As a bit of background, despite how it’s going to make me seem, in China as a tourist/ ex-pat, I was used to accomodation. You ask for a coke at the two-table family dumpling restaurant (with one table occupied by the family making the dumplings), and you see the little kid running down the street to wherever to buy the coke. Or how at the packed noodle place the no-smokng sign doesn’t apply to you (it wasn’t me, it was my Chinese friend). OK, so bear this in mind, rules often were more guidelines.
So G and I are in Lijiang — the ancient village on canals, drop-dead gorgeous — and we pass a restaurant called Don Papa’s.
Please also consider that there’s a lot of silly English signage in China — my bare mattress when I first moved into my place was covered in the repeating text “Hope it was good” — and I get it, I don’t read Chinese, I really appreciate seeing English, but it’s still funny. Anyway, I’m used to and expect silly names in English and a restaurant called Don Papa’s didn’t sound like the most authentic Italian eatery in the world, in fact it sounded like the name you’d come up with after watching the cartoon version of The Godfather.
So we go up there anyway, because we want pizza — I’ve been living in China for months at this point and sometimes you just want pizza. The building is an antique, all spindly wood with the wrap-around decks on each level, exactly the sort of place where the badguys go crashing backward through the second-floor railings and out on to the street below.
We’re seated by a lovely Chinese waitress on the top floor, with its stepped roof, with only a handful of tables around us at different levels so that it feels intimate and cozy, in this intimate and cozy village. The menu reads as it might in any pizza place in the world. The waitress returns and she’s bright and sweet and I ask charmingly for a certain pizza, except would it be possible (because I know of course it would) to get it without the anchovies. At which her smile drops and her eyes dart side to side, and she says, seriously, almost scared, “I’m sorry but the chef doesn’t allow for changes.”
I glance at G, and then say to her, winningly, something like, “I’m sure the chef can manage this one little request.”
“I’ll ask him,” she says quietly, and disappears.
I probably said something to G then like, “she’s going to go ask ‘the chef,’” making the airquotes on the title. I’ve given enough caveats for my actions and attitude already, so I’ll just let it stand.
And that was when “the chef” appeared. And he was pissed. And he wasn’t Chinese but French. He stood over me and bellowed and cursed in English heavily accented with French. “I don’t make shit food. You want shit food, you get out of here.” And on and on.
Now, I can get a bit, as the Brits say, shirty in situations like this, and I was half way out of my chair to leave. But there was something miraculous about a French chef, in a village in the middle of China, with so much pride over his pizza recipes, despite being a total dick, that I had to know. So I said, “OK,” and ordered off the menu.
It was easily the best pizza I had in China. And, while I hadn’t yet been to Naples, one of the tastiest pizzas anywhere.
But then again, fuck that guy.