I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I only revive the blog
when I’m on vacation. The solution that
comes to mind is to go on vacation more often.
From the informal survey I’ve been conducting for the last
couple of decades, it’s very difficult not to enjoy a trip to Italy. As far as leisure destinations go it’s
basically idiot-proof. I ran across one
person who went to Milan and declared their trip negative, but I’m willing to disregard
that particular person’s opinion. So when
I touched down at the Naples Capodichino airport a few of nights ago, even
though it was midnight, even though I had been in transit for eighteen hours
and could feel my contacts digging into my eyes, even though I was in Naples,
it was like bounding back into the arms of an old friend. An absurdly charming and somewhat inefficient
friend with great weather.
I had the very lovely excuse of my cousin Sophie’s wedding
to escape to the Mediterranean for a few weeks, as she was nice enough to pick
the insanely gorgeous island of Capri as the location for the festivities
(seriously, can you imagine anyone moaning, “Ugh, I can’t come that weekend, I have
to go to this wedding on Capri”?). From
California, getting here is best described as a pain in the ass—think SFO to
Munich to Naples airport (plane) to Naples bed and breakfast to Naples seaport
the next morning (car) to Capri harbor (hydrofoil) to Anacapri (car)—but it
really did all melt away when I woke up to the subsiding booms of a summer
thunderstorm, the first shots of orange light glowing through the clouds, and
the soft, salty smell of a port city. It’s
been ten months since I had a real vacation (one that puts at least eight time
zones and an ocean between me and the office), and I’d been getting to the
point where the slightest hint of traffic or Whole Foods being out of mango
chips made me want to scream like a provoked bear. My usual mellowing-out methods of intense
workouts, long steam room sessions, acupuncture, and chardonnay kept my inner
provoked bear at bay to some degree, but the relief was only temporary and I’d
revert pretty much as soon as I encountered someone standing on the left side
of the BART escalator or overheard an uptalker (“I went to this party last
night? And they had like, the best sweet
potato chips?”). I probably could have
taken off to Fresno for three weeks and been thrilled, so I am positively
ecstatic to be in Capri.
The first thought that crosses one’s mind when approaching
this steep white rock rising out of the dark blue Mediterranean is that it is almost
ridiculously beautiful. Not even just
photogenic, out and out gorgeous. The
island is covered in trees, wildflowers, and vineyards, along with clusters of
picturesque pastel buildings, and is crisscrossed by hairpin turns that swing
out over the sea hundreds of feet below.
The harbor and the town of Capri are buzzing with tourists—this is where
the day-trippers throng—but still manages to look disarmingly idyllic, while
the road that snakes up to the smaller, quieter perch of Anacapri alternates
between lush and shaded, with flowering vines spilling onto the pavement, and
tracing the edge of the cliffs in the open, blazing sun while offering
supremely dramatic views of the Gulf of Naples.
Capri is blessed in the looks department, and it’s hard not to get a little
bit high on such beautiful surroundings.
It’s also pretty inescapable that a lot of money flows
through Capri—seeing as it lost its “undiscovered” status two millennia ago
when the emperor Tiberius decided it made a nice place for a weekend getaway,
it’s been the playground of the rich and/or famous and/or powerful for quite
some time now, and everything is priced accordingly. Greta Garbo and apparently a fan, as were
Grace Kelly and Prince Ranier, and these days Mark Zuckerburg, Leonardo di
Caprio, and Beyonce number amongst the numerous celebrity visitors (I could go
on, but if you really want to know where celebrities are vacationing, I hear
that US Weekly is quite good at that
kind of thing). The classic place to
stay is the Quisisana, a giant peach-colored wedding cake, though I’m told that
these days the Capri Palace up here in Anacapri is popular as well. The latter is the only place on the island
you can get your Michelin star fix (“Ugh, I’ve gone three days without a
balsamic reduction”), so there’s that.
Anyway, the money that comes through here ensures that the
island is kept utterly perfect-looking.
The narrow streets are shaded by the kind of bright, typically Italian
facades that exude a sort of blissful insouciance that can only exist in such a
hospitable climate, an effect amplified by the bougainvillea blooming in
enormous clouds over the white stucco walls of private gardens and the heavy,
luxurious floral scents wafting out of the artisanal parfumiers (of which, yes,
there are quite a few here). Dolce and
Gabbana, Miu Miu, and La Perla are all housed in spaces that would be worthy of
an Architectural Digest feature were
they not surrounded by buildings that are equally or even more beautiful. It is genuinely difficult to find ugly
architecture here, which is both delightful and rather surreal. The villas and even the more modest houses
all employ the graceful and open shapes typical of the Mediterranean, and the
way they cling to the hillsides only serves to enhance Capri’s aesthetic
appeal.
 |
| To quote the great Classical playwright Aeschylus, this doesn't suck. |
But the thing that has really set my heart abuzz? The food.
Cuisine. Victuals. Munchies, if you are so inclined. Oh, sweet Jesus, every single thing I’ve
eaten here has been fresh, lovingly crafted, and mind-blowingly delicious. I was told that the food on Capri was amazing,
but somehow I didn’t fully process that.
The last thing I ate before getting to the island was a Salat ‘Take-off’”
in the Munich airport, which consisted of steak strips on a bed of spring
greens and was unable to completely conceal its true airport food nature. I rolled into Anacapri at about 11 the next
morning, perfect timing for a dip in the pool over at the Capri Palace and,
when the rainclouds meandered over from Naples, a casual lunch, where they took
my order of verdure alla griglia with a side of grilled chicken without a hint
of attitude and seemed perfectly fine with my damp bikini bottoms soaking
through the white linen couch. (I should
mention that we all gathered around a low table and piled into wicker chairs
and an L-shaped couch to eat, which, as someone with an aversion to hard
seating and sitting up straight, I found sublime.)
Outside, the vestiges of the storm rolled past and dampened
the air, punctuating the conversation with soft booms of thunder, while we caught
up with various friends and family from London and Santa Barbara and figured
out who everybody else was over Pellegrino.
I was luxuriating in this strange relaxed sensation that I’d only felt
on a couple select occasions in the last two months when the waiter presented a
plate of flawlessly roasted and seasoned zucchini, carrots, and asparagus and no
less than four chicken breasts crisscrossed with picture-perfect grill marks. Now, I don’t know what they did to this
chicken, but I can only assume that the original birds lived on a diet of
Evian, truffles, and fairy dust because I had to set down my fork after the first
bite and take a moment. If someone had
told me at that point that there was a religion that exalted this chicken as
its deity, I probably would have converted.
I deemed the first 12 hours of my vacation a roaring success and made my
way through three of the breasts, which would have been the perfect amount of
protein if my post-lunch plans had included bench pressing my own bodyweight
for the remainder of the afternoon (they did not).
That’s great, you may be thinking, but it’s a
Michelin-starred kitchen. They should
probably be able to cook a chicken. It
was that night’s dinner that really sealed the deal, though. The restaurant in question is a narrow little
place called L’Angolo di Gusto, and within a few minutes of sitting down, the
waiter, who it later emerged was the owner and husband of the cook, had placed in
front of me a diminutive white dish containing half a cherry tomato, a petite
ball of mozzarella, and a single basil leaf drizzled with golden olive oil and
a light sprinkling of black pepper. It
was a classic amuse-bouche, a small but perfectly formed Caprese salad.
A word on Caprese salad: I love Caprese salad. I have many fond memories of tearing up basil
leaves over thick-sliced heirloom tomatoes fresh from my dad’s garden and
eating the finished product outside on mild summer evenings, which, as one
might imagine, is an immensely pleasurable experience. After contacting a really lovely intestinal
disease called shigellosis in India and swearing that if I didn’t die I would
never eat or drink again, the first thing I actually had an appetite for was
Caprese salad. Despite the fact that it
was mid-April in the UK, which meant that the tomatoes and basil were flown in
from Israel, the mozzarella was rubbery enough that if you dropped it on a tile
floor it would probably bounce, and the weather was distinctly
un-Mediterranean, it was a brilliant re-introduction to solid food. There’s a long and joyous relationship there.
The thing is that I hadn’t eaten any dairy or any tomatoes
for at least three months (not by choice; that’s a whole other story). So that bite and a half of Caprese salad in
its ancestral homeland was, in a word, transcendental. The texture of the mozzarella alone would
have floored me. Obviously it was
homemade (like, seriously, duh), and the slightly firm chewiness of the outer
layer gave way to a center so creamy and tender that it could almost be
described as liquid. It was the very
essence of la dolce vita in the form
of soft cheese.
The game-changing amuse-bouche was followed by a sautéed zucchini
dish that I could never hope to replicate and grilled octopus tentacles
drizzled with balsamic vinegar on a bed of fresh fennel, which is pretty close
to my ideal meal. It should go without saying that the octopus was
fresh—I’ve eaten enough octopus to tell the difference between an octopus that
was fresh and an octopus that was schlepped in from somewhere else, thank you
very much—and I have no doubt that they’d gotten it from one of the markets
down by the harbor that morning. When
you look at the sea surrounding Capri you can just imagine the myriad octopi*
trolling the depths and wrapping themselves around rocks and thinking, This seems like a good place to hang out. As animals, I really like octopi; I think
they’re pretty cool and kind of cute in their own weird sea creature way. Hearing about the American tourists that
caught an exceedingly rare hexapus in Greece and then cooked it struck me as
particularly tragic, and I don’t think I could ever go octopus hunting, as
apparently it involves diving down with a crowbar and hitting them over the
head until they let go of their rocks. However, I like the taste enough that I
manage to block this out when presented with a plate of expertly charred
purplish tentacles. My connection here
might be even more poignant than the one with insalata caprese—some people can
say “I love you” in 17 languages; I can order octopus in 17 languages.
Since the Caprese amuse-bouche and octopus, I’ve cleaned the
local greengrocer out of cherries (they were 7.90 a kilo and, after having
spent $12 on a bag of cherries back in California the week before, I couldn’t
not take the deal), dined on edible flowers and young greens in a dressing of
olive oil and juice from the famous lemons, and, at my cousin’s wedding
reception, approached something akin to culinary nirvana. The seasoned buerre blanc, rosemary-lemon
sorbet palate cleanser, and rolled leg of lamb with a grilled peach and pine
nut compote that was accompanied by its own tiny dish of smoked sea salt were
all masterpieces in and of themselves, but the beluga caviar that we started
with was utter perfection. It was also
served on heart-shaped dishes with little heart-shaped caviar spoons, which is
a very lovely way to enjoy one’s caviar (as opposed to eating it out of the jar
in one’s sweatpants, I guess).
 |
| What remains of my kilo of cherries plus one rogue plum, which I'm transporting in a Carthusia parfumier bag, e.g. the chicest possible way to transport fruit. |
 |
| I know that whenever I talk about how much I love caviar I sound like a total jerk, but I can't help the way I feel. |
In short, I’ll confirm that Kate Moss was a tasteless moron for her whole “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” episode and that she really just needs to go away at this point. If she’s been to Capri, and I'm sure that she has, she’s clearly done it wrong.
As an aside, my cousin’s wedding, which brought me to Italy in the first place, was easily the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life. Between the ceremony taking place in the forest where Tiberius married Julia the Elder more than two millennia ago, watching the sun set over Ischia at the al fresco reception, the exquisite glass chandeliers flown in from Venice, and the flowers (oh my God, the flowers), it was the most gorgeous and amazing British-Californian-Arab-fusion wedding anyone could have dreamt up. Many tears flowed. With all this in mind, if I tried to shoehorn it into a blog entry that’s primarily about cheese and octopus, I’d feel like an ass. Words wouldn’t do it justice anyway.
 |
| View through the trees of the forest. It was pretty okay. |
 |
| Imagine this carpeting the floor of a pine forest and you'll get the idea. |
 |
| Ischia sunset |
*I recently found out that “octopi” is not in fact the
correct plural of octopus. It’s “oct
opuses” or “octopodes,” but I can’t bring myself to say “octopodes” without feeling really, really pretentious, and “octopuses”? Are you joking? How stupid does that sound?
opuses” or “octopodes,” but I can’t bring myself to say “octopodes” without feeling really, really pretentious, and “octopuses”? Are you joking? How stupid does that sound?
No comments:
Post a Comment