B. J. and the Bear

Two weeks ago an Italian friend made me an offer I could have refused, but didn’t. She needed help with a story she’s writing for Tavolo, one of the world’s premiere food magazines. Tavolo shocked the Italian food writing establishment in the 1960s by consistently linking the pleasures of food with those of amore. It could not have declared its intentions more clearly with the cover of the first issue: Sophia Loren was pictured with pasta sauce all around her mouth. She was wearing a wig-cum-brassiere made entirely of spaghetti. And nothing else.

Simonetta (the Italian job) writes a column in Tavolo that showcases Italian restaurants outside of Italy. She’d already covered the UK, the US and Australia, and wanted me to send her the good oil on the NZ scene in return for a few gallons of her family’s very good olive oil. I was engaged.

My brother was conveniently directing the children's play Thumbelina in Wellington and as I was already flying thither I decided to investigate one of the city’s best-known Italian restaurants, Scopa. This audacious “caffé cucina”, I reckoned, would tickle Tavolo’s fancy for carnal cuisine – in English its name means – wait for it – “fuck” (I ought to declare at this point that my Italian is passable). While scopa can also mean “broomstick”, every Italian over the age of 3 knows what it really means.

For years this restaurant has been getting customer reviews that suggest it’s a case of Scopa by name and Scopa by nature. Interestingly, while none of these reviews betrays any awareness of what scopa means, most of them complain about the staff’s “fuck off” attitude. The following unedited, semi-literate excerpt is typical of the negative reviews:

After going to this restaurant with about 7 other people i must say the food was good but the staff are completly rude. when i first walked in i wa waiting to get to my table as it was very busy and people standing around the waitress completly shoved me out the way with no excuse me or anything....not only that when we booked the table we originally had ten and went down to Seven and the waitres didn’t seem to be happy about this and asked very rudly why we booked for ten we advise that we did change the amount of people and then there was a bit of wine in the bottle and the waitress asked “can you finish this” and then last but not least we were asked if we could leave as there was another booking at 10pm after we were told when we booked that you couldn’t book after 8. 

My Scopa experience was by no means as traumatic – the food was the typical approximation of authentic Italian one tends to be presented with in NZ, and the staff, though obviously very much aware of the place’s filthy name, were by no means filthy themselves. Their attitudes wouldn’t have been out of place in the majority of Auckland and Wellington restaurants.

Back in Auckland, I knew exactly where my next Italian dinner would be: Me Ne Frego in Epsom. What is it about Italians moving to NZ and opening offensively named restaurants? The best translation of me ne frego is “I don’t give a shit”.

The Italian joker behind this restaurant has also been lambasted online. Despite knowing what the name meant, this patron nevertheless felt obliged to complain about the service:

 . . . if you don’t mind waiting for 55 minutes for your main course, & get verbally abused by a non-civilised, non-professional, hippie, dishevelled Italian guy, then by all means you should definitely check out the place, as i heard the food is actually quite good....

i didn’t get passed the appetizers, because i couldn’t wait any longer for my main course...

it’s just being told to f*** off in front of your family simply because you asked when the food would arrive after almost an hour waiting, well, it just didn’t go down well with me. 

To be fair, the owner/chef certainly can’t be accused of false advertising. What’s more, his food has been praised just as often as his service has been panned, and it is unquestionably autentico. My cautious attempts at the lingo defused his desire to tell me to vaffanculo and a very pleasant evening was had by myself and the one other customer who was cowering in a corner.

At this point I had two juicy morsels for Simonetta, but I really needed a third course to round things off nicely. I scoured the directories for another restaurant that might somehow fit into Tavolo’s theme of carnal cuisine. Things were not looking good. Try as I might, I could not read sex or offence into the names of the other Italian restaurants in Auckland.

I once had a student who made pizzas at Gina’s and who was learning far more interesting things from his Brazilian co-workers than he was from me. It was he who taught me the Brazilian slang for lesbian: “Velcro”. It was a lopsided exchange: all I taught him in return was bad poetry. This anecdote, while charming, was more Brazilian than Italian, and I was beginning to despair.

But then Dio smiled on me. I was driving through Kingsland intending to dine (reluctantly) at Papas Pizza Café when I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a sandwich board saying: “Pompino Ristorante”. I simply had to check it out, for reasons which will soon become clear.

I parked near Winehot and walked a little ways up New North Rd to where the sandwich board teepeed the pavement in all its hand-painted, red-white-and-green glory. I opened the restaurant’s door, bells tinkled, and the ugliest woman I had seen since leaving Wellington materialized from behind a beaded curtain. She must have been Simon and Garfunkel’s biggest fan: she had the height and impishness of the former and the hair of the latter.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a voice that was so uncannily like John Key’s I was momentarily at a loss for words. As I regained my composure I had time to note the two Davids above the till – Michelangelo’s and Posh’s. The place reeked of new paint, had six tables, no muzak (not even Andrea Bocelli), and far too many empty Chianti bottles in straw baskets.

“Table for one, please.”

“Anywhere you like,” John Key ventriloquized and left me alone with the sound of silence.

I seated myself and began to peruse the menu. After a few minutes I was approached by the second-biggest man I have ever seen. He all but shattered the beaded curtain and lurched across the few feet separating us. He was unquestionably several over the otto and Italian as Barilla pasta.

“Calla me Orso, ita meansa ‘bear’ in Italian!” he boomed in such a way that I thought he was somehow channelling an aftershock from the Christchurch earthquake. Gondola-like, his right foot collided with my table and made leaning towers of its Chianti bottles.

“Piacere, Orso,” I replied after the table recovered. “Mi chiamo New Zealand Gerald.”

“You speak Italian!” he rumbled, in Italian (the ensuing dialogue has been translated).

“Yes, sort of. Excuse me, but I have to ask you – why did you call your restaurant ‘Pompino’?” Orso, who indeed resembled nothing so much as a grizzly with a third-rate full-body wax job, bared ursine teeth and smiled from ear to ear – a good 12 inches at least.

“Ah, of course, you know what it means, eh?”

“Yes, I do,” I smiled back.

“Well it’s like this,” he said. “My wife, she’s always breaking my balls. She won’t learn any Italian and my English is not good. And she’s no oil painting – you saw her yourself.”

“She seemed nice,” I lied.

“She isn’t. She never lifts a finger in the kitchen – I have to do everything.”

“But why ‘Pompino’?” I persisted.

“Like I said, I have to do everything. She’s never given me a pompino and she never will – but the joke’s on her now, eh?”