An Italian lunch...

Spaghetti kitchen, that was the name of the “Authentic” Italian restaurant that our boss decided to take us to for his birthday, and after a hectic morning of meetings for him we finally reached there, all seven of us but not before it was four in the afternoon and I thought it was a lunch!

Enthusiastic as I was about the whole affair of having a free lunch in a new place that I was still to try. Though the initial food reviews that I read on the net made me a little apprehensive, I was still in the best of the moods to try when I reached there, as a peaceful white decor calmed my nerves, a soothing jazz balmed my soul and what a try it turned out to be!

As starters, we the vegetarians ordered something known as Cottage Cheese Siciliana, baked potato and cheese, and a serving of Feta bread. I never knew that Sicilians were as aware of paneer as the north Indians are, where every curry has to start with either paneer or should contain potatoes. However the eager wait to try an authentic Italian meal Soon fizzled out, as we realized that the Sicilians were more pseudo north Indian than we thought and a paneer tikka serving dressed with a little vinegar was known to them as their very own cottage cheese Siciliana.

The feta bread turned out to be even worse, as it was just a thin crust pizza from dominos, well it could have been a little thinner, but the toppings were really plucked off, and on each of those two hundred odd worth 'bread' covered exactly half a slice of ultra thin mushroom, half a berry tomato and one single olive sliced and diced to decorate the inordinately 'delicious' bread. On second thoughts however, it might not have been one single olive on one "bread", but I am sure we had at least one olive on the three such breads that we ordered. Well, I hope ...

So, I was too grief stricken to have a portion of the baked cheese in potatoes, or baked potatoes in cheese, whatever it was, whenever it finally came. Though my companions tell me that it was the only thing very Italian – bland, cheesy, and not very spoon friendly either. I am sure that it was expensive, and that makes it authentic Italian for sure. However, the apprehension could be visible on the face of all, as they gulped down the servings of baked potato and cheese, with some water, only after the plate was passed around twice on the table.

But the fear that I was living in was for the salad that we had just ordered – “Sandwich in a bowl”. I had given up on the credibility of the alongside dish descriptions. However, this one as I remember had read something very helpful like “vegetables, bread, herbs et al, all thrown in the bowl”. However the same turned out to be my only saving grace on a day when my only fault had been to order a late lunch for seven really hungry people and to assume that I knew all of Italian food. Well, at least I thought I knew before I visited this "authentic" restaurant. However, praises were showered on as people gulped down that eclectic greenish mix of herbs and shrubs that it contained those small bitter green leaves in a little more than half of the portion was a secondary matter, as well as the fact that half of it was cast aside, even if we were seven people in total having the same.

But, all this was all but starters and salads – the expensive mix of little food, the only purpose of which is to add to the already bulging pockets of the restauranter. However, leaving the restauranter alone, I was more concerned with the butterflies in my stomach – the ones that flew throughout the day before losing their consciousness in the exasperation of having nothing since the morning. Now, they were almost dead with the weight of the cheese, the olive, the herbs and the leaves – dead as the ghosts of my past, haunting my stomach again.

And it was then, I remembered something that was told and advised to me before my visit to the miraculous Milan, the vivacious Venice, and the Pizzalicious Pisa – “When you’re not sure of what to eat there, take a pizza or look for a McDonalds”. Well, there was no McDonalds for sure in the restaurant, and so I tried the next best part of the advice. While others looked through and ordered platters of Meal-e-Cottage Cheese, Lasagne-di-Marizi, blah blah, I was going through the pizza menu, and my eyes rested on something that proclaimed simply Tri-Color Pizza. Despite the humiliating experience that I had so far with the helpful description provided along with, I went ahead to read that one, the one which read “yellow, red and orange capsicum dressed with parmesan cheese chips, etc etc”. Seems pretty harmless, isn’t it? And tempting too?

Well, I decided to go ahead with it, and soon came a layer of thin dominos pizza bread covered with a layer of capsicum that they had promised, as well as all the salad leftovers that we had asked him to clean up, and to dress it up were six rectangular chips of parmesan cheese – all as promised, but what left me puzzled was the fact that the same had not been baked, it was like a pizza bread dressed in a colorful salad. I am sure that they still don’t bake pizzas on your table. But, I still waited for the maître d' to serve the same to me, and hoped that he would realize his mistake, and take the “pizza” away and would perhaps bake it. He came, and as I looked in horror, he promptly served me a slice out of that mess. This one too had botched up, and botched up big, and the butterflies were dead finally just at the sight of this marvelous “pizza”.

If the looks were bad, the taste deserved no words at all – the “worst” is just too mediocre to describe the eternal heavenly taste of that great one, that different authentic Italian Pizza. Well, I am sure that the Italians too would have been puzzled at this sight, and the recipe would have been really new for them – as I never had such a “pizza” even in the dinghy streets of Italy or even my boss had in any of the humongous restaurants located in the prized boulevards of Europe, and the rest of the world. In fact, one of them even drew a parallel to a similar incident that had surprised him in the past.

It so happened that he was a connoisseur of steaks, and when he was in France, his boss took him out to an ultra expensive restaurant, in the middle of Paris, a place where he absolutely loved the steak of. Just as today, the maître d’ served him with a plate, and in his case started with a bowl of cold beef. He was as perplexed, as I was at my state, and hoped for the attendant to come and deliver a respite. He came, and came with an egg that he broke squarely on the top of the beef.

Poor him, he had to gulp it. I ended my day in a better position, tasting meals from the plates of all my companions, and my dish was finally tri-color with cheesy white lasagna, a serving of macaroni, and some fusilli, some serving from the platter of cottage cheese. The lunch supposed to tickle our taste buds, left us tickled literally, and even two weeks after the ominous lunch, a reminder of my tri-color pizza leaves my colleagues grinning and me red-faced.

It was a different matter altogether that I came back and ordered a plate of trusty idlis. Nevertheless, thanks boss for the lunch! Will wait for another occasion in your life, and will never go to an authentic Italian joint in Mumbai. Well, if we do, I will just have to ask them if they bake their pizzas!