Working in Italian restaurants in the United States taught me many things, and one of them was slightly uncomfortable to accept: Being Italian does not automatically make you the final authority on Italian food.
We grow up with a certain confidence about these things. We can recognize overcooked pasta almost immediately, we have strong opinions about coffee and we can spend 20 minutes discussing whether cream belongs in a recipe without considering the conversation a complete waste of time. The problem is that, especially once you move abroad, that familiarity can quietly turn into arrogance. America helped me understand that.
One afternoon, while I was managing an Italian restaurant in Florida, a server came looking for me and asked if I could go to one of her tables. The guest was upset and wanted to speak to the manager.
Every restaurant manager knows this moment. You straighten your shirt, put on your diplomatic face and walk toward the table hoping the problem is something manageable: a cold steak, a forgotten drink, maybe somebody deeply offended by cilantro.
This gentleman had bigger concerns.
Before I could properly introduce myself, he looked at me and announced, "Horrible experience." Good afternoon to you, too.
I asked what had happened. First came the complaints about the service: not enough bread, not enough water, salt apparently difficult to locate. Then we reached the real crime scene: the lasagna.
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He asked me whether we had a Cuban or Mexican chef in the kitchen pretending to be Italian. For the record, our chef was from Emilia-Romagna, which I explained to him. It did not help.
The lasagna, according to him, was dry, the portion was too small, it did not contain ricotta and, worst of all, he was convinced it could not possibly have been fresh. I told him it had been prepared that morning. That somehow made things worse.
"So it's not made to order?" There was a small pause while I tried to understand where exactly this conversation was going. I explained that preparing an entire lasagna from scratch after somebody orders it would require a level of patience rarely found in the modern restaurant guest. Pasta sheets, sauce, bechamel, assembly, baking. We were not talking about tossing a caesar salad together.
He looked at me as if I had just admitted to an international fraud.
A chef friend of his in New York, he explained, had told him that real lasagna should always be made fresh to order. Once New York entered the conversation, I knew my chances were getting smaller. Anyone who has worked in restaurants in America knows that New York can sometimes function as a sort of culinary passport. You do not necessarily need to be Italian; knowing somebody from Brooklyn may be enough.
Then came the ricotta.
Our lasagna used bechamel. His idea of lasagna required ricotta. To him, our version was not simply different; it was wrong.
And this is where the whole episode became more interesting than just another difficult customer story, because I understood his frustration more than I wanted to admit.
For many Americans, especially those who grew up in Italian-American families, the food they call Italian is tied to childhood, grandparents, Sunday dinners and family identity. Telling somebody that the lasagna their grandmother made for 40 years is "not really Italian" might technically win you an argument, but it is also a pretty efficient way to become the most annoying person at the table.
Italians abroad can be extremely good at this. We arrive carrying an invisible gastronomic police badge. Carbonara? Let me inspect that. Cappuccino after lunch? Absolutely not. Chicken with pasta? Somebody call the embassy. Pineapple on pizza? We may need international sanctions.
I was guilty of it too, but living and working in the United States slowly made me less rigid. I met American customers who knew Italian wine better than many Italians I knew, people who had traveled through Italy for years and guests who could identify regional ingredients I would never have expected them to know.
Once, while describing pasta alla Norma, a customer stopped me to ask whether we were using salted sheep's milk ricotta. I remember being genuinely impressed, and moments like that slowly forced me to reconsider a few things.
Being born in Italy gives you familiarity with Italian food. It gives you memories, habits, instincts and probably a slightly unhealthy emotional reaction to badly cooked pasta. It does not automatically give you expertise.
In the same way, Italian-American food cannot simply be dismissed as a badly translated version of Italian cuisine. It developed somewhere else, under different conditions, with different ingredients, different customers and generations of immigrants trying to preserve something from home while adapting to a new country.
Of course, adaptation has limits. I have seen things done to pasta that should probably remain confidential.
America has an extraordinary talent for personalization, and if you give customers enough options, sooner or later somebody will add grilled chicken, vodka sauce, extra cheese and something called "Italian seasoning" to a dish that had been perfectly innocent five minutes earlier. But contamination and destruction are not always the same thing.
Pizza taught me this better than anything else. I have eaten excellent pizza in Italy and terrible pizza in Italy, just as I have eaten terrible pizza in America and excellent pizza in America. New York-style, Detroit-style and Chicago deep-dish sometimes barely look like members of the same family, but they all tell a story about what happens when food travels.
Recipes move with people, and when people change, food changes with them.
The angry gentleman eventually paid his bill, left no tip and made it very clear that he would never return. I survived. So did the lasagna.
But I thought about that conversation many times afterward.
Before living in America, I probably would have reduced the whole episode to the usual conclusion: Americans do not understand Italian food. After several years there, I became less certain. Maybe sometimes they understand a different version of it, and maybe we Italians are not always defending authenticity as much as we are defending the version of authenticity we happened to grow up with.
I still have limits. There are culinary crimes I am not emotionally prepared to forgive.
But these days, before declaring that somebody is eating Italian food incorrectly, I try to ask a more useful question: How did this food get here in the first place? Usually, the answer is much more interesting than the recipe.
Editor’s note: Simone Raccanello’s book, “L’Italia mangia, l’America consuma – Il conto del sogno americano,” will be released Nov. 17. Follow him on Instagram at @simoneraccanello.writes.
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