remember that night. Mexican kid. Very ugly. Was drinking with his friends and started playing the game with a pistol. He lost. Messy.”
I was horrified: was this why Jesus hadn’t been allowed to see the body? “Oh, no,” I blurted out, startled. “No one said anything about Russian roulette.”
The detective was taken aback. “You know, you’d better speak to Lamposone. I might have the case confused with another one.”
Detective Lamposone had been transferred to another precinct, in Bay Ridge. He had no recollection of the incident. I told him the details, the name, the date. Nothing. “I’m sorry. That one’s gone.”
One morning, about ten months later, I was working in the prep kitchen. I was making pasta with Alejandro, Marcello’s successor. (Alejandro had been the dishwasher on my first day at Babbo.) Alejandro had grown up on a farm, just outside Puebla, and had left when he was sixteen. He had been in New York four years. He was a kid. (One afternoon, when the members of the entire prep kitchen were in the basement, changing back into street clothes—the routine was that everyone stripped down in a space about half the size of a very small closet—Alejandro noticed that Elisa was staring at his belly. For someone so young, the belly was remarkably soft and round. “Mexican men,” he said cheerfully, slapping it with vigor. “Macho potbellies.”)
I had a little Spanish. I wanted to know how Alejandro’s family farm worked—what animals were raised, the vegetables, what was eaten at the family table. Alejandro, while perfectly happy to answer my questions, didn’t have that “capacity to look at the whole kitchen.” This was a job. He wasn’t interested in talking about food, although he was a perfectly good cook. He was interested in meeting American girls. He proposed helping me with my Spanish and, yes, if I insisted, talking about farm vegetables, provided I’d take him to some clubs. Just then Marcello walked in. His wife was outside, in a car. Marcello wanted to show the kitchen his new baby, a bundle of pink miniature girl cradled in his arms, a few weeks old, conceived, I realized, not long after his interview with Mario: in the confidence conferred on Marcello by his new position, he began a family.
People who don’t live in New York don’t appreciate how much the city has once again become fashioned by immigrants and is where you come to become the next thing you’ll be. In 1892, four out of every ten New Yorkers were born abroad. Since 1998, that has been the case again, owing to the arrival, legal or illegal, of immigrants from Latin America, Russia, the Asian subcontinent, Albania, the Baltic states. Both of Joe’s parents are immigrants, ethnic Italians who were living in Istria when it was incorporated into Yugoslavia by Tito: the Italians, long resented since the war (most had been Fascists), were told to assimilate or get out. Joe’s father hopped on a ship and arrived in New York illegally. He was fifteen. Lidia had a marginally more conventional passage and was granted political asylum. “Restaurant work,” Joe observed, “is the lifeline of immigrants in this city.” His father’s first job was in a restaurant; his first home was above a bakery (run by an immigrant). Thirty-five years later, their son, now a co-owner of his own venture, was providing a lifeline for another generation. He employed Marcello, an émigré from Argentina (and not, for all his pasta-making gifts, from Puebla). And now Marcello was secure enough in his new country to begin a family. Someone had died; someone was born.
I ONCE ASKED Mario what I could expect to learn in his kitchen.
“The difference between the home cook and the professional,” he said. “You’ll learn the reality of the restaurant kitchen. As a home cook, you can prepare anything any way anytime. It doesn’t matter if your lamb is rare for your friends on Saturday and not so rare when they come back next
I was horrified: was this why Jesus hadn’t been allowed to see the body? “Oh, no,” I blurted out, startled. “No one said anything about Russian roulette.”
The detective was taken aback. “You know, you’d better speak to Lamposone. I might have the case confused with another one.”
Detective Lamposone had been transferred to another precinct, in Bay Ridge. He had no recollection of the incident. I told him the details, the name, the date. Nothing. “I’m sorry. That one’s gone.”
One morning, about ten months later, I was working in the prep kitchen. I was making pasta with Alejandro, Marcello’s successor. (Alejandro had been the dishwasher on my first day at Babbo.) Alejandro had grown up on a farm, just outside Puebla, and had left when he was sixteen. He had been in New York four years. He was a kid. (One afternoon, when the members of the entire prep kitchen were in the basement, changing back into street clothes—the routine was that everyone stripped down in a space about half the size of a very small closet—Alejandro noticed that Elisa was staring at his belly. For someone so young, the belly was remarkably soft and round. “Mexican men,” he said cheerfully, slapping it with vigor. “Macho potbellies.”)
I had a little Spanish. I wanted to know how Alejandro’s family farm worked—what animals were raised, the vegetables, what was eaten at the family table. Alejandro, while perfectly happy to answer my questions, didn’t have that “capacity to look at the whole kitchen.” This was a job. He wasn’t interested in talking about food, although he was a perfectly good cook. He was interested in meeting American girls. He proposed helping me with my Spanish and, yes, if I insisted, talking about farm vegetables, provided I’d take him to some clubs. Just then Marcello walked in. His wife was outside, in a car. Marcello wanted to show the kitchen his new baby, a bundle of pink miniature girl cradled in his arms, a few weeks old, conceived, I realized, not long after his interview with Mario: in the confidence conferred on Marcello by his new position, he began a family.
People who don’t live in New York don’t appreciate how much the city has once again become fashioned by immigrants and is where you come to become the next thing you’ll be. In 1892, four out of every ten New Yorkers were born abroad. Since 1998, that has been the case again, owing to the arrival, legal or illegal, of immigrants from Latin America, Russia, the Asian subcontinent, Albania, the Baltic states. Both of Joe’s parents are immigrants, ethnic Italians who were living in Istria when it was incorporated into Yugoslavia by Tito: the Italians, long resented since the war (most had been Fascists), were told to assimilate or get out. Joe’s father hopped on a ship and arrived in New York illegally. He was fifteen. Lidia had a marginally more conventional passage and was granted political asylum. “Restaurant work,” Joe observed, “is the lifeline of immigrants in this city.” His father’s first job was in a restaurant; his first home was above a bakery (run by an immigrant). Thirty-five years later, their son, now a co-owner of his own venture, was providing a lifeline for another generation. He employed Marcello, an émigré from Argentina (and not, for all his pasta-making gifts, from Puebla). And now Marcello was secure enough in his new country to begin a family. Someone had died; someone was born.
I ONCE ASKED Mario what I could expect to learn in his kitchen.
“The difference between the home cook and the professional,” he said. “You’ll learn the reality of the restaurant kitchen. As a home cook, you can prepare anything any way anytime. It doesn’t matter if your lamb is rare for your friends on Saturday and not so rare when they come back next
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