How We Eat Out

Just about a year ago I wrote a post about food, and I am happy to report that we still love to eat minestrone, risotto, roasted vegetables, and a savory tart on a regular basis. When we crave a good grilled steak, we have a local place that serves up a perfect Fiorentina of Chianina beef that is nearly as good as what we often order when in Tuscany. Other than that, we rarely eat out. For one thing, the late-night dinners that Romans are accustomed to just don’t work with our schedule; for health reasons we try to eat our main meal at noon and stay light in the hours before going to sleep. The other problem is I like to cook and use the local fresh ingredients from my favorite markets because everything just tastes so good. In restaurants I am frankly disappointed, thinking, “I could make something better than this.”

Because of my love of the Tenuta San Carlo and the awesome rice grown there, thanks to social media, I stumbled on the story of Domenico Cortese and Sofie Wochner, a husband/wife team who just opened a wonderful new restaurant near the trendy food neighborhood of Testaccio in Ostiense. Last Friday, with our good friends David DesChamps and Bennett Singer, in town to do some more work on their documentary film project, we had lunch at Marigold Roma. Parking was a logistical nightmare, but I dropped my mother off and they had scored a table, and then my NYC parking prayer* worked -- I found a spot not too far away.

Let me say at the outset that I could tell I was going to absolutely love everything about this restaurant. The space is

intimate but not too small and crowded, spare and Scandinavian in its aesthetic choices but not cold and corporate like Ikea. Our server, Doris, was so warm and spoke perfect English, making us feel instantly welcome. Excited by the menu and specials, we decided to start with some small plates to share, and then each picked a different course to follow. The suggested red wine was phenomenal.

 

Tiberi “l’Rosso” Umbria IGT 2017 
Gamay Perugino, Ciliegiolo. Acciaio/Stainless Steel
An expressive light-bodied red with fresh red fruits, spice and pleasantly rustic.

I hardly know where to begin with my rave review of every

bite of food we ate. My fork travelled around the table to sample creamy stracciatella cheese layered with artichokes and hand-torn croutons, a perfect vegetable puree soup, a crunchy inventive salad of puntarelle and fennel with toasted hazelnuts and a bit of grated pecorino, vegetable quiche, a roast veal sandwich on Sofie’s sourdough with mustard aioli that my mother thoroughly enjoyed, and then

two spectacular warm plates, one with sausages and lentils, the other a beef stew or spezzatino with just a hint of heat that lingered in your mouth. For dessert we shared Sofie’s carrot cake and a brownie with our espresso coffees.

But what really made this meal special, aside from our good friends, the warm environment and staff, the delicious food and wine, was the opportunity to talk with first Domenico, and then Sofie, and discover that they were every bit as wonderful as I somehow knew they would be, and that our shared love of Tenuta San Carlo meant there was instant simpatia between us. They seemed truly happy to be doing the hard work of running a new restaurant. We took home the seeded rye bread and a scone, which my mother had later that day with her afternoon tea.

This was that rarest of gourmet experiences – inspired. So of course I picked up Maria’s hand-cut puntarelle the next day and a fresh fennel at my regular market in Flaminio, plus some hazelnuts from my organic store and dressed Domenico’s salad with my lemon garlic dressing. The next day I made my Caesar Salad dressing and used the rye bread to make garlic croutons. We had rye bread toast with avocado and eggs for breakfast, and the second time I made Domenico’s salad for lunch I added in some fresh shrimp. After a rainy weekend we craved some stew so I bought veal for spezzatino and added peas to the usual combination of

carrot, celery, onion, and potato with some tomato puree. I also made a batch of my banana oat raisin cookies but with almonds instead of walnuts, and some dried peaches.

We went out to Marigold and ended up bringing a bit of Marigold home with us. We can’t wait to go back.

*Jesus, Nana, and Manny, please find me a place to park. (This was passed on from a friend, and always works, especially if you’ve been looking for a while and then say the prayer).

At the Lincoln Memorial

Now that the dust has nearly settled on the not-really-newsworthy encounter between Omaha elder Nathan Phillips and a group of Catholic high school boys from Kentucky the day before the annual global Women’s March on the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial, I feel the need to share some of my lingering thoughts. In trying to sort out facts, emotions, media frenzy, social media meltdowns, and primetime TV interviews, I felt myself drawn down into the sewer of contemporary life in America.

My heart breaks for the clueless boys, probably seeing a Native American elder for the first time in their lives, and only having the sports culture of shouting, jeers and tomahawk chop gestures as a response.

I feel the pain of Nathan Phillips, who said he was trying to diffuse tensions between a small group of loud, obnoxious street preachers known as Black Hebrew Israelites and the high school boys, many of whom were wearing the notorious red caps with the Make American Great Again slogan. He approached with a powerful song and a drum and a friend drumming by his side, surrounded by others who lingered at the end of the Indigenous Peoples March. In an interview later that day, he said, “Those young people from that school, that song was a prayer for their future and my children’s future. We’re facing critical times and we’ve got to make choices, and they're going to be some hard choices.” 

When the initial video clip of Nathan Phillips’ singing went viral on social media, the Archdiocese of Covington and the Covington Catholic High School the boys attended issued a statement condemning the actions of the boys and apologizing to Nathan Phillips specifically and to Native Americans. As Twitter feeds filled with background on the school and its culture, many of the website’s pages were made private. (Out of curiosity I looked to see what the social studies education requirements were: Only 3 courses with no history requirement). Initial reporting on the incident intensified and the media shifted to alternative narratives of the event as longer videos emerged presumably exonerating the boys and their behavior.

An edited video collage with minimal voiceover was posted on January 23^rd by Barbara Marcolini and Natalie Reneau of the New York Times with a catchy subtitle of “here’s what happened.”  It ends with Nathan Phillips calling out to the crowd, “Relatives! Let’s make America great, let’s do that.” Edited out of a longer clip of that moment by Kaya Taitano (posted by Indian Country Today on Vimeo) is a boy with a Trump hat saying that land gets stolen throughout history, it’s the way of the world, “that’s how it works.”  An Indiana man, Jeff Neal, wrote his take on all of this after watching lots of video and posted it on Facebook.  By far my favorite commentary is by Cory Collins of Teaching Tolerance who argues for education that makes

visible power dynamics, unpacks intent and impact, and debunks false equivalences. He concludes, “Thinking critically about stories like this is a skill our students will need for the rest of their lives. Let’s help them develop it.” One great place to start is the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The Native Knowledge 360 is a national initiative to promote improved teaching and learning about American Indians.

For me, in this maze of media commentary, there lingers a deeply troubling abyss between icons of old and new: a Native elder singing and drumming face to face with riled up teenage boys wearing MAGA hats. This encounter caused a flood of intense emotions, revealing fear, vulnerability, hatred, bias, and the hot mess of America’s broken culture. The shouting is deafening, the posts of vitriol unending. As it turns out the original Twitter account to post the video clip may have been fake (it has been closed by Twitter). Our enemies have figured out how to stir up muck, and weaken our resolve to make our democracy more than a failed experiment.

I know that there have always been tensions between youth and elders, and I am probably guilty of romanticizing the past and fearing a dystopic future as I get older myself. Yet as I think about the growing epidemic of elders with dementia and other profound caretaking needs, I wonder what will become of them. Will Americans continue to build fake towns to house their disabled elders, out of sight, out of mind? Will young people’s diminishing education and insatiable addiction to online multimedia mean they lose out on appreciating and learning from our collective history? I am haunted by Nathan Phillips and his repeated use of the word relatives to address the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial as he completed his song.