A Big Night All Around

My husband, a first-generation Italian, is fiercely passionate about the culinary traditions of his homeland. I often get to reap the benefits…and endure the castigations about what is truly Italian, and what is not. The other night, for instance, I mentioned Stanley Tucci’s new cookbook and his eyes burst open because one of his favorite movies of all time is Big Night. I knew what was coming next. He puts on for me his parody routine, he’s an Italian waiter in an Italian American restaurant going off on a customer.

“I’ll have the shrimp scampi,” this customer says.

“I heard you the first time,” my husband, playing the waiter, replies.

“Excuse me?”

“You ordered the shrimp, I heard you the first time. There’s no need to say ‘shrimp scampi’, it’s like saying ‘shrimp shrimp’ or more accurately ‘shrimp langoustine’. You wouldn’t order a steak by asking for a ‘steak vacca or a ‘salmon salmone’? No need to repeat yourself. Just ask for the shrimp.”

“But that’s what it says on the menu…”

“Look,” interrupting. “I am just trying to be helpful and begin to correct the century-old mistakes that my forefathers embedded in American culture. The menu should say ‘sautéed shrimp with garlic, butter and wine sauce’. That’s what the dish contains. I’d half forgive them if they had said ‘shrimp scampi-style’, but that still does not make sense. No, it’s wrong, it’s been wrong for centuries, it’s time to right that wrong.”

“I’ll have the shrimp in garlic, butter and wine sauce.”

“Brilliant. Anything to drink?”

“I’ll have a glass of the California Syrah.”

The waiter makes a snide comment about the mismatched wine pairing. He is subsequently fired.

If my husband had to make a living as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, his career would last thirty seconds.

As a boy growing up in Rimini, a resort town on the less glamorous Italian coastline, he would sit and observe his grandfather (or grandmother, never more than one in the kitchen) create mouth watering meals from the simplest of ingredients—triglie fritte, risotti, paste asciutte of all kinds, every meal a veritable feast. And on every single occasion, no compromise was made with the ingredients, the preparation, the timing or how the meal was served.

Big Night always brings him back those days. The film is a sumptuous, heart wrenching depiction of two emigrant Calabresi brothers who battle with American culture and themselves to save their Jersey Shore Italian restaurant from the brink of bankruptcy in the decades after World War II.

Like the younger brother chef, Secondo, perfectionist to a fault, my husband would not have been able to hold his tongue, even to appease the pleas of his desperate, older, and much wiser businessman brother Primo. He sees himself in Secondo as he refuses to satisfy a patron’s request for risotto and a side of spaghetti and meatballs. No compromises.

My husband and I have not yet purchased The Tucci Cookbook. But we hope he’s applied the same standards as he did with Big Night. We hope he had Secondo review the recipes, and if so, then certainly he’s been able to capture the essence of what food means to an Italian (and Italian-Americans). What a meal means. I even hear the recipe for the famous Timpano is in it…

What about one for a simple fried egg?

Big Night’s final scene is a masterwork of filmmaking. No dialogue, the morning after the feast, Primo and Secondo realize that their restaurant is doomed, and yet the simplest of actions becomes a metaphor for the film, the methodical process of something as simple as making breakfast. Frying eggs, the relentless immersion in the routine acts as a constant that allows the characters to stay pure to themselves, maintain excellence and fight another day. No compromises, no short cuts, no deviating from their core principles.

That’s why ‘shrimp scampi’ is wrong. It’s shrimp in garlic, butter and wine sauce.

Attached to this article is a photo of my husband’s grandmother’s recipe for Gamberi allo Champagne. Its pages are worn, stained yellow, the recipe hand written, bound with others in leather binding. My husband covets this book like a precious artifact, and it took some time for him to relent and allow me to steal this one photo. The recipe is in Italian, of course. I was afraid to ask for an English translation, so certain he would say no, so afraid is he that novice Americans might omit or change one ingredient or step. We may as well rip out his soul.