Fruits of the Sea

OK, the final chapter of last week’s saga resumes with our barely grateful customer hosting the service rep and me to dinner on Thursday night. Seven of us--namely Mario, Fausto, Alessandro, Guglielmo, Claudio, Giuseppe and me--rendezvoused again in Savona at a seafood-only mom-and-pop joint with a rustic chaotic decor. The place was about as real Italian-Ligurian as they come, I suppose, given a cold rainy Thursday night in early February in little Savona; certainly no servers or other diners spoke English. As a double-Ausländer (German for foreigner), i.e., an American from Zürich, I was sort of the guest of honor. Meaning that courteous attention was given to inform me exactly what was being ordered, and then slyly inquisitive attention was given to exactly what I ate and how.

International business travelers know the key to a successful transaction depends not at all on their company’s offerings or service or technical details or contracts or whatever. No indeed, the key to a successful international business transaction is eating and drinking like your host. For example, in Mexico, eat breakfast from 10am-1:30pm including lots of corn tortillas, picante sauce and raw onions; in Korea, eat marinated BBQ’ed beef until your colon cries uncle (right, Jeff?); in Japan, eat eel sushi as long as your arm and wash it down with warm sake (right again?). Although I’m no master of authentic Asian cuisine, thanks to Steph’s and my Euro gastronomic adventures I’ve acquired a hand at chowing down like an Italian, Frenchman, Spaniard, etc. In my Savona case, I knew that one must sop up all remaining sauce or juices on every plate with the spongy rolls provided, one must twirl one's pasta with one's fork against a spoon, one must serve oneself slippery pieces of fish with fork nested into spoon like a European version of chopsticks, one must eat like he or she hasn't seen food in three days, and one must imbibe wine like Prohibition just lifted.

The first course consisted of five types of cold fructe de mare antipasto (think tentacles), followed by fish ravioli, followed by seafood linguini, followed by gigantic mussels in the shell, followed by the most enormous quantity and diversity of battered fried nautical fill-in-the-blank you can imagine, followed by dessert and naturally, espresso (the easiest rule is that not ordering coffee at the end of the meal insults the whole country).

The trickiest mealtime test, however, really challenged me--the dreaded gamberetti test. Each portion of seafood linguine came adorned with two enormous fully-intact shrimp, the gamberetti. I mistakenly left them for last, and when I glanced around at other plates for a clue on proper dismemberment protocol, everyone had already finished (please see, “Hasn’t seen food in three days” rule, above). So I attacked these treacherous gamberetti with knife and fork, succeeding only in halving them horizontally without piercing the hard shell underneath. Without breaking conversation, I noticed several tablemates peripherally glancing at my plate, awaiting my conclusion. Sweat bead on brow, I rested the utensils, grabbed a roll and sopped up some sauce to buy time. Was I finished? Throwing caution to the wind, and because the shrimp indeed looked quite delicious, I snatched up one slippery tail portion, ripped through the shell, extracted the meat and popped it down the hatch. I repeated with the body portion--slightly gunkier inside, eh?--and likewise the other shrimp, finally licking the oily sauce off my fingers as subtly as possible, wiping a napkin and pretending nothing had happened. Apparently I passed with flying colors and did not mistake my colleagues’ curiosity, as one laughingly mentioned in Italian and my service rep translated, “He doesn’t speak Italian, but he eats like an Italian.”

Alongside the food, plenty of prosecco sparkling wine and the local white were repeatedly poured into tiny glasses throughout the meal. The overall serving quantities blew past "All you care to eat", surpassed even "All you think you can eat" to stop somewhere near "All you can do not to lose it". Without much exaggeration, I had problems breathing because my stomach had expanded where my lungs usually are.

I bid them Ciao! after working again Friday morning, catching the 12:30pm train from Savona to Milan and then boarding the despised gimpy Scheiss-alpino (SwissGuy thankfully corrected me, the Cisalpino is an Italian- not Swiss-maintained train line) again missing its connection for another 90 minute delay, finally depositing me home--exhausted and still bloated from Thursday--at a relaxing 8:30pm. Work trip completed.


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