Flavors are the language of memories

We gather the memories of our guests, each of them has taught us something.

Remembering a flavor sometimes means embarking on a journey through time

Let me tell you about the time when a very, very old man came to us for lunch. He had fought in the Korean War and was from the United States. He had an Italian name, one of those that in Italy makes you think of foundlings, little children left without parents and registered at the town hall with invented, unlikely, sometimes even funny family name.

He was tall, very thin, with tanned skin, and was accompanied by his wife, a very elegant blonde woman. They didn’t speak Italian, sat at a table, and ordered from the menu. Shortly after, the dishes arrived, and they began to eat. They chatted calmly, everything seemed normal. But then something incredible happened: the Cocule te marangiana allu sucu (balls of eggplants in tomato sauce) arrived at their table.

As soon as the man tasted them, he stopped still, deep in thought, with his eyes closed. Rosalba was sitting nearby. (Rosalba De Carlo, the Maestra di cucina of our restaurant, has her own table and often sits in the dining room with guests, chatting with everyone, and everyone goes to greet her).
Rosalba noticed something was happening at that table and thought one of them might be feeling unwell. But instead, the man was moved to tears. His wife, leaning forward across the table, gently held his arm to comfort him.

The man then shared his story with Rosalba and Giorgio. He was born in America to Sicilian parents and grew up with three brothers and his grandparents in the same house. In the family, they only spoke Sicilian because the elderly grandparents had never learned English. So as he told his story, he started speaking Sicilian with Giorgio. But it was a language we Italians could barely understand. It was a very ancient Sicilian, truly out of time, with a perfect accent. In his voice, there was no trace of English accent, nothing. He was speaking in an archaic Sicilian as if we had traveled back 150 years! Even his wife was astonished, as she had never heard him speak in his original language before.

How incredible! The man couldn’t speak Italian, couldn’t even understand it, yet he was able to speak in a centuries-old language from the early 1800s!

What had happened?

He told us that as soon as he tasted the Cocule di Marangiana, he was overwhelmed by memory. He remembered how his grandmother used to make them almost exactly the same way. He told us how she grated pecorino cheese, using every last piece because it was expensive, because it came from Italy, because it was the taste of their homeland. His grandmother’s clothes even had that same scent, because she stored the cheese in her wardrobe. As he shared these memories, he wept and smiled. That flavor had transported him back in time. A bond was created between us, brief but intense, woven from shared memories, recipes, and ancient words lost in the evolution of a language.

We never saw him again, but years later, we still talk about it, often remembering his strange family name. Certainly, even he, upon returning home, must have thought many times about our balls of eggplants. We always hope that one day we will meet his children or grandchildren. Because this too happens, finding our old business cards in the hands of new, young travelers retracing the journeys of the heart towards their family origins.