Pilgrimage to Tramonti, Birthplace of Pizza (Nina! He says this!)

Pizzeria San Francisco Tramonti, Costa D'Amalfi

IG: @pizzeria_san_francisco_tra

Alfonso’s electric golf cart whirred us down the winding mountain road from Zagara, the cool night air off the vines and stones nostalgic of those first early teenage years giddily spent out late in undefined freedom. We rolled down the narrow cobbled streets of Minori, over the seafront cliff road, then began the thirty minute winding climb into Tramonti. The invigorating air of youth soon blended into the chilly cave air of the steep canyon; little beep-beep emoji cars daringly grumbled past our pokey conveyance on straightaways no longer than a game of pickle. I was seated behind Alfonso, so he would absorb any mopeds that came through the windshield.

At the pizzeria he announced that he would sit on the other side of a large dining room column so that he would not be a presence at our special dinner (and spend his time drumming up rides in peace), and soon we were engrossed in a menu of simple pies and grilled verdure. Decades of food television have drilled into us that the pizzas we eat stateside are more akin to trashy casseroles than the ancestral, austere flatbreads of this region, from whence pizza allegedly originates, and this menu bore out that truth. We could have ventured into pies with smoked salmon or charred broccoli and pistachio cream, but ultimately felt it most beneficial to explore the archetypes. A white pie with sausage, artichoke, and lemon for me, a red with funghi, olives, and prosciutto for her.

I had slyly declined to use the past tense when mentioning my career in food journalism to our host, so when little freebies began arriving, I was happily reminded of the power of that pen.

Fried focaccia wedges with a dollop of the clearest, most forcefully honest little stewed tomato — sorry, daughter of Vesuvius — I have ever tasted rang the bell for a tour of, as Mario Batali used to put it, “perfect, deeply un-fucked-with” ingredients. Lightly-marked grilled vegetables of uniform thickness and their own nature of clarity, dusted with dried oregano, would have been unthinkably boring at home, but here at church they were to be appreciated in every minute aspect of their minerality, salinity, and bitterness.

A dispiriting couple from Toronto weighed on the table next to ours. Both wore shower shoes, despite not also wearing bath towels, and kept up a monotonous, broken line of conversation which indicated in no way that any species of carnality would visit their quarters on this trip. Their sole value was to have ordered before us, so that when we saw their pies emerge like glowing shields from the forge of Vulcan, born into and immediately transmuted by the tempering air of the dining room — like orange ingots quenched squealing in water — we sat upright like dogs when a cleaver falls. To the couple’s credit, they used utensils to eat their pies, a correct but annoying Italian custom, like how they spear French fries with long toothpicks.

From where we sat in the quiet Tuesday night dining room we caught occasional glimpses of Francesco’s head, of his peel stabbing into the flames of his oven, of his back as he arranged the antipasti. Soon he was clearly pulling our pies from the flame-licked dome, and his wife Pamela delivered them to the table, to our poorly-disguised Christmas morning faces.

Reading a laundry list of precious salivary adjectives is as trite to read as it is to write. What I hope you can do is come to this place and recalibrate your sense of how every parameter of this creation is meant to reach its zenith of expression and optimal intermarriage. When food is truly enthralling, you don’t drop the temperature with egghead declarations, you just lose yourself in chasing the flavors from bite to bite. It immediately established itself as the reference pie for the rest of my life.

In another move which spoke to the forewarning of a Food Journalist, Francesco carefully approached our table at the close of the meal, which he hadn’t done with the other tables. I offered my hand, and across our near-total language desert I managed a, “meraviglioso in tutti categoria,” given with as strong a smile as it was received. Multiple permutations of Thank You were exchanged as a form of information, and we thanked each other out of the restaurant, past the couple of carabinieri who always seem to be chatting idly with the staff at closing time.

Like a new baby, America provides two things: a lot of shit, and a lot of potential. I doubt we’ll ever stop selling each other bankrupt, adulterated flours and sugary tomato sauces, and approach the Italian level of reverence for ingredients, but in pockets in my home city of Portland I see a keen passion for it, and pizzas which approach Francesco’s. Only with lucky travel can we know to what we aim, so I’m grateful to Salvatore and Nilde for championing their culture to the breakfast table guy who asked so many questions about the way they made their lemon marmalade and “didn’t want to eat tourist food.”