Capri: Home of the best Italian cook ever

He called himself Lino, and if he hadn’t shown me his press clippings I would have thought him a shameless self-promoter, telling me how good his food was and how he’d been voted one of the top three chefs in Italy blah-blah-blah. And then I took a bite of what I’d ordered, and I forgave him everything.

But let me back up. We spent out penultimate day in the Italian coastal town of Positano by taking a bouncy pig of a boat to the sainted island of Capri. I say sainted because the guidebooks describe Capri with the same kinds of words that some people use for sex: breathless, exciting, palpitating, heat-seeking missile… uh, not that last one. The reality was a bit different: crowded with schoolchildren, hot, overpriced and boasting the same kind of atmosphere found in a cheap Las Vegas resort.

The reality of the trip over was that the woman sitting behind us blew chunks shortly after we shoved off, and others almost followed her. All that and for just 22 euro (about $25) a head!

Still, we arrived more or less in peace, we quickly took the finocolare (tram) up the mountin, transferred to a bus there and went on to Anacapri (the top point of the island). Then we took even another bus to the point on the northwest side of the island, overlooking the fabled grotta azzurra — or Blue Grotto. We’d hoped to see the inside of this natural wonder, which is supposed to have water so blue that it makes the sky pout, except that nature wouldn’t cooperate: The waves were too big for anyone but swimmers to enter the grotto, and we’d left our wetsuits back in Spokane.

So, what else was there to do but eat? We ended up at Nettuno, one of two restaurants a few steps away from the walkway down to the grotto entrance. And standing there, fronting the sea, was Lino Giamminelli, trying to get us to let him order a group meal for us (we didn’t ) and recommending the perfect white wine (whatever it was, it was!). I had few hopes, but I went with his recommendation (vegetarians tend to be suggestive). And then the dishes arrived.

And Leslie Kelly will be surprised to hear this, but I had the MEAL OF MY LIFE! The ravioli was in a red sauce so exquisite that I literally stopped eating and almost spit it out. The cheese-filled squares of pasta had a stuffing so tasty that I’m sure the cow whose milk made it must get treated like a bovine Paris Hilton. I was reminded of the scene in Robert Rodriguez’s “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” in which Johnny Depp liked a certain dish so much that he went into the kitchen and shot the chef. My wife had something Lino called “Pasta Aumm Aumm,” which was penne and eggplant and tomatoes all blended together in a concoction that made you want to moan “mmmmm, mmmm.” As, without embarrassment, I did.

The dish ordered by my sister-in-law Jean was the same as mine, and my brother-in-law Steve had a special seafood plate that Lino talked him into ordering. They, too, were moaning with a kind of food-inspired sexual heat. And the wine, along with Lino’s special fragola semifreddo (a kind of air-blown strawberry gelato), while not cooling things off too much, managed to finish the meal with the kind of perfection seldom found outside Michelangelo’s private studio.

So, the upshot. It’s never pleasant to have to listen to people brag about themselves, except of course when it turns out that they’re just telling the truth. Lino was, telling the truth that is, and damn if the meal that he oversaw production of wasn’t something that I will no doubt still be dreaming about at certain moments during my next three lifetimes. It was so good that I might be tempted to return to Capri tomorrow.

I’d even be willing this time to sit right next to the woman who blows chunks.