Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Authentico

I think I feel a theme coming on.  this is another post that touches upon pizza.  and if you’re gonna touch upon my pizza, you’re going to have to wear these gloves.  I have no idea where you’ve been with those hands.

We were surprised by the crowds there on Valentine’s Day - we’d picked Gaspare’s Pizzeria as a fallback when our #1 choice was inexplicably closed, expressly because we expected it to be an easy, unhurried, quiet experience.  Who goes to the local lattice-ceilinged, basket-chianti and fake-grapes pizzeria on such a romantikal night?  Well, apparently everybody does: big filipino families and tough young russian thugs with doe-eyed waify girlfriends, old grey locals and squinting sightseers examining the clumsily-painted murals as if they were florentine frescoes and the wall-mounted coin-operated mini-jukeboxes at each booth as if they were alien technology - the world had turned out.  It was quite a surpise, all right - we’d grown used to this place as a quiet, un-updated storefront going back to the middle of the last century when so much of this ‘hood was built.  Of course, we’d been there plenty of times, but I guess we hadn’t been there lately.  I remembered it as relaxing, dusty, a relic hanging on for survival in a neighborhood where the primary emphasis had shifted from western Europe to Asia to the eastern blok over the past several decades.  Now Gaspare’s is packed out the door.  What gives?

We figured it out on our next trip there a few weeks later.

The plan had been to go somewhere else but we ran out of energy and came back to Gaspare’s for a low-effort comfort supper.  Just an ordinary friday night, no reason to think they’d be overbooked - but there were were again, our names on the clipboard and our asses waiting in the cramped anteroom.  But 20 minutes later the man running the pizza ovens ran up front, apologized to us for the wait, and smilingly escorted us to the last booth in the back, next to the counter into the kitchen where, against a built-out wall, the ovens stood glowering; there, I saw the reason for the crowds:

We were waiting for quite a while for our pizza to be brought to us.  I wiled the time watching the waitstaff negotiating the many crowded, closely-packed tables with smooth choreography that belied their obvious youth - she was a pretty, slim young woman with wavy hair, olive skin, and unquestioned control of her tables; he had chiseled features and dark mousse-spiked hair, and his tables were eating out of his hands.  When they spoke to each other, or to the grinning pizza-peeling host, it seemed that very few words were needed.  A short phrase, a facial expresssion or a gentle touch were all it took. They operated very efficiently, and with great respect and apprecation for each other. 

Still waiting for our pizza, I scanned the collection of photos that had been mounted on the wall above the pizza ovens a short distance behind us, posed smiles gleaming out into the dim dining room.  In many of them, Mr. PizzaSeater was standing with somebody or other, chest and chin outthrust proudly, sharing a grinning shoulder-to-shoulder embrace.  That same smile was still plastered on his face, a little more seasoned but no less bright, as he ran his restaurant that night.  And in the middle of the bottom row of this Wall of Fame were two framed 5x7s - school photos, from the look of them, both showing identically posed models against an identical mottled green backdrop: a boy and a girl, near the end of high school. 

They looked familiar.  I looked again - the capo’s smile was on their faces too - they were his kids.  I looked again, again - those kids: they were the waiter and the waitress, maybe five or six years ago.  He’d filled out, gotten rid of the pompador, and there was less ingratiation in his smile, but it was him all right; she had developed a fetching confidence and a much nicer hairstyle, but it was still her.  It was friday night and Gaspare was running his pizza house with his son and his daughter, filling the bellies of the central Richmond with savory thin crust and its ears with midcentury italian pop and the occasional raucous rendition of Happy Birthday sung by most everybody in the restaurant by the time we hit the fourth line. 

Pizza is a communal food - more than most dishes popular in this country, it invites reaching, touching, and communication at the table.  We all eat from a single platter, plucking our slices and sharing condiments (oregano, peppers, garlic, shrimp flakes - it’s a conversation all in itself).... so it shouldn’t surprise me that this pizzeria, distinguished as it was by the kind of convivial authenticity that only exists in the presence of the concerted efforts of generations of a gifted family, had been recognized as a great place to get your feed on.  It had the goods - a damn fine pizza - but it had the intangibles too.  It had soul, and that got shared liberally at every table too.  I was just sorry that it took me so long to figure it out.