Cafe Wars

The following meal in Rome is how Mom and I learned to eat at the less tourist congested cafes:

There is fierce competition for patronage in the eateries near major hotels.  As you walk through the neighborhoods and back streets, you will be invited, enthusiastically, to try each cafe's cuisine.  The typical come on goes something like this, "Pasta!  Pizza!  Free Wi-Fi!  Air conditioning!  Good price!  Good price!".  It held a strange sort of cultural deja vu, and I half-expected to turn around and have one of these hunky Italian men offer me an elephant ear and a chance to win a giant fluorescent pink stuffed bear, crying "Three throws for a dollar!" or "Pitch Til U Win, purty lady!"

When Mom and I first arrived, we passed one such eatery with a shamefully good looking waiter standing beside his boss, doing his best to draw in customers.  I say "shamefully" because he was so good-looking I really thought he should feel a little guilty for hogging all that good DNA, when the rest of us have to make due with the hand we're dealt.  As we walked by this creature God had made when he was fully rested and feeling particularly inspired, I caught his eye every bit as much as he caught mine.  What is happening here in this strange, beautiful land?

He was on us in seconds, trying to charm us into buying a meal.  We still had to check into our hotel, but I caved in the face of such flirting expertise, and promised to return. 

Let me break in here to tell you I had not planned on doing any type of flirting whatsoever on this trip.  When I packed, I included writing materials, art supplies, lazy day clothes, and the bare bones of makeup only because I planned to take tons of pics.  The opposite sex was the last thing on my mind- besides I hadn't felt remotely attractive in a donkey's age.

It took being back in the states having coffee with my grief support group of one for me to make sense of the obvious.  My friend explained that just as each of these young Italian men was a pretty, pretty peacock that I would never see in my own backyard, but only at the zoo, I was the same to them with my blue eyes, blonde hair, and fair coloring.  Oh...

Back in Italy, it was game on.  Let the flirting begin!  It was almost laughable to feel my womanly wiles coming back one stroke of smoky eyeliner at a time.  I even considered going braless for a brief moment in time, but remembered Mom was with me, and may not appreciate the attention I might garner.  Instead, I pushed the shoulders down a tad bit on every garment I donned, and took Mom under my flirting tutelage, which was nearly as much fun as the flirting itself.

So a couple of nights later, we returned to the roadside café with the bright orange chairs, greeted immediately by the hot waiter, "You came back!"
I lost myself for a moment in those dark, melted chocolate eyes, and fairly swooned into the seat he pulled out.

Mom and I ordered our pasta and set to watching the street scene.  As we took in the people walking by, our waiter snared a couple and prepared to seat them.  When he turned his back to grab menus, the waiter from the café opposite- a mere five feet away- grabbed them up, seating them before our poor waiter had even turned around.  His look of puzzlement quickly turned to outrage as he realized what had happened.  He turned his hot gaze to the waiter from across the roadside, exclaiming in heavily accented English, "Oh my God!  What are you dooooing?"

Young, Italian, handsome...and angry?  It was almost more than I could bear.  Side note here:  what is wrong with me that I find verbally displayed anger attractive? 

The customer stealer from across the way merely shrugged his shoulders at our waiter, whose name turned out to be Mimmo with three M's.   His shrug said, "Whatever, dude.  I gotta make this money."  The smug look on his face made me want to cross the cobblestone and smack him up for wronging my man.  Mimmo began cussing him out in Italian at a low, steady, fierce tone that customers who weren't really paying attention would never notice, but made my toes curl. Smug customer thief listened for perhaps ten seconds before showing Mimmo his back.  Mimmo, color high in his cheeks, exhaled loudly, and threw his menus onto the nearest table.  I briefly considered following him, and offering him the comfort of cradling his head to my bosom, but fought the urge.  Barely.

He returned with our dinner plates, and as we dug in, a scruffy looking accordion player came on the scene.  He began playing for the couple at the end of the café, nearly taking their ears off in his determination to earn a tip.  The owner heard the ruckus and came out of the kitchen and onto the street to shoo the musician away.  "Too loud!  Go on!  Go on!"  he instructed, holding a hand to his ear, and pantomiming the beginnings of permanent hearing damage. 

The accordion player shot him a rebellious look, and lifted his chin up into the air at a defiant angle.  He comfortably settled his weight on one foot, and began playing louder still.  This drove the owner absolutely beserk.  He began flapping his hands wildly and yelling in Italian, spittle falling like a light rain.  With each demand to disperse, the accordion player crept closer still to the couple's table, until finally he was so close to that poor couple that if one of them had stuck out their tongue, they could have licked his instrument.

This stand off went on for nearly four minutes, a veritable eternity, until the couple offered the musician a handful of euros to take himself, and his increasingly loud dinner music elsewhere.  Satisfied, the owner went back to boiling pasta.  As he walked away, I got the strangest feeling that not only did this scene play out often, but perhaps it had been rehearsed.  I wondered if I came back later when the trash for the night was being hauled to the curb, I would find the accordion player and the owner huddled up together splitting up the night's profits?  Maybe I'm a little too cynical. 

But maybe not.

**To see how the budding romance between Mimmo and I played out, you must return for an upcoming blog post.

Ciao!