I witnessed something similar a few years ago at a conference in Ottawa. We had gathered at a local pub, and a Parisian friend asked for a hamburger "cooked rare". The waitress responded "I don't think we can do that", which elicited the obvious reply "of course you can, just take it off the grill sooner".
At this point we stepped in to explain that it was a matter of food safety laws, and the beef used for hamburgers in Canada really wasn't safe unless it was well cooked... and that, contrary to stereotypes about North American cuisine, we all understood that good quality meat shouldn't be ruined by overcooking.
He agreed to have a legal hamburger, but only on the condition that it was overcooked as little as possible.
I witnessed the opposite in a restaurant in Switzerland. A friend ordered a steak but asked for it well done. The waitress asked if he was sure. He said yes.
A couple of minutes later the French chef came out and remonstrated with my friend for about 10 mins. The essence of the conversation (neither spoke the other's language and the rest of us translating probably wasn't helping much) was whether it ought to be a crime to cook well done steak versus how far the human rights act applied to restaurant choices.
In the end we negotiated an agreement whereby the trainee would cook it and the chef wouldn't watch.
I knew a guy in Vancouver that frequented a hotel restaurant with particularly good burgers, and went through such extensive discussions with the manager on this issue that they eventually had him sign a waiver and agreed to cook burgers rare only for him.
Hamburger meat in Canada doesn't have to be overcooked to be safe of course. Food safety laws are just very conservative compared to europe. A few years ago BC passed a law that made it really hard for people to continue selling home-baked goods at farmers market, or for farmers to self-butcher without doing it in expensive approved facilities.
> the beef used for hamburgers in Canada really wasn't safe unless it was well cooked
This is an exaggeration. The law originates from 1974 after a prominent TV news investigation found a few cases of contaminated beef that made no one sick. Rather than institute a new set of nation-wide inspections, the government thought it was easier to just tell people they had to cook burgers medium-well at restaurants. Several US states have recently added these laws too, but it doesn't mean US beef suddenly became unsafe.
Unless you're in a high risk category (very ill, very young, or very old), you'll be just fine with a medium rare burger.
Given that it's anecdote hour, I'd like to share that the reverse works too: You can prank unwitting foreigners into believing you have all kinds of weird local culinary habits.
In my student days, I helped run a local Dutch branch of an international student association. We made it a habit to tell visiting foreigners that the Dutch, in the winter, like to heat up their beer, add whipped cream and a whiff of cacao powder, and drink it all from mug. Especially popular after ice skating. Rude to refuse.
Over the years i think we got over 200 people to drink warm beer with whipped cream voluntarily.
It has long been law in Canada that hamburgers be cooked well done for food safety reasons . . . Canadian restaurants will never give you the choice; it surprised me to be asked how I wanted it cooked when I was in the US and other countries. However, I take issue with the idea that the beef is unsafe. It may be slightly riskier than say a steak (which you can order rare), but if there was any suspicion about the beef, it would never be sold.
FWIW, In most places in the UK it is unusual to get a burger that's even slightly pink. In fact several times I've seen people send pink burgers back. I believe this is due to the uncertainty as to whether it's deliberately pink or simply.
I lived in Bologna for a couple of years. The pizza there is so damn good I think you really should just be grateful and accept whatever they give you. Once you start believing that you can have a pizza rossa with mozzarella, it's a slippery slope until you end up with a "deep-pan" pizza with chicken on it.
(As another commenter says, this whole situation seems utterly improbable. Pizzaioli/e are generally friendly and happy to make whatever you want, within reason, and will just gently rib you if you order something silly, especially if you're a foreigner. At least, that has always been my experience, anyway.)
this is far from being a rare thing. I have had this happen to me at a local Italian restaurant, where I ordered a Pizza Vegetaria with parma ham. The chef outright refused to make it, but after a while agreed to make a pizza with tomato, Mozarella, ham and vegetables
Apropos of nothing much, I spent six months working in Naples, billeted in a run-down coastal resort town some 15km west of the centre, on the coast. There was some adequate pizza, and some truly awful pizza, and at one point we got so sick of the only food options being pizza or pasta that we flew a cook in from England to make us a curry. A local cook was tasked with preparing the rice, which he got wrong.
I suspect that out of the cities, the quality of food drops off significantly, and the range of foods, which was always pretty unimpressive in Italy, certainly drops off. This is going to be true everywhere, of course, but I suspect countries coasting on a reputation of good food suffer this to a greater degree.
I can't quite imagine anyone (Italian pizzaiolo or otherwise) getting so worked up over a pizza order. I think the situation described in the piece was either much friendlier than the author makes it out to be, or a fantasy that nicely plugs in the eat-pray-love-style "Italians are all about food and simple life and being passionate about everything while gesticulating" memes.
I'm sure you can easily evoke a similiar parsing error in any programmer ("we want a waterfall process that's agile") or designer ("make it green, but without the green").
The reaction / reactance may or may not be rude or agressive, but that's just how people react individually to confusion / irritation / cognitive dissonance.
you clearly never met passionate Italians, food is an important part of the tradition, even more about pizza which is ruined in so many ways around the world :-)
when I hear an order with pineapple or chicken I feel worst than that. I don't want to be graphic so I will just say it's like putting something really unpleasant on a pizza.
Maybe it's a matter of language? You can't have a marinara WITH mozzarella, because the marinara doesn't have mozzarella, but you can have a marinara PLUS mozzarella, because that's now not a marinara.
A friend of mine who used to work at McDonalds, told that "custom" burgers are always made to order, so he advised that if you want a fresh hamburger, order a cheeseburger with no cheese - you'll get a fresh made to order hamburger and cheese on the side.
My usual way of ordering pizza in the US is to as for a Margherita or Quattro Formaggio or whatever, "but with a couple of toppings". That works.
In the place discussed in the article, it would probably be better to phrase that as "a pizza that is like a Margherita, except that it has an additional ingredient".
That said -- a pizza that is altered by adding an extra topping is easier to conceptualize than a cheeseless pizza that is altered by adding cheese. So I can somewhat understand the pizza-maker's distress. :)
Mostly. On top of that, you actually have two variants: traditional, round pizza (which comes in common take-away square boxes, and may or may not be pre-cut into slices for convenience), and smaller, square-shaped sliced pizza ("pizza al taglio"). The latter is always considered fast food.
Italian fast food usually is squared sliced pizza that you eat standing in the shop, or on the go. It's fast because it is continuously produced and therefore, by the time you walk in, it's always already available, steamming and waiting to be cut.
Take away round pizzas usually take more because the are made JIT for you and are considered more of a way to have regular dinner at home without cooking.
It's also a matter of standards: you can't order a dish and make modifications that perturbate the nature of that (like, milk in black coffe or cheeseburger without cheese). Margherita with garlic is equally absurd as marinara with mozzarella.
The only way out from this catch22 would be to order a pizza with tomato, mozzarella and garlic, explicitly omitting any "base template" from which to start
> Margherita with garlic is equally absurd as marinara with mozzarella.
Why? What are the specific definitions or margherita and marinara that don't allow these modifications? Without undisputed definitions, this is just irrational dogma. Black coffee by definition excludes milk, cheeseburgers by definition include cheese, but for margherita and marinara, this is not obvious at all.
Here in Australia, 'marinara' means some kind of seafood is on the pizza, usually shrimp. 'Marinara without the seafood' here would be like 'pizza rossa with cheese' in the article - it changes the underlying definition of the pizza.
I'll give you two explanations from the discussion of this article in the Italian subreddit:
- asking for marinara with mozzarella is like asking for a vegetarian dish with some meat on the top - it's against the very principle of a pizza with poor ingredients that were available on a ship (marinara = marine, a sailor's pizza)
- Italian pizzerias usually have huge menus with dozens of combinations and there's really no need to ask for custom ingredients, but for that subset of places that do allow that, mozzarella is too expensive to be put in the category of "extra ingredient for half a euro", so a client asking for a marinara base instead of the more expensive margherita base (that already has the cheese), might be looking for a loophole to pay less.
[+] [-] cperciva|10 years ago|reply
At this point we stepped in to explain that it was a matter of food safety laws, and the beef used for hamburgers in Canada really wasn't safe unless it was well cooked... and that, contrary to stereotypes about North American cuisine, we all understood that good quality meat shouldn't be ruined by overcooking.
He agreed to have a legal hamburger, but only on the condition that it was overcooked as little as possible.
[+] [-] lucozade|10 years ago|reply
A couple of minutes later the French chef came out and remonstrated with my friend for about 10 mins. The essence of the conversation (neither spoke the other's language and the rest of us translating probably wasn't helping much) was whether it ought to be a crime to cook well done steak versus how far the human rights act applied to restaurant choices.
In the end we negotiated an agreement whereby the trainee would cook it and the chef wouldn't watch.
[+] [-] krrrh|10 years ago|reply
Hamburger meat in Canada doesn't have to be overcooked to be safe of course. Food safety laws are just very conservative compared to europe. A few years ago BC passed a law that made it really hard for people to continue selling home-baked goods at farmers market, or for farmers to self-butcher without doing it in expensive approved facilities.
[+] [-] jessriedel|10 years ago|reply
This is an exaggeration. The law originates from 1974 after a prominent TV news investigation found a few cases of contaminated beef that made no one sick. Rather than institute a new set of nation-wide inspections, the government thought it was easier to just tell people they had to cook burgers medium-well at restaurants. Several US states have recently added these laws too, but it doesn't mean US beef suddenly became unsafe.
Unless you're in a high risk category (very ill, very young, or very old), you'll be just fine with a medium rare burger.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medium-rare-burgers...
[+] [-] skrebbel|10 years ago|reply
In my student days, I helped run a local Dutch branch of an international student association. We made it a habit to tell visiting foreigners that the Dutch, in the winter, like to heat up their beer, add whipped cream and a whiff of cacao powder, and drink it all from mug. Especially popular after ice skating. Rude to refuse.
Over the years i think we got over 200 people to drink warm beer with whipped cream voluntarily.
[+] [-] goodcanadian|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|10 years ago|reply
Well.... except it would be amongst the safest in the world.
These countries that eat different food are not safer. Just different. This is the excuse we make to excuse why we won't do it.
Sashimi chicken in Japan is not different to raw chicken in the US for instance. This is the cultural divide I think the article is about.
[+] [-] CurtMonash|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinramsay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehwebguy|10 years ago|reply
It was burnt to a crisp, worst burger I've ever paid more than $2 for.
[+] [-] bshimmin|10 years ago|reply
(As another commenter says, this whole situation seems utterly improbable. Pizzaioli/e are generally friendly and happy to make whatever you want, within reason, and will just gently rib you if you order something silly, especially if you're a foreigner. At least, that has always been my experience, anyway.)
[+] [-] ATsch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|10 years ago|reply
I suspect that out of the cities, the quality of food drops off significantly, and the range of foods, which was always pretty unimpressive in Italy, certainly drops off. This is going to be true everywhere, of course, but I suspect countries coasting on a reputation of good food suffer this to a greater degree.
[+] [-] andrea_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hussong|10 years ago|reply
The reaction / reactance may or may not be rude or agressive, but that's just how people react individually to confusion / irritation / cognitive dissonance.
[+] [-] dewiz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 100timesthis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrusi|10 years ago|reply
No, unless this paraphrasing misrepresents the original wording, that's not the issue.
Far more likely is the "Black coffee with milk" suggestion at the end of the article.
[+] [-] ectoplasm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|10 years ago|reply
Umm cheeseburgers have cheese on them... Do you mean a hamburger?
But it Italy.
[+] [-] white-flame|10 years ago|reply
"I'd been asking for the equivalent of a black coffee with milk. "
[+] [-] intruder|10 years ago|reply
So I ordered a cheeseburger without cheese. Laughter ensued and I was forever stamped an idiot.
That's why I moved to Japan.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] abbot2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.wegmans.com/blog/2010/07/irradiated-ground-beef/
[+] [-] CurtMonash|10 years ago|reply
In the place discussed in the article, it would probably be better to phrase that as "a pizza that is like a Margherita, except that it has an additional ingredient".
That said -- a pizza that is altered by adding an extra topping is easier to conceptualize than a cheeseless pizza that is altered by adding cheese. So I can somewhat understand the pizza-maker's distress. :)
[+] [-] nly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aruggirello|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ai_ja_nai|10 years ago|reply
Italian fast food usually is squared sliced pizza that you eat standing in the shop, or on the go. It's fast because it is continuously produced and therefore, by the time you walk in, it's always already available, steamming and waiting to be cut.
Take away round pizzas usually take more because the are made JIT for you and are considered more of a way to have regular dinner at home without cooking.
[+] [-] ai_ja_nai|10 years ago|reply
The only way out from this catch22 would be to order a pizza with tomato, mozzarella and garlic, explicitly omitting any "base template" from which to start
[+] [-] _ak|10 years ago|reply
Why? What are the specific definitions or margherita and marinara that don't allow these modifications? Without undisputed definitions, this is just irrational dogma. Black coffee by definition excludes milk, cheeseburgers by definition include cheese, but for margherita and marinara, this is not obvious at all.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefantalpalaru|10 years ago|reply
- asking for marinara with mozzarella is like asking for a vegetarian dish with some meat on the top - it's against the very principle of a pizza with poor ingredients that were available on a ship (marinara = marine, a sailor's pizza)
- Italian pizzerias usually have huge menus with dozens of combinations and there's really no need to ask for custom ingredients, but for that subset of places that do allow that, mozzarella is too expensive to be put in the category of "extra ingredient for half a euro", so a client asking for a marinara base instead of the more expensive margherita base (that already has the cheese), might be looking for a loophole to pay less.
[+] [-] swagv|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] timvp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ai_ja_nai|10 years ago|reply