Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

KITSCH ETHNIC

90 Paramus,฀New฀Jersey,฀1995 It happens to me all the time. Shopping in the mall, I’m suddenly gripped by late morning hunger pangs that must be assuaged. My first thought is the Starbucks knockoff, where $2.75 will get me a disappointing cappuccino, which I’m likely to order rather than a perfectly acceptable regular coffee. After all these years, I still resonate to the mellifluous sound of the word cappuccino. I remember standing at a coffee bar on the Via Veneto in Rome nursing a cappuccino. It was the end of my first year in graduate school, and I was eager for romance. A few feet away, a man with thick salt-and-pepper hair, fresh from his barber, ordered an espresso and smiled at me. A confident Italian man at home in the world. I did not imagine him then with a trim wife, kids, and a sexy secretary with whom he drank Cinzano rosso on Friday afternoons. But I did feel, incorrectly perhaps, that attention counts, even if the smile is more form than substance. Better the heated Italian forms, I remember thinking, comfortable with my stereotypes, than the cool indifference of northern Europeans . The cappuccino had served its purpose. I tilted my cup, savoring a greedy final sip of foamy milk. When I looked up, I was once again Mary Martin in South Pacific without Ezio Pinza: the Italian was gone, enfolded forever in the music of cappuccino. This morning, however, more than coffee is called for. A bagel at the bagel shop would answer more directly to the gnawing I feel. But ever since bagelmania seized America more than a decade ago—severing bagels from their eastern European and Jewish origins—it’s hard to find one that isn’t too big or too soft, utterly tasteless or garishly overseasoned. My body feels the heaviness of the bagel I have not eaten, and I consider running home for a salad and a few slices of fresh mango. But I’ve already fixated on Café Europa, where I’ll surely order an oversized cheese quesadilla, served with salsa, guacamole, and sour cream. Of course, the quesadilla is more than my appetite warrants—and its lack of delicacy mocks my nostalgia for an “authentic” Mexican quesadilla, perfumed with flor de calabaza, squash flowers. “Three minKITSCH ฀ETHNIC฀ KITSCH ETHNIC 91 utes,” the Latino worker informs me, as he places a ready-made quesadilla in Café Europa’s warming oven. Enclosed by bistro-style tables, the wood-paneled Café Europa sits in the priciest corner of a high-end suburban mall. It features wraps with the flavors of the New World, North Africa, and Asia (“California,” “Casablanca,” “Teriyaki,” “Chicken Fajita,” and “Caesar”), paninis (“hot grilled sandwiches on Eastern European flatbread” with a similarly wide geographical spread), and transethnic salads . In addition, it offers beautiful chocolate cakes, cheesecakes, fruit pastries of a central European provenance, and decent coffee. Europe still has a constituency among ladies who lunch at the mall and seniors who use the mall’s interior streets as their free, all-weather health club. Hybrid Europe, with tentacles extending into Mexico, Japan, Brazil, and the American Southwest, is no less attractive. Perhaps the expansive reach of NATO and the European Union deserves the credit—or the blame—for Café Europa’s transEuropean fare. Imagine, a magnanimous Europe mimicking an inclusive America ! How can I mock a site of such (agreeably confused) political correctness? Even if the dark wood trim embodying “Europa” is more stage set than streetworthy, the place is my mall-entrapped oasis. It’s my respite from getting and spending without the smell of grease and without the lines for fries and chicken McNuggets and other creations of America’s homogenized culinary mainstream. Paramus,฀New฀Jersey,฀1990 Six-year-old Ruby and her mother, Dolores, are sharing an oversized Idaho potato stuffed to overflowing with chili con carne. I watch the pair from an adjacent table in the food court opposite the Hot Potato stand. Passing the Styrofoam plate back and forth, they finish the chili before attacking the potato. Finally only the limp brown skin is left, like a jacket abandoned on a bloody battlefield. Ruby pulls playfully on Dolores’s red and black silk scarf and bounces in her chair. “Coke or California shake?” Dolores asks, picking up her daughter’s signal. “You choose, and I’ll have some of...