Beef Feet

In Palermo, Sicily, I had my worst Italian meal ever. I hope. I didn’t take any pictures, nor do I remember the name of the restaurant. I’m trying with all of my will to bury the memory deep within the folds of my brain, where my most embarrassing moments and most horrific illnesses also reside. A place from whence this particular moment in time will, optimistically, never reemerge.

In all fairness, it wasn’t any fault of the restaurant. They offered a three-course meal for 13 euro, and I jumped at the opportunity to have a lot of good, cheap food. For the appetizer, there were many mouth-watering offerings. But for some reason, I was feeling adventurous, and asked instead, for the chef’s choice. This caused the waiter to get curiously flustered, as he tried to explain something to me about what it entailed. The one word he said in English? Beef.

“Ah beef! Si. Mi piace.” (Ah, beef! Yes. I like it).

What arrived was an array of pickled vegetables and some strips of, I guess beef, along with a delicious eggplant involtini, and what looked suspiciously like a stuffed, rolled sardine. One of the vegetables was an unidentifiable thing, kind of an opalescent, whitish-yellow with a soft interior, like seeds inside a cucumber. I popped it into my mouth, but it was nearly impossible to chew. It had the texture of undercooked pasta—I thought maybe it was some kind of fibrous root vegetable that was, well, undercooked. Regardless, it was far from delicious.

The funny thing about my comprehension of the Italian language is that I always figure out what people are trying to tell me. About five minutes after the fact. So as I was scrutinizing the alien vegetable and thinking to myself, “Is that hair?..” it dawned on me that what my server had been saying was “piedi.” Feet. His mistake was saying, “beef,” which caused my brain to go in to English mode and disregard the rest. So I had just eaten a very large, foul-textured piece of beef foot, or cow hoof to the layman. For any of you who have ever had pickled pig’s feet, I imagine that this is quite similar. For those of you who are normal, you can understand that this was a revolting revelation. Which left me, after eating the non-alien vegetables, and the eggplant thing, with a piece of extremely fishy fish (after all, sardines are the fishiest there is) complete with skin and bones (I don’t even eat the crispy skin on chicken); the meat, which was very fatty, flavorless, and eerily tender; and a pile of hooves.

Now it was starting to sink in than in addition to saying “piedi,” the server had also been gesturing to his face. I couldn’t remember the word, but I figured it was something like “cheek,” or “tongue,” or worse, “brain.” I think I’ve had beef cheeks before, and I had tongue a few weeks ago, and it was actually quite good. But I really had reached my threshold for risk taking so I practically held my nose and slid the rest of the meat and the sardine down my throat. Mom always taught me to clean my plate. The hooves however, were not going anywhere.

My second course was mushroom ravioli in a sauce of three tomatoes. Not too scary, I figured. The three types of tomatoes appeared to be sun-dried, cherry, and heirloom. But the sauce was brown and tasted odd. I wondered if it was flavored with beef stock. And the mushrooms were pungent, and tasted almost like…fish. It was practically like eating fish ravioli in beef sauce. But perhaps I just had fish and beef on the brain.

The best part of the whole experience was the three hours of sardine burps afterwards. I recently heard a Sicilian man say, “A day without sardines is like a life without sex.” I’ll let you eat some fish bones and burp for three hours and then decide which is the worse evil. I know my answer.