The Forbidden Kebab in Tuscany

I once interviewed a chef whose Michelin-starred restaurant is tucked in the hills of eastern Lazio; when I asked what he thought of fusion cuisine, he said—without blinking an eye—that he liked it: using tomatoes from the Campagna region and basil from Genoa was great, he remarked. My question had broader ingredients in mind, but I got the point. Lucca, a walled medieval town in the northeastern part of Tuscany, made headlines a few months ago when the right-wing-leaning city banned ethnic foods from its historical center. The city claims it has since received mountains of letters from around the world supporting the ban.

In our love affair of all things Italian, we also tend to tolerate when the people of this boot-shaped peninsula do things that in other countries would send off alarm bells. Whatever the case, Italy has a history of provincialism, especially when it comes to food. For the first few months I lived in Rome, I traversed the city seeking anything but Italian restaurants, hoping to occasionally supplement my all-Italian diet with something different. I made a mental map of the Italian capital, dotted here and there with a sushi spot or an Ethiopian restaurant. But finally, I had to accept the lack of culinary diversity. In fact, I embraced it, thinking the Romans I met who not only refused to eat sushi and Mexican and Chinese, but also rejected any dish that hailed from outside Lazio, were a kind of anomaly, cultural relics that may not exist in the coming decades.

But now Lucca is institutionalizing the provincial Italian taste bud. The four ethnic eateries in Lucca’s historic center which had existed before the ban have been grandfathered in, but, as The New York Times reported when they recently checked back in on Lucca, city officials let those original eateries open because they didn’t even know what kebabs—the main staple of the four restaurants—were. Here’s a solution that could quell the bad taste of this whole situation: the owners of future kebab joints should start using Italian bread that’s similar to a pita—like the piadina, for example—and rename the sandwich: The I Love My Mamma Lucca Lamb Piadina Panino. Then everyone will be happy.

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