Four grown men were standing around my kitchen island groaning in unison, which is generally not what you want to hear when someone unpacks your new Carrara marble countertop.
They had just carried the 600-pound slab into Parla Cucina, my forthcoming cooking school in Rome. Now, as the packaging came off, we could all see the massive crack near the cutout for the cooking surface, running across the marble’s 2.7-meter edge. There were loose pieces, too.
“Che peccato,” one said.
The others took turns agreeing. What a shame.
I surveyed the damage. Then I called my designer.
If you read my earlier newsletter about opening the school, you may remember that I was not approaching this venture from a place of abundant inner peace. I wasn’t sleeping. I was tense and anxious, overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that needed to happen before I could welcome people into the space for classes and workshops.
Annoyingly, most things were going well. This gave me very little comfort. Apparently, I had decided that a run of good news was just a down payment on some future disaster.
A few weeks earlier, the custom kitchen had arrived from Carpi, in Emilia-Romagna: sink, dishwasher, two ovens, fridge, cabinets. The whole thing was built by hand by Steel Cucine, founded by the Po family in 1999, drawing on generations of experience making cooking equipment. I had a beautiful kitchen from people who knew exactly what they were doing, and a long list of tasks that made me question whether I did.
Beyond the appliances, the room was empty. I found this personally antagonistic.
At home, meanwhile, my office had become a storage facility for the school. Boxes of cookbooks, utensils, pasta tools, and pizza equipment covered every inch of floor. I kept the door shut, which did nothing to stop me from mentally inventorying its contents when I should have been sleeping. All of this explains my emotional investment in the delivery and assembly of the kitchen island and its very large cabinets.
The island arrived on Friday. It was made by Veneta Cucine, a family-run company that started in the province of Treviso in 1967. I appreciate its history. At that particular moment, I appreciated its storage capacity even more. As the crew assembled it, I could finally picture unpacking the boxes and putting their contents away. I could see myself working in the room. The school was coming together. Then they unpacked the marble.
Here, presumably, was the disaster I’d been rehearsing for. An enormous, expensive, broken object occupying the center of a business I was trying to open. And I felt fine. I called Bergamin, the Veneto-based design company I often commission for kitchen projects. My designer and I talked it through. We would install the damaged slab while a replacement was made and shipped from Carrara.
“Hey,” I said to the crew. “Who’s got some tape?”
They filled the crack with silicone and reattached the pieces that had fallen off. We bound the whole thing together with masking tape. The result was not what I had envisioned when I chose a marble countertop, but it allowed us to keep going.
I kept waiting to get upset. Surely the frustration would arrive once the workers left. But all that tension I’d been carrying around had disappeared. This struck me as weird, possibly even alarming. I had been losing sleep over boxes of copper pots and puntarelle slicers. Now there were shards of my new countertop in front of me, and I was content.
I don’t want to claim I’ve achieved some profound personal growth here. I would still like my marble to arrive in one piece. But I suspect I’d exhausted myself trying to anticipate problems, and there was something almost restful about finally having one I could deal with. I knew what had happened, I knew whom to call, and I made a decision.
After another conversation with Bergamin, I was informed the marmista in Carrara would start work on the replacement. Marmista is Italian for marble worker, and in spite of it all, I think it’s the best Italian word. I would have preferred fewer opportunities to use it this month, but here we are. The new slab will show up sooner or later. In the meantime, there’s a kitchen to test.
On Tuesday, the inaugural Rome Deep Dive group will gather at Parla Cucina for its first class, kicking off my new series of Italian journeys and giving the kitchen a proper test. The school won’t open to the public for another few weeks. I’ll share details on how to book as we get closer. For now, I’m looking forward to having people in the room and something cooking on the stove.
I can’t promise this newfound calm will last. But apparently I can look at 600 pounds of damaged marble and get on with my day, which would have been useful information several sleepless weeks ago. Come cook with me soon. Admire the cabinets, and if the tape’s still there, take a selfie with it.
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