Café L'Amour

It was my father who first taught me the importance of mozzarella cheese. “Chow is continuous,” he’d say, fishing out the small, egg-shaped pieces from the water they swam in. It was a saying he’d picked up from his years in the military, and one of the only remnants of it I could see in him in our day-to-day. He would hand them to me, letting them slide from his palm into mine, and motion to the bamboo cutting board stationed on the granite countertop by the sink. Being the youngest in the house (aside from my 3-year-old brother, who wasn’t fit to operate kitchen utensils), it was my job to perform the thankless task of slicing the cheese for each meal. Mozzarella was difficult. It had a habit of slipping out from beneath the knife, and sometimes my slices would end up grossly misshapen - odd, oblong discs too fat on one side and barely substantive on the other. Still though, I much preferred it to the unbearable job of grating cheddar, mostly because of that moment at the end of the block when I’d have to start being extra careful or I’d slice pieces of my knuckles into the great orange heap.
At that time we lived in a house my father had designed himself, with bamboo flooring and a main level that was only one sprawling room and high ceilings that my father called “Valhalla.” The house was built on a slope, so the deck on the main level actually sat a story above the golf course our backyard ran into. During the twilights of summer, with the mist of the golf course sprinklers drifting up, my stepmother and my uncle would sit outside and play backgammon with a bottle of merlot while my father and I cooked, singing along heartily to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. My father has always been into that sort of thing. He called it Café L’Amour, and on evenings when I’d rumble down the stairs and head for the front door he’d call, “Hold on, darling - Café L’Amour is open tonight.” I didn’t have to stay, but I did. I was 14 and supposed to be hating my life, and in the typical ways I did, but there was never a time I felt happier and more fulfilled than when I could hear the sizzle of meat on the stove behind me as I worked my hands sore slicing apart ball after ball of mozzarella.
We had to move away from that house for a while, and when we came back we couldn’t afford it anymore. Café L’Amour is not closed, though. It comes back to me quite often, actually, even at the most fleeting note of big band - but mostly in my undying passion for mozzarella.