Giardiniera

A yoga instructor and a fashion designer walk into the Pfister. They are from Portland. This is not a joke. Well, generic maybe it is. Kimberlee and Ashley pose with baby Quinn in front of the painting of kittens in a basket. Quinn wants to hold my hand (and her mother’s hand) so that she can walk down the hallway backwards. They inform me that walking backwards is a metaphor. Everything is a metaphor. I already observed and wrote about this (we think alike!), ed but they point out to me how the marble steps look just like salami. The meat steps look downright appetizing though they are vegans. “They just need to add some olives to these steps.” I think about the sandwiches my Italian-American mother packed for me as a kid and remember that there is an olive relish that tastes really good with this kind of salami (I have determined the steps are made of capicola my mother’s favorite salami, not genoa which is my favorite) but I cannot remember the name of the relish.

Hey, I need a refill on this tea I am drinking.

In the café a woman wears a watermelon t-shirt and dines upon a fruit cup. On the table beside the fruit cup is a banana. Her sweater is pink and looks ripe. Her name is Donna.  She lives in Chicago but has come to stay at the Pfister every summer for the past 29 years to attend Festa Italiana. The woman is FBI, full-blooded Italian, third generation. She doesn’t know the language and has never visited Italy, but she does know that the fried calamari at Festa is delicious. But at Festa even the nightly fireworks are delicious.

Every summer she and her family will rent 3 or 4 rooms at the Pfister. This year her two daughters and their families will join her. A total of nine grandchildren will be present. To amuse the kids, Donna buys unusual graphic t-shirts (such as the watermelon shirt she currently sports that has tiny cartoon ants crawling on the sleeves) at Festa and only wears them once a year when she stays at the Pfister.

Donna’s husband is a retired restaurateur, but she says he is running a stand at Festa that sells military sweatshirts (he donates the proceeds to the USO), stuffed olives and giardiniera. GIARDINIERA! Hey, that’s the name for the stuff that I was thinking of a half hour ago! If you are like me you are wondering if the restaurant that Donna’s husband owned served Italian cuisine. It did not. He owned Moon’s Sandwich Shop, a popular inner city Chicago diner that has been around since 1933. It has 18 stools, a line of people waiting to sit on those stools and closing time of 2:30p.m. “It looks like a broken down pawn shop, but they make everything fresh everyday,” Donna reassures me.