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- VOL. 12.9
Tatonka’s Globetrotter Cuisine
By Derek Davies
Maurizio Laureri is sitting at the bar. From his lookout post, the big man watches over the restaurant like a captain on the bridge of his ship. Beyond the tables lie a moonlit sea and a sky of silvery clouds. The crash of waves on the rocks counterpoints the voice of a tenor singing Italian opera. This is as romantic as it gets. We might be on Capri or Ischia in the Bay of Naples. In fact, we are just up the road from brash Patong, down a vermilion cliffside stairway, through a lush garden of plants and waterfalls.
A very tall wineglass with the slenderest of stems stands on the bar in front of Maurizio. It will soon be empty. A Negroni, Maurizio tells me, is a classic Italian cocktail - like an Americano with gin, campari, soda and vermouth, but with extra gin because the black American GIs who were in Italy after the Second World War liked it that way. I choose a Negroni. The rose-tinted cocktail is bitter-sweet and packs a punch."The secret of making good Italian food," says Maurizio as we move to our seaside table, "is to love Italian food." A baby Marinara pizza appears with a dish of swordfish and avocado in a light lemon sauce which is still in the experimental stage. The baked clams and mussels are superb. "They are done with my mother's special recipe," says Maurizio. With a smile, then, he adds: "They do them like this all over the world."
A bottle of white wine appears and is uncorked. Our glasses are filled, and filled again. The Alvieto Seco is dry, light, fresh and not too fruity. "Roger Moore drunk this wine five nights a week at this restaurant when he was filming on the island," Maurizio says. "He speaks fine Italian with perfect grammar, but very, very slowly." Maurizio isn't shy of dropping names of the rich and famous who have dined at his restaurant, although he asks me not to mention one or two of them in this article. "We've had movie stars and billionaires, killers from Corsica and smugglers from the Caribbean."
We're getting well into the meal by now, and we still haven't finished the antipasti. In my fuzzy state of mind Maurizio is beginning to remind me of Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Even his voice has a raspy edge. He speaks of Rome, his birthplace ("It takes seven generations to make a real Roman"); his first job at an Italian restaurant in London; working at the famed Orsini in New York; making a fortune in the rag trade, getting married at 4.30am in Carson City, Nevada, and then losing all his money at the casino; working as a film extra ("I was very good at dying"); walking out on an girlfriend in Italy to buy a packet of cigarettes and sending her a postcard from Thailand. It's been a full life.
To complete the first stage of the meal, a big seafood pie with a pastry top is placed on the table. Maurizio opens it with a knife. The Antipasto Caldo de la Casa is one of the latest house specialties. Crammed full of lobster, crab, mussels and other seafood delights, it could almost be a meal in itself. But there's more to come. Should the pasta be eaten with a fork and spoon or just a fork? Maurizio's opinion: "It doesn't matter. There are two schools of thought." Then veal in lemon sauce, red wine, tiramisu, large glasses of Calvados ...
We've enjoyed some of the finest Italian food you'll find anywhere in the world. And we've had fun. That's how an Italian meal should be.
Tel. 076 344 079