Dolci Fatti en Casa

When I read “Dolci Fatti en Casa” at the top of the restaurant’s list of desserts, I laughed, until I understood that it meant not that the house desserts were fattening but they were all made on the premises. The menu was offered by Queen Italian Restaurant, a ten-minute walk from our temporary quarters in downtown Brooklyn. It’s an old-line establishment, now in its second generation of family ownership, and it provides superb Italian food along with swift, attentive, and unobtrusive service. It’s too expensive for casual dining, but it’s a wonderful venue for an occasion.

The occasion in question was our 48^th anniversary, which we celebrated recently with a visit to that restaurant. We each ordered a three-course meal, and I abandoned all restraint in my choices, from the spinach pasta sinfully bathed in cream sauce to the tomato puree and tiny fried onion rings of my next pasta course, to the sublime vanilla bean gelato at the end. Each choice was delicious, but each one would have made the authors of Dropping Acid, the reflux diet cookbook and cure, my new bible, flinch. They prescribe a low acid, low fat diet, and my meal last week was not only high acid (tomato puree and fried onions) but also high fat (everything else).

I can’t say I ignored my diet at that restaurant last week, for its strictures were firmly in mind as I ate my dinner. Better to say that I intentionally violated it. Yet I didn't feel any guilt - well, only a slight tinge of guilt - for I was convinced that acid indigestion would keep me up all night; I’d be punished for my transgressions; and thus moral balance would be restored to my world.

It pains me to admit that enormous pleasure engulfed me during that meal. It was a new sensation. I had eaten good dinners before, of course, but I had never before experienced the pure satisfaction that excellent old-fashioned cooking can provide - cooking, that is, with plenty of butter, cream, and eggs, with utter disregard for the food's cholesterol content. We had gone to celebrate and enjoy ourselves and we certainly did. I wonder if it's old age that allowed us to abandon ourselves to such pleasure.

Of course, it wasn’t only the food that was wonderful. That my beloved, sitting opposite me, was also participating in this feast was an essential element of my pleasure. We talked about what we had been doing at that very hour, 48 years before. We had landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and were being driven to Laurence Rockefeller’s resort, the Dorado Beach Hotel, then a relatively small hotel before being sold to the Hyatt chain. As we talked, we agreed that we hardly knew each other then. But we had the good fortune to make the right choice in each other. We were lucky. We still are.

As we walked home in a state of satisfied satiation, I was apprehensive about the consequences of my folly. But the gods that supervise acid reflux must not have been paying attention that night, or maybe they were on vacation, or maybe they gave me an anniversary present. In any event, I slept through the night with no problems whatsoever, providing yet another example of the world’s injustice. Still, if I eat like that more than once a year, I’m unlikely to reach our 49^th.