The Last Supper

The trattoria closed on a Tuesday. Not a Saturday, which would have been dramatic, or a Friday, which would have been poetic. Tuesday. The least interesting day. My father locked the door, hung the key on the hook inside, and walked home. Twenty-eight years. Tuesday. It was his father's before him. My grandfather opened it in 1971 in a neighborhood of Bologna that was working-class then and is now whatever comes after gentrified — the cafés have oat milk and the butcher became a vintage clothing shop and the people who remember the neighborhood before are either dead or have opinions that nobody wants to hear. My grandfather made three things: ragù, tortellini, and lasagne. Not because he couldn't make other things. Because these three things were enough. The ragù took six hours. The tortellini were folded by hand, two thousand a day during the holidays, each one the size of a fingertip. The lasagne used bechamel, not ricotta, because this is Bologna and not Rome and my grandfather had views on the matter. My father added to the menu over the years, slowly, the way you add furniture to a room — a dish here, a dessert there. By the end there were eleven items. He never printed a menu. The dishes were on a board behind the bar, handwritten in chalk, and if you couldn't read Italian or couldn't read his handwriting, which was the same problem, someone would explain. I didn't take over. This is the part of the story where you expect me to say I regret it, and I'm still deciding. I studied architecture. I live in Milan. I design offices for companies that want their offices to not look like offices, which is most companies now. I am good at it. I am not passionate about it, which is fine. Passion is overrated in work and essential in cooking, and I inherited the wrong one. The building is a gym now. I went in once. They'd kept the tile floor and the high ceilings and added mirrors and rowing machines and a sound system that played music at a volume my grandfather would have considered an act of aggression. I stood in what used to be the kitchen and a woman in lycra asked if I needed help. I said no. I needed the opposite of help. I needed things to be put back. My father doesn't talk about it much. He's seventy-three. He cooks at home now, for my mother and whoever visits, and the ragù still takes six hours and the tortellini are still the size of a fingertip and the lasagne is still bechamel, not ricotta, because principles outlast restaurants. I go home every other month. The train from Milan takes an hour. My father meets me at the door, smelling of garlic and wine, which is how he has always smelled and how the trattoria smelled and how, I am beginning to understand, the word home smells to me. The trattoria is gone. The cooking is not. These are different things.