Not mincing words

There's an interesting Times article that, unwittingly, does a good job of capturing some of the issues that are roiling, and will ultimately change, Europe.

Immigrants Capture Italian Flavor: Last month, Gambero Rosso, the prestigious reviewer of restaurants and wine, sought out Rome’s best carbonara, a dish of pasta, eggs, pecorino cheese and guanciale (which is smoked pig cheek; pancetta, for aficionados, is not done) that defines tradition here.

In second place was L’Arcangelo, a restaurant with an Indian head chef. The winner: Antico Forno Roscioli, a bakery and innovative restaurant whose chef, Nabil Hadj Hassen, arrived from Tunisia at 17 and washed dishes for a year and a half before he cooked his first pot of pasta.

“To cook is a passion,” said Mr. Hassen, now 43, who went on to train with some of Italy’s top chefs. “Food is a beautiful thing.”

Spoken like an Italian. But while the world learned about pasta and pizza from poor Italian immigrants, now it is foreigners, many of them also poor, who make some of the best Italian food in Italy (as well as some of the worst and everything between).

With Italians increasingly shunning sweaty and underpaid kitchen work, it can be hard now to find a restaurant where at least one foreigner does not wash dishes, help in the kitchen or, as is often the case, actually cook. Egyptians have done well as pizza makers, but restaurant kitchens are now a snapshot of Italy’s relatively recent immigrant experience, with Moroccans, Tunisians, Romanians and Bangladeshis all doing the work.

The fact itself may not be surprising: On one level, restaurants in Italy, a country that even into the 1970s exported more workers than it brought in, now more closely mirror immigrant-staffed kitchens in much of Europe.

But Italians take their food very seriously, not just as nourishment and pleasure but as a chief component of national and regional identity. And so any change is not taken lightly here, especially when the questions it raises are uncomfortable: Will Italy’s food change — and if so, for the worse or, even more disconcertingly, for the better? Most Italian food is defined by its good ingredients and simple preparation, but does it become less distinct — or less Italian — if anyone can prepare it to restaurant standards? Does that come at some cost to national pride?

Wow--these foreigners sometimes actually cook! And yes--top immigrant chefs are just 'anyone'.

There is, of course, more.

But in a debate likely to grow in the coming years, others argue that foreign chefs can mimic Italian food but not really understand it.

“Tradition is needed to go forward with Italian youngsters, not foreigners,” said Loriana Bianchi, co-owner of La Canonica, a restaurant also in Trastevere, which hires several Bangladeshis, though she does the cooking. “It’s not racism, but culture.”

Yeah, and the Confederacy was all about culture, too.

And then, of course, there's this:

Despite this success — and thousands of loyal Italian customers — he said he never felt fully accepted. “Italians say they aren’t racist but then they say to me that in Milan I have found America,” he said, referring to a slightly insulting expression for finding success without really working for it. “It makes me feel lousy.”

Qunfeng Zhu, 30, a Chinese immigrant who opened a coffee bar in Rome’s center, has had a similar experience even though he makes an authentic espresso in a classic Italian atmosphere (overlooking a few bottles of Chinese liquor).

“Some people come in, see we are Chinese and go away,” he said.

But in the last few years, he said, that happens less frequently, one sign that Italy is opening up — if slowly — to other kinds of food. Twenty years ago it was hard to find anything beyond the odd Chinese restaurant. Now the choices are broader, especially for Asian food like Japanese or Indian.

“We live in a globalized society — there are so many people represented in our city,” said Maria Coscia, the commissioner of Rome’s public schools. So much so that last year the city began a program of serving a meal from different countries once a month. But many parents complained loudly.

“The first time we did it, the menu was Bangladeshi,” she said. “That was a problem.”

As a result of the complaints, the program was tweaked slightly and now at least one dish in four on those days — even grade-school students eat well here — will remain Italian. Now it is largely accepted, though the program’s Web site includes this reminder for the still wary, “In the total of the 210 school days, when lunches are served, only eight days are dedicated to the menus from other countries.”

It's pretty astonishing how openly racist Europe can be--the best part about the article is it continues the trend of writing about non-white Italians as foreigners, as if the definition of an Italian is limited to those whose grandparents marched under Mussolini.