I must finish last week's story and also provide additional color commentary on that substance so near and dear to every Italian's (European's?) heart--food. This business trip made my fourth and longest visit to Italy (all in the last twelve months, can you believe it?) and provided a certainly more authentic glimpse of everday life than any vacation could (or may want to).Our daily cafeteria lunches continued to amuse me much as my company's lunches do with their regional loyalty--frittata, pesto linguini, saltimbocca, etc., and always a first course of pasta followed by a second course of protein, either of them alone large enough for a lunch portion. I still have to give the slight edge to our Lausanne kitchen, however, both for quality of preparation and portion sizes large enough to stuff a water buffalo.
My service rep and I dined Tuesday evening at a popular Savona staple called Farinata, which serves a mandatory and fantastic appetizer of Ligurian-specialty yellow-flour flatbread, also called farinata (funny how that works). The rest of the evening featured various forms of seafood, of which I recognized not a single fish name, all delicious. The wine also flowed freely, as we had suffered several setbacks during our Tuesday troubleshooting.
Wednesday was "do-or-die" day, but our technical luck improved enough to survive Thursday afternoon's cross-examination of results; we weren't sure if we'd be kicked out of the plant, that's only happened to me once before. For some reason the Italian Technical Director kept aiming pointed questions at me, despite repeated protestations that I'm the new guy. Ultimately we represented ourselves well enough that our customer hosted us out for dinner on Thursday for our hard work and 11-12 hour days. But there was enough entertainment during dinner that I think I’ll expound in another post…
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