Nestling in the northern mountainous fecundity of Piedmont in Northern Italy is Le Langhe, diametrically opposed to the dusty toe of the boot, land of brigands, malaria, pizza and organised crime. It is not the home of the Italian cooking that became such a part of mainstream American culture, via Ellis Island, from the impoverished and disposed Calabria and Sicily.Whence al Capone, and further down the line, Frank Zappa. Swings and roundabouts. Migrant cuisines are gifted to the world by the push of religious oppression, ethnic pogrom, famine and hardship, thus it was the 'kitchen of poverty' that informed the shorthand of so called Italian cooking for nearly everyone who wasn't Italian, of pasta and tomato, and of course the pizza. If ever there was the perfect example of making a few good things go a long way, but this is something that deserves looking into another time.
Piedmontese culture may not have exported itself around the world in the form of spaghetti and meatballs, but it did colonise the country of which it would eventually be a part. Not only rich in natural resources, it was Piesmontese statesmanship the kept the cogs of The Risorgimento, the invention of 'Italy' moving, in the same way that Bismark's Prussia would engineer the unification of Germany the in the decade that followed. Why am I telling you this? What has today's history lesson got to do with a badly maintained food blog?
Until a couple of years ago, my favourite restaurant on British soil was also named Le Langhe, a delightfully, and it seemed, wilfully obscure little eatery on the outskirts of Central York. Eatery is perhaps the wrong word. In the back was a small dining room where the you could eat a short selection of dishes derived from the eponymous region of the chef's birth. There was also a printed sheet detailing the daily changing pasta dishes, each of which was made from scratch on the premises. I've never really seen the point in fresh pasta, and to be honest I still don't, unless it was made by this guy. Glowing yellow, neither fondant soft, not al dente, it was unlike any pasta or noodle dish I can compare it to.
The menu detailed various formulae that went something like: one pasta dish, one main course, a cheese, but not a dessert; or with a complimentary wine, with which you must choose only from the first two pasta dishes, and so on. You see what I mean by wilfully obscure? It's almost as if they only wanted you to eat there of you really meant it. The great thing was, you didn't need the menu. For twenty five pounds, the chef would construct a five course menu, all you had to do was say if you wanted fish, meat, or vegetarian as a main course.
If you are in the presence of people who know what they are doing, why on earth make your own choice? I always went for fish, as finding someone who knows what they're doing is such a rare treat. The John Dory with crayfish butter is the sort of dish of beautiful simplicity nobody knows how to do anymore. I wouldn't choose my wine either, like I said, who am I to make decision like that when I am eating in the back room on an international wine importers shop, and they know far better than I what the best thing is to drink with whatever they want to feed me.
Here we get to the crux of the biscuit. Le Langhe wasn't even really a restaurant. It was also a delicatessen. There were cured meats, salami, cheese, oh what cheese, but above all there was wine. I'd usually leave with a bottle or two of something I'd sampled during that meal. When you went to the toilet, you passed boxes of wine, stacked from floor to ceiling. When you made it into the gents, there was often more wine, again, stacked floor to ceiling. It was obvious what kept the place afloat financially, but the gift on the side was that it made cooking like this on a small scale and an obtainable price something that was in anybody's reach, should they choose to hunt it out.
A couple of years ago, I learned that they had closed. I can't remember where I saw it. There was no official statement, and if it was a news piece,there was no interview or word of any kind from anyone involved in the business, but I'm willing to make a pretty confident stab in the dark. It strikes me as absolutely no coincidence that the closure came swiftly enough in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. I'd spoken to importers myself on the phone as the prices of ingredients from Italy and Spain shot up almost overnight. Le Langhe in York was like a test bed, a microcosm of all the things that economic free fall was about to fuck up, foreign staff, food ingredients, wine, cheese, charcuterie.
Now it's gone. Gone forever. I used to worry that I'd spend my last few years fighting off mutant children for the last Tunnock's Caramel Wafer in a post apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. It was a survival strategy that I'd only need to enact if the massed forces of world messianic megalomaniac evil finally unleashed the end of civilisation. I never envisaged we'd be able to do it to ourselves. In Le Langhe the Barolo will flow like a river, the early morning sun rises of the damp earth as the the hounds nuzzle for truffles in the forest. On Brexit Island, the dream of a languid five course lunch over two or three bottles of wine feels like an impossible memory, as we sit down to a lunch of chlorinated factory farmed Trump Industies chicken ('the best chickens, great chickens, really great, the best'), and the last of the stockpiled Fray Bentos pies. Fucking well done everybody.
