The room I’d bring her to
Trattoria Gatto Nero, Pietrasanta.
There are restaurants you go to for the food. There are restaurants you go to for the view. And then there are restaurants you go to because, when you have something serious to tell the person sitting across from you, a confession, a decision, a piece of news you don’t yet know how to soften, you cannot tell it to them in the kitchen at home and you cannot tell it to them in a place where the waiter will interrupt twice with the specials. You need a room. You need a room that already knows you. You need a room where the cook is a woman in her sixties named Alberta who has been making the same eight or nine things for thirty years, where the front-of-house knows what you drink, where the lighting is low without trying to be, and where you can sit at the same table for three hours and nobody will rush you out because the table is yours for the night and they understood that when they sat you down. In Pietrasanta, this room, for me, is the Gatto Nero.
It is hard to miss. It sits inside the old walls of the centro storico on Piazza Carducci, right next to the post office, and if you park where I park when I come into town, you walk past its front door every time, the small black cat painted on the sign and the dehor with five or six tables under the portico. We walked past it for months before we went in. I cannot now remember why we waited. The room inside is small, maybe 10 covers total, with a caminetto against the back wall that is lit from October until April and stone walls that have been stone walls in this building since something like 1300. The tables have white cloths over a darker undercloth, the way Italian tables have had white cloths over a darker undercloth for as long as anyone has been eating off them indoors. The first time we came in, one of the waitresses, hearing my accent, told us in Hungarian that her mother was from Transylvania. She knows a few words. We have been going back ever since.
We almost always order the same thing.
The antipasto is a plate of crostini misti: thin slices of Tuscan unsalted bread, toasted and topped with five or six different toppings. There is one with pomodoro, fresh and acidic. There is the obligatory panzanella, the Tuscan summer salad of stale bread and tomato, served as a smear. There is something with eggplant, depending on the season. And there is the fegato, the liver pâté that is the canonical Tuscan crostino, dark and faintly metallic and finished with a splash of vin santo and a few capers, the small bitter punctuation that keeps the whole thing from going heavy. Fegato is the one you want. If you do not eat liver, you have not eaten Tuscany. The Gatto Nero’s fegato is not flashy. It is honest, the same way a piece of well-made hand soap is honest, and it tastes the way someone’s grandmother in Pisa was making it in 1962.
For the primo we sometimes share the soup, a Tuscan zuppa di verdure with cabbage and beans and bread cooked into the broth until everything has melted into everything else, which is its own subject for another piece. After that, Sophia and I diverge.
She orders the tagliata, a small Tuscan beef fillet sliced over arugula with grana shaved on top, simpler and lighter than the bistecca alla fiorentina that occupies the other end of this menu and that we have at home or save for special occasions. I order the trippa alla fiorentina, which is tripe stewed for hours in tomato and onion and finished with parmigiano, a dish that for most non-Italians requires either bravery or ignorance and that I would recommend on either basis to anyone within reach. Tripe is the stomach of a cow, cleaned and cooked until it gives up its toughness, and a kitchen that knows what it’s doing turns it into something silky and faintly sweet that has more in common with a slow-cooked osso buco than with anything you could call offal. The Gatto Nero’s trippa is the best version I have eaten in Versilia. I have ordered it almost every time I have been in this room. It has never disappointed me. Once, on a January night, Alberta came out from the kitchen, wiped her hands on her apron, and asked me how I was finding it, the way a serious cook asks when she already knows the answer.
We finish with the tiramisu. It is good. It is unfussy. It is a tiramisu.
Reading this back, I notice that none of what I have just described is in any way revolutionary, none of it would impress a food critic, and there is nothing on this menu that you have not already eaten in a dozen other Tuscan trattorie if you have been eating in Tuscany at all. This is the point. The Gatto Nero is not a destination restaurant. It is not on a list. It will not change your life with a single bite. What it will do is feed you well, the same way every time, in a room that does not perform, served by people who recognize you on the second visit and remember you on the fifth, while you have whatever conversation you came in to have.
There is a category of restaurant for which the food is the entire reason to go, and the room is incidental. There is another category for which the food is decent, and the room is the reason. The Gatto Nero is the third category and the rarest. The food is good. The room is good. Neither is the reason. The reason is that the place has been built over thirty years of doing the same thing well, without trying to be more than it is, the kind of low atmospheric pressure under which two people can actually hear each other.
I have told Sophia things at this table that I could not have told her anywhere else. Not because the food disarmed me. Not because the wine helped, though it did. Because the room had already decided that whatever we said to each other across the white tablecloth was none of its business, and because the fegato arrived without ceremony and the trippa arrived without ceremony, and Alberta did not come out unless we wanted her to, and because when you sit down in a place that knows you, you are free to have the conversation you came to have. This is what a trattoria is supposed to do, originally and in essence, and most of them have forgotten. The Gatto Nero, at thirty years and counting, has not.
If you come to Pietrasanta, eat there. Sit by the caminetto in winter. Sit in the dehor in summer. Order the fegato. Order the trippa, and if you cannot bring yourself to order the trippa, order the tagliata. Talk for three hours. Nobody will move you along. That, more than the food, is what you have come for.
