Juventus pair Weston McKennie and Timothy Weah are facing the wrath of Italy after criticising the nation’s famous cuisine.
The Americans unwisely agreed in an appearance on a recent podcast that the food since they arrived in Turin “has no variety”. To dig themselves deeper into trouble when the Serie A season begins, both went on to suggest US restaurants were better.
“You guys don’t have variety – it’s pasta, pizza, fish, steak,” McKennie said. “You know what the problem is with Italian food? It’s great, it’s good specific food that you do very well, but in America if I go to a burger joint or a steakhouse, then I go to another place 10 minutes down the street, I’m still eating a burger, but it’s a completely different taste. In Italy, I go to this restaurant and get a pesto pasta, I go 10 minutes down the street and order a pesto pasta, it’s the same thing.”
What we think of as “Italian food” isn’t, really, Italian food. Or, to present this the other way around, it is Italian food but no Italian eats like that.
There’s Neapolitan food, Sicilian, Fiorentine (where everything has spinach, even the eggs), Turin, Venetian and so on. And locals in those local areas do get superb versions of those local cuisines. But the pick and mix of all of the best of those local cuisines – which is what the rest of us call “Italian food” – not so much. A Sicilian restaurant in Turin might be more difficult to find than one in London. Heck, even a Milanese one in Turin…..
Yes, I am exaggerating. But there’s still a point there. In any one Italian city and hinterland you’re going to have a great deal of that local cuisine. Some of which will be truly excellent. But it ain’t “Variety R Us”.
It would have been so much funnier if they had criticised French cuisine.
Or even, dare one say it, Japanese. The wife has just got back from three weeks in Nippon complaining about the quality and variety of the food, both of which have taken a dive over the last decade. The reason? apart from the high end, most kitchen staff are now non-Japanese, They don’t know what Japanese food should taste like and pollute it with their own filthy ingredients and spices. Ah, the benefits of diversity.
The burger isn’t a different taste from the last one, it’s all the additional slop the second place puts on it that the first one didn’t!
I can only imagine if they played in the EPL.
I love America but the idea that there is variety in the menus does not seem correct. You have to live in an area to find the better places. Which stricture would I suppose apply in Italy too.
Sorry to hear about Japanses food, I enjoyed it, but ten years ago. Possibly all the kitchen staff are in Aylesbury now.
I’m more than a little fed-up with the constant narrative that everything that Germans, Italians, Japanese etc is better than the way we dumb Anglos do it. Restauranteurs tend to be pretty cosmopolitan people who trot the globe looking for cuisine ideas that they can take home and make money out of. If Other People’s Food really was so much better, the eating public would stop buying burgers and fried chicken altogether and they would never buy a loaf of ordinary, despicable, deplorable, distasteful sandwich bread again. But they do and artisanal bread remains very much a fringe choice. Because we’re stupid, you see, and the people of these other nations are so much more morally worthy than we are.
Service is better in America, a lot of Italian restaurants seem ambivalent about the idea of customers
I once spent three months in the US. (My other visits have been only 1 – 3 weeks.) I admired the good value of prole food – burgers, dogs, blueberry pie. I enjoyed freshly squeezed OJ at breakfast – then unknown in Britain.
Everything further upmarket was rubbish except two good meals in three months (i) Cape Cod, chowder then lobster, (ii) San Fran, Chinese tucker in a joint where I was the only round-eye.
The problem was that Americans were wonderfully hospitable so I couldn’t possibly tell them what I thought – it would have been rude and cruel. Even the god-awful coffee couldn’t be mentioned though it did leave me aghast at American criticism of British coffee. What a cheek – at least ours was of variable standard, including really quite good. The American stuff was universally foul.
Had exactly this experience about 20 years ago when I was working in a town in Tuscany for a month. 26 restaurants in town, two dishes between them.
DM – Even the god-awful coffee couldn’t be mentioned
They think Starbucks is coffee. When that accursed chain opened up shop here, my sister insisted I must try it.
I was surprised by two things:
* What they call “coffee” tastes like the Devil’s arsehole probably does. Shitty and burnt.
* How much?!?!?
Unfortunately, PT Barnum was right, so Starbucks is still in business. The Arabs know how to make coffee, the Yanks know marketing.
BUT… at least when you go to a Yank restaurant, they treat you like a welcome guest. Italian waiters may be too busy smoking and eye-fucking the passing totty to bother with your order.
Western non-western food isn’t non-western food, it’s eg food that Chinese people living in the west think that is what western people think Chinese food is. Chop Suey was invented in California, Chicken Tikka was invented in Glasgow.
Italian food – same in France – is regional and sub-regional. Italian and French restaurants in other Countries usually offer a selection of dishes from different regions or adjusted to local taste and expectation.
There is no such dish as spaghetti bolognese, for example. . Spaghetti is a pasta from the South of Italy.
Ragù alla bolognese is sauce typical to the region around Bologna and eaten with flat or tube shaped pasta, not spaghetti. In northern Italy rice is the “pasta” of the area. Pizza in Turin is obviously an escapee on the run from Naples probably wanted by the Carabinieri.
The thing about Americans, is they seek out pizza, burger, fried chicken, or Chinese food wherever they happen to be, because it’s what they know, then complain it’s not like the slop they get State-side.
My favourite ever American meal was in Vegas. French food with US service, which is quite something. I’m sure the reverse would also be good, if only for memories.
Starbucks remains a total mystery. Only 8 people pretend to like the coffee, and yet it’s the only thing for which Yanks will join long queues. I even know Continental Europeans who love it. Is it drugged?
A Sicilian restaurant in Turin might be more difficult to find than one in London. Heck, even a Milanese one in Turin…..
And if there was one no local would eat, or even want to eat, there.
The Starbucks coffee is because what they mostly sell are very milky drinks like lattes where a very dark roast is necessary. Their standard coffee is not good for an espresso, but the blonde roast isn’t half bad.
Nero are the best chain. Then for me it’s between McDonald’s and Costa (McDonald’s is great value).
My favourite coffee is Monmouth Coffee near Covent Garden. Really surprisingly good value coffee considering the location (but you’re often packed in.
I don’t understand the people who go to foreign climes, love the native food, then return home and want something that is anglicised (not too hot, chicken breast rather than leg meat, no gizzards, etc).