Memories of an Early Kosher Restaurant
The onset of summer reminds me of the kosher restaurant my father ran out of the Centro Pitigliani, a JCC of sorts, in a building owned by the local Jewish community.
Pitigliani was founded as a Jewish orphanage by a Baron and Baroness in 1902. They later perished in Auschwitz.
During my childhood, the building was still referred to as ‘l’orfanatrofio’, the orphanage, because it hosted children from disadvantaged families while also functioning as a cultural center.
We knew some of the children from the orphanage, because they attended the Chabad sleepaway camp located in a 16th century villa up on a hill above Pieve di Camaiore, in Tuscany, not far from the beaches of Viareggio.
During the summer months the orphanage relocated to the seaside town of Porto S. Stefano. My father would travel there during the month of Elul to blow the shofar for the children and staff, and some of us would tag along.
I remember the sound of the shofar carrying over the bay as we watched the boats rocking softly in the water, standing on the expansive terrace over the gorgeous view.
Pitigliani had a commercial kitchen and large dining hall. At the time there were no kosher restaurants in Rome, which may be hard to imagine if you’ve been to Rome recently. Until the excellent Yotvata restaurant opened in the late 1990s, being a tourist who kept kosher was a bit challenging.
My father sought to fill the gap during the height of tourist season, and that’s how a pop-up restaurant was born, although nobody used the term pop-up in the 1980s.
Some days, my siblings and I accompanied our father to Pitiligiani, driving from our residential neighborhood to the more picturesque historical area of Trastevere, across the river from the Ghetto.
The highlight of these excursions was the TV room.
It was a large room, usually used for cultural activities, but when we were there it was dark and empty save for a TV set. In order to get us out from under his feet while he supervised the kitchen and interacted with the guests, my father allowed us to watch black and white Laurel & Hardy films in the dark room.
Laurel & Hardy were Stanlio e Ollio in Italy. Watching dubbed films can be a dystopian experience, but we were too young to care and too transfixed by the fools slipping and sliding on the screen, dropping pianos and inexplicably speaking Italian with a fake American accent.
Back out in the restaurant, there were American and Israeli tourists who smiled at us and patted us on the head, delighted to see little Chabad children in Rome, of all places.
There was warm chicken soup and delicious torta di pinoli
, or pine nut cake, which was Mario the chef’s top secret and super complicated recipe.
Most fascinating of all was the dumbwaiter, used to haul the dishes up and down. A veritable amusement park, we had never seen anything like it. Who knew what other wonders the world offered?
At days’ end, my father would gather the soiled tablecloths and napkins and we’d drive to a laundry on a leafy street up one of the hills of Rome to deliver the linen and pick up a freshly folded batch.