Slow Food and the newest Italian restaurant in Greensboro

We read in the News and Record of a new Italian restaurant opening downtown.  It is called Riva's Trattoria, and is located on Greene St.

We are told that the owners want the restaurant to be a part of Greensboro's growing Slow Food movement "by offering seasonal dishes based on what's available at the Greensboro Farmers' Curb Market and local producers".

This is pretty interesting.  Another writer has detected the irony that the trendy Slow Food movement has cited Italian cuisine and folk ways as an example of How We Should Be Doing Things:

The goals of the movement sound awfully similar to the life that my grandparents brought with them to the United States. A life that was abandoned a century ago as the giant wheels of progress turned, and immigrants, happy to have left the grinding poverty of their homeland, traded agrarianism for industrialization.

It’s always amusing for a third-generation Italian-American like me to see the ways of my grandparents reemerge in this new millennium – this time as a life to be imitated rather than looked upon with pity. Their customs, which I once believed were musty relics of the Old World, are now entwined with a movement that tells us how to seek a better, healthier life. I grew up wondering why my mother tipped heavy tins of olive oil when all the neighbors used Mazola; why we ate dishes like escarole and beans when everyone else was mixing Hamburger Helper into ground beef. I begged my mother to serve Chef Boyardee instead of Celentano frozen ravioli.

How strange my requests must have seemed to my mother, who grew up watching her own mother spend all morning in the kitchen. My grandmother stretched the ravioli dough and rolled it nearly the length of the table, moist yellow sheets which she spread with a thin layer of ricotta cheese before placing another sheet of dough on top. No wonder years later my mother felt guilty buying frozen ravioli. And to make matters worse, her daughter begged for limp, canned squares. But I didn’t want to be associated with any Old World traditions, New World daughter that I was. I believed that anything modern, anything American must be infinitely better.

My ancestors, those original Slow Foodies, were intimately connected to the land. After my grandfather settled in Maplewood, New Jersey, he dug a large garden next to the apartment building that he owned. He’d grow the vegetables and my grandmother would come down each morning to choose the day’s selection, which she would cook for dinner that evening...

I want to see how an alternative movement chooses to articulate values that my grandparents lived and never thought to question.

It is, indeed, hard to imagine that the way my grandparents lived could now be held up by the "in crowd" as the hip, cool approach.  Life is full of surprises.
 

Comments

[Jeffrey Sykes]

Joe: Have you tried the place yet? I see they have Caprese. I've recently fallen in love with the Caprese at Back Street Buzz Coffee in Reidsville.

Have you had that at the Buzz?

I love pesto!

[Joe Guarino]

Jeff, I am not sure if the place in Greensboro is actually open as of yet. The newspaper annoucement last week indicated it would be opening soon.

I really enjoy Caprese also. I had not yet been to Back Street Buzz; but now that I know they have Caprese...:)

Thanks for the tip.

[Carl Wilson]

Irony or inevitability? Concentric thinking insists that things will come around again. (Fondue anyone?) And karma suggests that perhaps it will be the good things that do. (I’ll have the three egg omelet, hold the whites.)

Having grandparents who also grew much of what they ate, my penchant for local produce predates Slow Food. I refuse to eat a fresh tomato out of season and preferably from my backyard.

Now we just need a few chefs who actually grow their OWN produce!