Alla Nostra

The blog has been quiet but I promise you great things.

I’ve been saving talking about Alla Nostra until now, because last night was when it really happened. It’s hard separating out the causes of Alla Nostra, how it came to take hold of our apartment, how it has driven us to have cleaning ladies in the place this morning, how it has brought out love and closed the gaps between countries. Perhaps it started with Barbara, perhaps it started earlier, I think it did. I think it started when Matt took a job as a maintenance man at a string of high-end down-town restaurants.

Matt leaves for work early, at five thirty or six thirty, it’s too dark to tell. Then he works in the kitchens, fixing fans, helping dress new floors, a little bit of circuitry, the odd bit of painting and flood prevention. By 11:30 he is hungry and he eats in the restaurant with the rest of the staff before the places open up. He eats shark steaks and spinach and salmon and lamb and rosemary, he has jus, bliny, carafes and chata-mon-foi-touille. The experience has changed him. He can no longer, at the end of the day, be content to buy a big box with “CAKE” written on it, and suffuse himself with chocolate and light heady sponge in front of the TV. He can no longer get a slab of pizza three inches thick and dressed with slippery salami whose secretions gloss in puddles under the lights in the kitchen. No. Not only must he now buy fresh marinated mozzarella and burgeoning salads, one-day-dead meat, sirloin, bacon heaved before his eyes, right from the strung up belly of a bright pig corpse. Not only must he buy flagons of wine and exotic brown breads, he must share them. The first rumblings of his new tastes came in his cooking himself and I delicious steaks, but it was clear he was hungering for a wider audience, a people to indulge.

And that’s where Christian comes in. Christian is the Chief Operating Officer of Sublet in the City, by all means a slip-ship-shady set up which rents out apartments to innocent visitors to New York, who come for a month or two. Matt did some work for them and became close friends with Christian, a former sergeant in the marines and forlorn rock star, who has broken his back, lived for a while in a hostel in San Francisco, been in love and swapped it for a guitar and came to New York with 25 cents in the bottom of his shoe. The thing, or maybe a thing, about Christian is that maybe before, maybe after, maybe on a troop ship in the Mediterranean he took on a thrill of learning. He only reads the classics, mainly Greeks and Romans but he’s getting into Russian stuff now. Matt, by contrast, was stuck in a rut on Elizabethan drama but I sent him modern classical with “I Claudius.” Last weekend after Matt had bought a hoard of books from a dead woman’s apartment and filled our kitchen with them. You should of, I wish you had, seen the blazing, bickering, snitch-rag row that blew up between Matt and Christian over who got to keep Dostoevsky's Idiot. So there it is, the roots of Alla Nostra: the openness, the tastes, the will to entertain, to invite, to learn. And, in the combination of Matt and Christian, the action, the eagerness to throw open the doors and do it, and to do it the right way.

I mentioned Barbara because she started it. Barbara is small and Italian, a wind up blaze of “figissimo” and “haur-wesome”. She is a nanny to two poor defenceless children in upstate NY as part of some aupair-America shenanigans by which she gets to take English classes and see the city. So last Thursday, Barbara was on her day off, nosing through Soho, breathing some fumes and she took a break for a coffee in a café. Matt and Christian, recently endowed, you remember, with delicate tastebuds and a thirst for the right things, went into the same café just as Barbara, from Milan, was deciding that she needed to get to know some people in this part of town because clearly this was where some of the action was. “Please, what is the nightlife like around here?” She brazenly, Barbarily asked the two of them.

That night I got home around eleven or twelve and the collapsible table was in the living room, the lights were dimmed, the carpet glowed red on the floorboards, there were candles and Adam, another of Matt’s close friends and a recording studio engineer, was playing a guitar as Matt and Christian and a bright nosed Italian nodded and smiled, glazing dazing drinking wine and fingering the last food on their plates. “Alla Nostra,” they said when I came in. To Us.

That was Thursday, then the same on Friday, on Saturday Coco came over and we sat with Alla Nostra for the first time. The first time you dine you have to make a toast in your native or another language. I gave English, Coco gave us Japanese. Then Sunday, again, more steak, more meat, more red wine and candles and classic show tunes coming from the stereo under the TV which was tuned to some endless broadcast of Ole Blue Eyes. Barbara came back and brought Fay, a tall Brazilian who is also an American-Aupair. Christian rustled up some girls who are renting apartments from Sublet in the City. But really, what it was all building to was to last night: a great night, twelve expected, more invited, Alla Nostra.

And so it was. Dan the intense limousine driver with crackling eyes was there, he brought his friend Jerrod who said, as far as I can remember, nothing at all. There was another Dan as well, a graffiti artist who had drifted, selling homemade candles, into another café where Christian happened to be, and was invited. Dan, the second Dan, was twitchy and high-wired, his life I think a mini series of things going wrong right now. His sister was in the hospital around the corner so he popped out at one stage of the evening to see her, he was due in court this morning on some charge or probation hearing or other. Dan had a nervous way and straggly tattoo on a shadowy forearm. But he made the pasta sauce and did a lovely job of it. Louise came and was from Epsom and studying at the fashion college in Chelsea – I was, of course, strongly territorial as England in the apartment. After Fay and Barbara there was Fred the Frenchman, god knows where he came from but I’ve met him a few times now, a nice bloke trying to set up a flashy bureau de change. Coco came and so did Jacob Goldstein (him again) and so did Steven Chen, later.

So we sat, 11 or 12 at the new plastic table bought for the occasion, toasting endlessly from great glasses of fruity wine, letting the food get cold, the pasta congeal ever so slightly in the gloom, serving each other snacks and salads because the rule of Alla Nostra is that you should never serve yourself, your fellow guests should be attentive to your needs. The toasts, the toasts. Heart felt – people tried to remember the last time they’d gathered this way. Christmas, family, love, if it wasn’t for, creative, welcome, never seen, these were things that people said. We heard in Spanish and Italian and French and Mandarin. I’m not afraid. It was emotional. And with trips on to the balcony to look up at the clouds and with guitars: Dan the limousine man sang some very questionable gospel numbers before Christian gave us his country song, Adam sang some of his favourites, Jacob made us howl “Alla Nostra” like it was Oasis homecoming concert and Steven Chen, black-laced bar-shoe tapping at the rug, closed his eyes and sang about San Francisco and New York City with a Blur-ish / Pulp-ish “oh-OH-oh” chorus. The friends we made that night. Alla Nostra.