Sicilian Diary

Negative vibes last night in the kitchen. Mi marito said, ‘I don’t even go there any more if I can avoid it, I don’t like the atmosphere.’ They were all shouting at each other when I arrived and then hushed up when they saw me. I think we got the whole kitchen wrong. I don’t like it, even the aiuto cuoco with his earnestness, he hasn’t got good ‘manualità’ as they say here, he doesn’t manipulate the food well, his plates are graceless and unpalatable looking. A highly strung girl came in (she had come in for the opening and been super-enthusiastic), with her tangoed fake tan and tight clothes and complexes, accompanied by a minute girl with her minute dog. They sat at the table next to mine (I was eating), greeting il barman effusively. She gave me a brief smile and then checked – just checked, not really expecting a negative, ‘It’s OK to have the dog here, vero, he’s just piccolino.’ The barman says ‘Not at all, no probs!’ I leaned across and said, ‘Maybe next time it would be better...

At last it is Monday, our day off. I am wrecked. I woke at 12.30 my whole body aching, especially the legs. Last night the restaurant was full. I was on fire going round all the tables explaining the specials, ‘the fish of the day is mupa, abbiamo burratina pugliese (which most people didn’t know since it comes from Puglia and not Sicily, so I had to explain it is like mozzarella but creamier - really delicious). People asked me where I was from, and was I Spanish because of how I pronounced the names of the tapas. One table of guys said ‘complimenti per l’italiano’, which I really appreciated since it is no mean feat to have to rattle off the specials , then explain and advise them on the different dishes available, when you have large tables of hungry customers staring at you, slightly bewildered by the array of things on the menu. We have ‘Piatti Unici’, the equivalent of a main course (some with basmati rice and vegetable soufflés or roast potatoes and salads etc), but this is mo...

Everything is chaos. Everything is Pachamama. 4am is Pachamama – just about closing time on Saturday night. 11am is Pachamama when the cleaning lady is there and my suocera is putting away the groceries they got (my suoceri do the shopping for us, saving us from getting up early in the morning, an enormous help). 3pm siesta time is Pachamama when we’d like to be relaxing on the beach maybe but some tecnico or other is coming to fix something that doesn’t work properly (the dishwasher, the ice machine, the cooker, the freezer – every other day something breaks down …). 9.00am is Pachamama because we are woken by the scooters roaring past below and the church bells ring out their demented melody. After only five hours sleep our brains automatically switch on to Pachamama and to the chores we have to do today to make it work tonight. Am I going mad? It seems like it. Nice people came in to sample our food this weekend. An Italian Swedish girl with her Icelandic boyfriend on holidays at he...

Friends who had the paella last night said it was too salty, that there were actually big agglomerations and clumps of it and the fish was too boney to eat in one piece. So I told the cuoco and he said he didn’t put any salt in it, and I said maybe the fish are very salty and he said they were not, and he kept insisting he didn’t put salt in and the aiuto cuoco like a Greek chorus repeated ‘no, he doesn’t put any salt in the paella’. Like a pantomime the two of them. So I wandered off mystified and perturbed at their compete negation of responsibility, quite a habit here as it turns out. But then it came to me: il brodo -the fish stock – he was supposed to make his own as he had said, but I had noticed a large tin of Star stock on the counter which I didn’t like the look of, the stocks here are very salty and often have too much monosodium glutemate in them. So I went back and said, ‘I bet it was the brodo, you bought that already made stuff didn’t you?’ And the light went on in his ey...

We have a little issue about the music. I am the one with the huge music selection on the iPod and cds, but when I put on nice background music for diners(bossanova, flamenco fusion, Feist, Ceu, Bebel Gilberto …) mi marito often switches it to something more lively like house or hip hop. I don’t think that music is ideal for eating, though it may well be OK after midnight on Friday and Saturday night. As soon as mi marito sees a few men come up to the bar though he reaches for the CDs and sticks on something loud and pumping. Or simply turns up the volume. So we have this farcical situation whereby he turns it up and I turn it down and he fires over dirty looks. The barman asked once to put on his music and then knew better than to interfere. Unfortunately we can’t seem to agree on this; he says he knows what he is talking about and I should just let him get on with it, but I feel strongly about it since it creates the ambience. On that subject, he is obsessed with the lighting and say...

The ‘cook’slid up to the bar at around 1am last night leaving the aiuto cuoco to do all the cleaning in the kitchen. He was all friendly and familiar, and ‘I hear everything, I know all the bar and restaurant owners and I hear what they are saying …’ Is this supposed to be some kind of threat? He stays on at the bar with his beer and I seem him deeply engaged in talk with my husband and I imagine he is complaining or something. So later on our terrace, in the lovely cool night air with the smell of jasmine and the softly lit Via Montecastro leading up to the Spanish castle, my husband tells me he was asking for more money .. already. After the shame of Saturday night! You must be joking! I would have sent him packing, so perhaps it is useful that I was not there. My husband managed to be diplomatic: ‘We had two ‘difficult’ days and then two days which went well enough. We need to see how you get on this weekend and the weekend after ...’ The ‘cook’ was talking about a raise at ‘fine me...

Saturday night was a complete disaster. The cook has no idea what he is dong. He still insisted on making the pasta from scratch when an order came in! He has a huge problem with heating up food in the microwave, which is why he wants to make all the pasta sauces from scratch. But you can’t start making the tomato salsa at 10pm when the order arrives. The salsa takes an hour or so to make to stew the tomatoes properly and get the flavour. He even started making the Spanish tortilla in the middle of all – this takes at least half an hour also because you are supposed to fry the onions and potatoes on a low heat for 15 minute before you even start with the eggs. I have never worked in a restaurant before but it is common sense that the microwave will be used to heat up food, and that a lot of things need to be prepared in advance. My suocera came in to help out when she heard about the cook’s incompetence. She is delighted to be back in her kitchen but doesn’t feel like she can tell the ...

Now we realize why the kitchen was so calm at 7pm yesterday – the cook believes in doing everything fresh and on the spot. Which had sounded good at interview, but is of no practical use whatsoever. We all want freshly made gnocchi, but freshly made in the morning is fine, not at 10.30 at night when the order arrives! Unfortunately, there were huge delays with orders, and the food was poorly presented. The cuoco blamed it all on the aiuto-cuoco, but, since we ended up having to spend a great deal of time in the kitchen sorting things out, we could see that the cuoco simply hadn’t prepared the basics. As my soucera said, it doesn’t take an expert to know that you need to have your basics - tomatoes,onions, garlic and parsley chopped up, parmesan shavings freshly grated, grilled vegetables ready etc. This guy was so out of it that he actually started making up a fishstock when the order for the fish couscous came in. I happened to see the face of the woman who ordered it – not good. The ...

When I organize things, everything is planned in advance and sorted out ahead of schedule, guaranteeing a calm running order for the event itself. But here in Sicily there is no such thing as forward planning. Everything runs on the basis that things can only be achieved at the last minute and only if you stress people enough to do things for you. It certainly doesn’t feel like we are opening tonight. There is still a mess in the bar area; workmen’s’ tools, painter’s pots and brushes, things the previous manager left behind. We have been to the supermarket and vegetable shop and cash and carry to do the massive shop and compare prices. The cooks are hard at it in the kitchen, the first frowning and looking meaner by the minute, the second talking non-stop in his high pitched monologue. The restaurant outlet calls us with the disappointing news that the blackboards won’t arrive in time despite reassuring promises to the contrary. They were to go behind the bar with the tapas and wines o...

Countdown: three days left before we open. The kitchen has been cleaned and scrubbed and is ready for use. We are still going back and forth to the Catering outlet for knives, glasses, placemats and all the things that are coming into our heads at the last minute. I unscrewed all the shelves in the jumbled mansarda (attic space above the estaurant) and carted them down to the storeroom and the younger cugnata and I screwed the huge metal strips back together, making sure we put them all back in the right slots so the shelving won’t be wonky. A very finicky job. We have at last unpacked the new dark wood chairs and tables which have been stacked up at various strategic points and washed off the dust. My husband and his friends have finally after two weeks of sawing and smoothing and sandpapering, painting and varnishing, managed to fix the wooden strips to the bar and it is now looks like a proper bar, with the long mirror opposite framed in the same blue-painted planks. We’ve had the ...

Two places I hope I don't have much to do with in the future: the health centre and the comune , or town council, centre of all civic parts of an Italian's life and dreaded hell of bureaucracy. I need the libretto sanitario to get medical treatment here. I am not sure if this is a little book I get given, or if it means my name will simply be registered on the system: it appears there is a new version just out, and no one is clear about it. This looks hopeful… We queue up at the appropriate door in the medical centre only to be told it's just closing and we'll have to come the next day. So the next day we are there bright and early and we get sent from one office to the next. There is an ancient man smoking cigarettes, which he holds under the table every time the door opens (as if no one can smell it!), as technically you are not supposed to smoke in public buildings in Italy, least of all the health centre. In Sicily though, this law is largely ignored. So I choke on...

Yesterday we got lamps from the Argentinian lady married to the man who has the Ethnic Store with her. She was full of stories about her mixed lineage and the life in Buenos Aires and her return there in a few weeks and all the while her long hair falling over her eyes knowing she is attractive and using that to sell her products. But I like her she is intelligent, and calm (not like the locals) and she joked about that too. She let us change the lamps later when we discovered much to our chagrin that they gave a very lunar cold light and not pleasant to be in. We are putting them on the ceiling, one like a sail and the other the same shape but brownish made from banana leaves, very pretty and suit the Spanish corner corner. We had fun at the capo (beautiful headland) when we ordered gelato at the bar. I had paid for two small cones, (due coni piccoli) at the cashier. There were loads of short oversized families and couples pressed up against the counter choosing ther version of chocol...

I did start to make headway this week with all the people we are having to deal with (painters, builders, technicians, electricans, carpenters ... and their corresponding lingo - pushing my Italian to the limit). We went to Marco the glass maker today at 2pm in the next town and there wasn’t much traffic because all the good locals were lunching punctually. He showed us all his lovely prints on the glass and I kept asking for the preventiva (the quote) but to no avail until he had shown us all the beautiful concoctions then we went back to the reception room where his uncle was and he came out with the unrealistic figure of €1100. He went bright red, poor guy, when he saw our faces and the uncle started crumbling 'Ah ma che vuoi, c’è la tela il vetro il lavoro di …'. I said, 'Yeah sure that’s fine, but we’re wasting our time cos we don’t have that budget available - that is why I have been asking you all along. Anyway, we have a quote for €600 from elsewhere and we’ll jus...

I am on my hands and knees behind the bar along with my suocera (mother-in-law) scrubbing the filthy fridges and their greasy vents when my husband returns, all pleased with himself, from a glass company in the next town with samples for the top of the bar. When we stripped the wall behind the bar we found a layer of cork which had been put in for soundproofing. It fit in so well with the natural, ethnic-chic look we are trying to achieve that we decided to leave it like that. It provides a nice contrast with the shelves for the wine and alchohol bottles, which we have painted white. We've put a strip of cork along the top of the bar too, and this glass will run along the top. But rather than just a strip of glass (clear or frosted? - another of the tiny decision we have to make), they can print the logo and the name of the bar along the strip. Much more interesting. Sensing my husband's delight, the aiuto-cuoco is overjoyed and gabbles away about the aesthetic advantages. ...

Another week of all-day DIY. We have lots of callers coming to look in on the proceedings, give comments and advice (not always helpful)and generally nosy around so they can go around town telling people what it will look like. We spent the entire morning with the falagname, the carpenter who is very good and obliging but insists we stay with him because otherwise he won't get round to doing it. So we had to stay with all the sawdust flying in the air and my husband's hayfever getting worse by the second. He kept taking handfuls of the mint and rosemary growing abundantly in boxes lining the railings of the carpenter’s garage if you don’t mind there was even a fruiting lemon tree in the midst of all the concrete. We are using the same planks that we've put along the front of the bar to frame a long mirror opposite the bar, also painted blue like the fishermen's boats. The falagname has the fattest fingers I have ever seen, they are like sausages on the end of his hand. ...

Today I was woken violently by a string of shots being fired at 6am. It was so loud I nearly fell out of bed and I leapt up ready to defend both of us from the impending danger. The canon shots (around 8 of them in total I counted, fired at 10 second intervals) didn't worry my husband. He muttered something about San Francesco and rolled over back to sleep. Apparently San Francesco di Paola is the adopted patron Saint of Milazzo (the real one being Santo Stefano who would have his volley of canon shots and festivities later on in the summer. It is said that this saint of mariniai, sailors and fishermen, walked across the straits of Messina to mainland Italy on his mantle, and so part of the festivities is a procession behind a prest carrying the saint's relics (a piece of the mantle). But the whole town and neighbouring villagers turned out for the main procession - a huge statue of the saint on a platorm is borne on the shoulders of a specially chosen group of men (competition...

With the May 5 deadline less than a week away, I have decided to give our two cooks lessons in making tapas... My husband and I spent hours working out the menu. Not a simple task at all. Tapas, fundamental to the social life in Spain and now becoming a lively part of Irish socialising, are not so famous in Italy it turns out. I had somehow expected culinary practices in Sicily (southern Italy)to be similar to those in Andalusia (southern Spain), given that Sicily was under Spanish domination (the Aragons)from the early 1400s to the early 1700s. I also expected there to be a North African flavour to Sicilian cooking,due to its proximity to Tunisia, just as Andalusia's proximity to Morocco is felt in lots of the soups and stews and tapas found in Southern Spain. But endless menu discussions with my husband and the cooks revealed that Italians feel that the Spanish are their poor cousins and so their food could never be considered as good as Italian food, and especially not Sicilian ...

Here in Sicily it's a whole new world. We've been here a almost a month already. All is chaos and we'll never manage to open before the 5th May when we have to start paying the rent. It is all so massive. SOOO much to do. The building is on two floors, the bar to the left as you come in, with the restaurant area upstairs, two terraces out the back, and a sideroom which we rent from the owner of the building next door, as it has a disabled toilet which we must have by law (despite the fact that it is not accessible by wheelchair since the entrance to the building is separated from the pavement by two steps and the comune hasn't bothered to build a ramp - just one of the many contradictions of Sicily). We have now got the wooden planks to go along the front of the bar, and painted them blue, like the fishermen boats, but we are also repainting doors and old wooden trunks (sent back from Buenos Aires by the returning Sicilian emigrés who owned the building originally - th...