The Night the Pesto Won

A dedication to Beppe Gambetta, native son of Genoa

by Joseph Harris

There are evenings that arrange themselves without your permission — where the food, the music, and the company arrive in a combination so improbable that you spend the rest of your life wondering who organized it.

Mine happened several years ago at a small private dinner on the Mendocino Coast, hosted by a friend who was sponsoring a local concert. The guests, I was told, included a couple of well-known guitar flat-pickers. My friend knew me as a restaurateur and a devoted appreciator of all things Italian — that was reason enough for the invitation. What she did not know, what had never come up, was that I had spent a formative stretch of my younger years playing in a contemporary bluegrass band. That part of my life had long since given way to restaurants, physics, and the particular kind of busyness that swallows old musicians whole.

The guests were Dan Crary and his wife Larree, Beppe Gambetta and his wife Federica, and — as a gift the evening hadn't advertised — Bill Evans on banjo. If those names land differently on you than they do on me, I'll say simply: I was dining with royalty, and I didn't know it until the soup course. Beppe is Genoese. Not Italian in the general sense — Genoese in the specific, particular, proprietary sense that people from Liguria carry their home the way other people carry a passport. Liguria is his. The coast, the basil, the olive oil, the sea light — all of it lives in him the way a key lives in a lock. And so naturally, inevitably, with the logic of a man who cannot help himself, he prepared pesto alla Genovese.

I make pesto. I have made pesto for decades. I make it well. I have stood at that preparation with some pride.

His put mine to shame. I say that without resentment and with considerable admiration. There is a difference between someone who has learned a thing and someone for whom a thing is simply memory — muscle memory, landscape memory, the memory of a grandmother's kitchen in a city that looks out onto the Ligurian Sea. Beppe's pesto tasted like that. Like somewhere. Like his somewhere.

We discovered our musical connection at the table, somewhere between the pasta and the conversation about guitars, and I felt the small shock of recognition that only happens when you realize the universe has been quietly arranging things behind your back. After dinner, I did what any reasonable person would do: I persuaded all three of them to play.

They set up in the living room. No stage, no lights, no audience beyond a handful of people who could not quite believe their luck. What followed was one of those performances that exists only in the memory of the people present — no recording, no document, nothing but the sound moving through the room and the knowledge, in real time, that you were hearing something rare.

The pesto, I will tell you honestly, held its own. In the full recollection of that evening — the music, the company, the improbable grace of it all — the bowl of pasta made by a native son of Genoa stands as its equal. That is not a small thing to say.

Dan Crary now lives in Little River, just down the coast from Fort Bragg. Every now and then I stop by and we play together — a privilege I did not earn and never expected, and one I do not take lightly. We are friends. The universe, apparently, was not done arranging things.

This Ligurian menu is dedicated to my friend from Genoa, Beppe Gambetta. He showed me what pesto tastes like when it remembers where it comes from.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California