To Beef or Not To Beef

Forever friends forge friendships wherever you end up living, especially when an Italian meal is served.

It had been a cozy, Californian afternoon of kale soup, butter lettuce, watermelon radishes, sourdough bread, and local, gooey cheeses. We had spent the day in Sonoma visiting new friends who were starting to feel like old ones, with our conversations skating in and out of English and Italian. After lunch, we sauntered in a misty forest among tall, skinny Redwoods that resembled the average, slim body type of the Bay Area.

We had only been living in San Francisco for two months, and this was our first trip outside of the city. California felt casually cool, terribly new, and deliciously ours to devour.

Earlier that day, my then ten-year-old son had sat in a chair overlooking a stunning nearby vineyard, and suddenly turned glum.

“This looks like Italy but it’s not,” he said, tears in his elementary-school eyes.

We were all still in those initial stages of falling in love with a place — not knowing yet if we were ready to let go of a past and embrace a future.

When it came time to head back to San Francisco late that afternoon, we were peopled out. It had been a family outing with our young kids who had spent more time with our babysitter than with us in our first couple of months on the job of nights out mingling among the Italian-American community. In a sprint-like start following our international move from Italy to California, that lazy afternoon offered us a water break during a marathon.

In the car ride back to San Francisco, the kids were whiney, tired, and wanting their new home even though it was still cluttered with suitcases as we waited for all of our furniture to arrive from Rome. While we all longed to slip into our pajamas, I knew we were perilously close to a breakdown. I feared it might be my own.

Although my husband believes, in principle, that weekends should be for rest, he rarely practices it. In the field of diplomacy, there’s always the sense that the show must go on. New to California, we felt we couldn’t turn down invitations, a combination of not wanting to offend anyone and a thirst to slurp up everything new. While my husband shines in the spotlight, sometimes all I want is to hide behind the curtains.

On our way home, my husband insisted we stop by a 6pm dinner near Market Street in San Francisco. The host, Angelo Garro, lived in his metal-welding workshop where we would dine, and where he cooks and grills the vegetables he forages and the game he hunts. My husband had only met Angelo once before and knew we would instantly feel back in Italy once in his company. A Sicilian who moved to California years ago, Angelo might even be something of a homesick-healer for our son. My husband promised our irritable kids that the fly-by would be “solamente cinque minuti.” The kids knew that a five-minute stop-over usually meant an hour.

It would be an informal dinner in honor of Italy’s most renowned butcher, Dario Cecchini, who had just arrived from Tuscany, via Argentina, where he’d performed one of his meat shows dissecting a cow. Dario was an old friend whom we first met in Tel Aviv, where he was dressed in his signature uniform of a tricolor Italian-flag vest, Nantucket-red pants, and tomato-red Crocks.

I knew my husband was homesick for homemade prosciutto, Tuscan accents, Chianti wine, and Italian camaraderie. After two months of hanging out with strangers, we longed for the familiar feeling of an old friend who knows your language and culture, the kind you can sit with in silence and feel as if you’ve caught up.

We arrived at the end of a dark street in Southern San Francisco, and parked in front of one door, slightly jar, with a glowing glimmer of light streaming out like a kryptonite beam. It lured us towards the roaring voices of a party, a familiar sound that often excites me but, that night, exhausted me. I inhaled, squeezed my kids’ hands as if we were about to charge a soccer field, and pushed through a creaking hinge that made sneaking in impossible.

All eyes landed on us, and somehow the beam turned into a spotlight, and all four of us were center stage. Dario spotted us, dropped the T-bone on which he was gnawing, and tooted his signature trumpet horn like a court jester announcing our arrival.

A middle-aged Cheshire cat, Dario zapped my husband into action with his mega-watt smile. They embraced each other as all Italian men do, kissing each other on both cheeks. But, unlike most Italian men, these two also gave each other a bear hug, a tradition each has picked up from his respective American wife. Our kids grinned at the warm, whimsical Italian whose infectious, trumpet-blowing kookiness lifted them out of their late afternoon droopiness. My daughter melted when Dario picked her up, placed her on a stool, and encouraged her to toot his trumpet as loud as she could.

Sofia and Dario in their trumpet duet.

With welding tools, wrenches, antler heads, and wild turkey feathers hanging from the ceiling, Garro’s forge was in stark contrast to the gala halls of five-star hotels where we spent much of our time at welcome receptions. I feared if I put my phone down somewhere I might never see it again amidst the clutter of cooking utensils, canvas portraits, pots, and pans. It felt like the kind of hang-out where you needed a spoken password to enter but the door was actually never locked.

It was clear from Angelo’s soft brown eyes beaming through his oversized tortoise-shell glasses, his puffy, soft hands which caressed a child’s cheek as tenderly as the game he hunted, and the skillet of pasta he always keeps warm on his back stove that he would become a forever friend. As the years went by, I knew I could find my husband at Angelo’s if he needed a break from work and wanted to feel he had returned to Italy, albeit only for his lunch hour.

Angelo’s back kitchen was packed with canned jams, olives and fruits, and freezers full of fresh game. Out of it swiveled bowls of homemade pici con guanciale, crostini di lardo, and chunks of Dario’s famous Fiorentina, which he grilled in a back aisle with an overhead opening of a roof somewhere between plumbing tubes, hubcaps, and a scorched barbecue. Out trumpeted Dario’s stentorian voice every time a luscious slab of meat landed on the picnic table around which some sat while others stood, wiping their greasy fingers on the white-and-red checkered tablecloths.

“To beef or not to beef!” Dario cheered as he passed around a tray of exquisitely-charred Florentine steak grilled together with Angelo and Lorenzo, both sporting aprons over their jeans.

Our children were the youngest of the warm, jolly crowd of about thirty, and Angelo and Dario instantly included them in the theatrics. Angelo showed Luca a wild turkey hanging by its neck in a back freezer, and promised he’d take him hunting one day in Sonoma. Dario took on seven-year-old Sofia as his mascot, and encouraged her to sound his horn whenever inspired. She quickly caught on and punctuated his every interjection with a medieval toot. The kids were treated like adults, the adults acted like kids, and the Italian meal smelled like home.

My kids with Dario while Sofia clutches her precious bag of salt.

Dario was dressed in his trademark outfit, with a silver belt buckle worthy of a cowboy but that worked with his swagger. In keeping with his reputation, he climbed up on a wobbly stool, his six-foot-two frame perilously close to a dusty chandelier dangling from the wooden beams, and recited Dante, bringing a raucous crowd to a solemn silence. When his tenor voice ended his recital, Sofia understood the musical coda and squeaked the horn on cue as if they’d been performing the duet together for ages.

Two hours later, when the time came to leave the dinner, Dario and Angelo showered our droopy kids with salt, as if they were newlyweds sprinkled in rice, promising them good luck. The kids walked away smiling, and carrying special salts handmade by each Italian, one from his butcher shop in Tuscany and the other from his forge in San Francisco. It was the kids’ baptism to San Francisco, officiated by two seasoned Italians with ties to California.

Over those first two months, we had attended numerous welcome parties that overwhelmed and moved us in our new role in San Francisco. We had worn out our perma-grins, grasped a chorus line of hands, and endured back pain from the countless cocktail hours we had spent on our feet while meeting and greeting.

But, that Sunday night, as we stumbled into this fantastical forge, I felt we were attending a welcome party to San Francisco that felt like us.

It wasn’t at all a party for us: it was Dario’s welcome dinner to San Francisco, an informal launch with friends before the formal kick-off of La Settimana della Cucina Italiana, where my husband had invited Dario to be the guest of honor. But, there we were, ourselves, Italian and American, dressed in sneakers, jeans and raincoats. My morning make-up had long since faded, my hair frizzed far beyond its blow-out, and I felt unmasked. There, we were reunited with an Italian friend whom we had met while living in Israel who helped us bridge friendships in our new posting.

There, in San Francisco, our worlds had circled back into a united force on the other side of the world — which happened to be, by some beautiful stroke of luck, my country. In this small, noisy microcosm of homemade food, Italian wine, and chaotic cheer, we had found our Italy in our America.

In those first two months, we met more people in San Francisco than we had in a year of living in Rome. We mostly split our time between the multi-generational Italian-Americans of North Beach, and the newly-arrived Italian Stallions of Silicon Valley, two worlds that don’t naturally overlap.

That night, we encountered both, in a hidden hub of happiness, where Italy and America merged into the sort of evening where I may go home tired but I sleep content. Where I fall asleep reveling in how Italians, and, especially, my tireless husband, have taught me that taking the time for a simple meal together is enough to make anyone feel at home, no matter where you live.

Dario, my husband (giving a toast on a wobbly stool), Sofia, and Angelo.