JAMES PEMBROKE
Throughout lockdown, I was haunted by the image of a Private Eye cartoon from the early ’70s.
A bejewelled and rouged man with a broad fedora, knee-length fur coat and cowboy boots is standing outside an Italian trattoria. The caption? ‘Come on in. The waiter’s lovely.’
After 90-odd days of our home cooking and table-laying, I realised I could take no more. I wanted a waiter.
I couldn’t wait. So we have decamped to Ostuni, in Puglia. It’s like coming to a neutral country during a war; a country with peerless produce and brilliant cooks for whom the maltreatment of food is blasphemy. Neither Deliveroo nor Just Eat bikes can be seen ferrying already tired dishes to the sofas of binge-watching millennials. The restaurants are open as normal, but with far fewer punters.
My daughter chose our first restaurant, the tiny Osteria Ricanatti. The chef owner has about four tables outside and six inside. Sensibly, there are only three dishes for each course. He’s clearly keen for a Michelin star, so we were given the obligatory glass of Prosecco and some amuse-bouches. After three months of Kettle chips, these nibbles were transcendental.
The three pasta dishes and suckling pig were true, unpretentious, Pugliese wonders. We missed the pud because we had to collect my son’s demob-manic guests from the station. But in those two hours before the Reign of the Seven Nightbirds, who spend their waking hours (3pm-6am) vacuuming up every last drop of alcohol, we gloried in the serendipity of sitting at someone else’s table.
Who needs binge-watching? We had front-row seats at Ostuni’s passeggiata. A carousel of tiny dogs, old ladies, gaggles of girls in this year’s de rigueur uniform
of short dresses and bovver boots, gangs of local teenagers out for gelato alla crema and a meet-up on the medieval walls, and a portly white Rastafarian who we decided must be from Germany.
There is noticeably far less tension on the street here. The rules are clear, simple and respected: masks are compulsory in shops. That’s it. The waiters wear masks when serving, but few pedestrians were covered up. There’s no melodramatic British back-turning or side-stepping. Malaria was still prevalent here until 1969 – so they seem just to accept illness and its precautions as necessary evils.
On Sunday, Josephine and I headed off to the holy of holies, Miramare da Michele, for lunch by the sea at Torre Santa Sabina. Michele and Eleanora Greco run the world’s best seafood restaurant. Don’t just take my word for it: restaurateur Rowley Leigh and Oldie cookery writer Elisabeth Luard concur.
Every time we go, Eleanora has changed her repertoire of antipasti. Unused to large lunches, we had to forgo her unique pasta dishes – but I will work harder when I return next week. Last night, all ten of us had antipasti, pizza and vino locale for under 20 euros at Vecchia Terrazza, which has a terrific view of the floodlit old town of Ostuni.
The only tiny fly in the ointment for us bibbers was that, after three months of opening my own bottles, I had forgotten how long the gap is between the ordering of the first bottle and its arrival. The Magnificent Seven found a solution early: stay on in the bar for a quickie and let me go ahead to order the vino, whose belated arrival coincided with their own.
You really must come: you’ll be the only Brits here. BA and easyjet are flying to Brindisi and Bari, and all the airports are empty. Buon viaggio.