Alexandra Antonioni - Eat Me - Love, Sex and the Art of Eating

For my family, who have supported me through every Beginning, Middle and End and without whom my life would be a very empty place indeed.

And for the next generation: James, Max, Cristian and Sacha.

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

THE BEGINNING, THE MIDDLE, THE END

THE BEGINNING

Attraction

First Dates

One-Night Stands

Infatuation

The Seduction Dinners

Aphrodisiacs

Pink Cloud

Easy Like Sunday Morning

Room Service

The Mini-Break

Indoor Picnics

Meet Me After Work and Bring a Toothbrush

Rude Food

Those Three Little Words

Your First Quarrel

The End of the Beginning

THE MIDDLE

7 THHeaven

You Are Cordially Invited To …

Pet Names

Forever Friends

Domestic Bliss?

Soul Mates

Eating al Fresco

I Don’t Like Mondays

Welcome to Lola’s

La Famiglia

Home Alone

In Sickness and in Health

Reality Check

THE END

Thunder & Lightning

The End is Nigh

Once More With Feeling …

The Last Dance …

Food Glorious Food

The Six Stages of the End

Ouch … It Hurts …

All You Need is Love …

POSTSCRIPT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Quite simply the joy of Eat Me is that it extols the virtues of Love, Sex and Food, three things everyone has experience of, and that people just love talking about.

Food has, throughout the ages, been synonymous with hedonistic pleasure, with finding love, falling in love and sometimes losing love. Eat Me demonstrates with an informed, seductive and cheeky approach how to marry food with the various stages of romantic relationships. Nothing is left to chance, from first date dinners, postcoital snacks, meeting the future in-laws and making up after your first big row, right through to fabulous recipes for comfort food should it all go horribly wrong. I’ve been there and I’m quite sure you have too.

Nothing inspires romance quite like food. The cunningly pre-meditated but seemingly effortless way that Alex recommends the seduction and subsequent nurturing of a lover through cooking just can’t fail. She uses her kitchen in much the same way a spider uses her web.

Her reminiscences of first-date disasters during supposedly romantic dinners as well as her mischievous take on the nuances of relationships had me roaring with laughter as I recalled some equally excruciating but, with hindsight, bittersweet encounters from my own past.

Along with great menus and some truly honest relationship advice there are moments of déjà vu for us all as we smirk knowingly at some of the insights into the ongoing battle of sexes. To quote a line from Eat Me: ‘Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth. Deal with it’.

Have fun with Eat Me . Open a bottle of wine, put some music on, get into the kitchen and start connecting with the culinary siren you have within. Be spiritually and emotionally nourished, and most of all enjoy.

Marco Pierre White

May 2005

Prior to starting our journey through the mesmerising alchemy that stems from the marriage of food and love, I should like to give you a little background information about myself. So here are a few pertinent details about where I’ve been and what I’ve done, which should afford you a better understanding of the author, my credentials and the experiences that have led me to write this book.

I was born in London to Italian parents sometime in the early- to mid-sixties. (I don’t like to be too precise about my age, female prerogative and all that, let’s just say that I’ve been around long enough to have learnt about the harsh realities of life, but not so long that I am no longer able to be excited, amazed and enraptured by it.)

Given that my parents owned a restaurant, the Bongusto (which as kids we re-christened the Gone Busto, naturally out of earshot of my father), I was steeped in a foodie culture from a very young age. I have warm and vivid memories of ‘going down the shop’, as we used to call it, to help out in the school holidays. It was not unusual for there to be three generations of Antonionis in attendance at any one time: my parents, occasionally my grandfather (although he came to eat and generally observe proudly from the sidelines) and we three kids – my older sister and baby brother and me.

We were all working towards the same goal: a successful family restaurant serving first-rate, home-cooked Italian food in a cosy, friendly atmosphere, affording the kind of welcome and familiarity that comes from seeing the same faces over and over again. Many of these people became an integral part of our extended family and even today, long after my father has retired, they still have a place in our hearts.

Having spent the better part of the school holidays and weekends working in the Bongusto it was only natural that I should grow up with a leaning towards hospitality as a career. Having learnt the basics I spread my wings, and in the early Eighties, newly married at the tender age of 20, I moved to Hong Kong with my husband. There I lived and worked for many years managing some truly fabulous restaurants, amongst which was Grissini at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the brand new and utterly gorgeous diamond in the Grand Hyatt crown.

Grissini was a world away from the Bongusto and, unbeknownst to the hierarchy of Swiss hoteliers that employed me, I was totally inexperienced in the running of a fine dining restaurant. To say that I talked up the family business and my hospitality experience is an understatement – it was a far cry from the family-run, all-day-breakfast café/restaurant of my youth and an extremely steep learning curve. But learn I did; the young, gifted Italian chef at Grissini was a genius and through this book I hope to do him justice in passing on his knowledge of food and its ability to seduce.

Grissini was a highly romantic restaurant in a wonderful setting overlooking Hong Kong harbour; floor-to-ceiling windows afforded fabulous views of the South China Sea. It was a heady time indeed for little Alex Antonioni from North London, to suddenly be presiding over such an exalted dining room full to the rafters with the beautiful people: witnessing their romantic assignations; first dates, reunions, proposals, celebrations, secret trysts and, of course, the occasional tearful parting.

I watched and learned.

It is a fact that every night in a restaurant, any restaurant anywhere in the world, a theatre production takes place: the guests are the star characters and the staff and food their producers and props. Every night there was drama, every night a new lesson in love and life.

Unfortunately, my marriage was not to last and after my divorce I left Hong Kong and returned to London. After a period of settling in, the advent of a fabulous new career in restaurant PR and being very much a single girl about town, I ‘serially monogomised’ for the first time in my life, enjoying a succession of very agreeable one- to two-year relationships.

Despite the fact that the guys I became involved with turned out to be Mr Right Now rather than Mr Right and the liaisons came to their own natural conclusion, I wouldn’t have changed a single thing. I loved, laughed and learned a lot; there is a lot to be said for being an independent, single, successful, commitment-shy woman. The world was now my oyster.