eyes in the restaurant were glued to our plates. And it was then that I had two simultaneous realizations, 1) I instantly understood what it was like to be a fish in a fishbowl with one’s over-zealous owner watching you eat, and 2) I realized that our waitress was not the control-freak, crazy woman I’d originally pegged her to be but instead was like any good Southern grandmother worried over how her guests will receive her hospitality.

And as I ate (and eat I did, for I feared the consequences of not eating every noodle in my bowl), I began to laugh. And then my friend laughed. And so did the couple next to us. And then the whole restaurant – even my bathroom companion – began to laugh, save my Italian grandmother. We laughed and laughed until the tears rolled down our faces and into our bowls.

And after we took our last bites and paid our complements to the chef, my Italian grandmother cracked a smile.