More than imitating the past, we rediscover a winning model for the restaurants of the future. And we frequent the real trattorias

by Paolo Manfredi

"They've rounded up all the trees / And put them in a tree museum / And they charge all the people / A dollar and a half just to see 'em"
(Bob Dylan)

And in the end, like bell-bottoms, gastronomic vintage has made a comeback too. First subtly, with some establishments offering vintage dishes, then with a series of explicitly nostalgic openings, in names, locations, and menus.
The past always comes back, damn it, that of the youth of us 50/60-year-olds, the legendary '70s and '80s, with the Formica tables, mismatched chairs, refrigerators adorned with stickers of products that no longer exist. No harm, obviously, unless in the meantime the real places continue to close down at full speed: they cut down the trees and put them in the botanical garden for a fee.

Restaurants: the past that doesn't return

It's not, not entirely at least, the lament of an elder towards cultural appropriation; indeed, if it were so, we would be happy for the return of the past, but that's not the problem. The problem is, on one hand, that every vintage (from Facebook profiles with childhood photos to a culture made entirely of remakes) is primarily a manifestation of distrust towards the future: if I'm confident, I only look forward, like the early Lamborghinis (so much faith in the future!) that didn't have rearview mirrors. From above, too often the remake is worse than the original: the places obviously feel artificial and the dishes are generally well-made, not always, but without soul. Because that mixture of experience, use, mistakes, distortions, nostalgia that makes the past magical isn't easy to reproduce: you have to feel it.

There's not just the old trattoria

Reducing the past – the neighborhood trattoria that prepared the dishes of our memory, just a little better than our grandmothers did (grandfather in my case, my grandmother cooked terribly) – to the new format that sits between poke and Burmese cuisine is disrespectful to our history. Do you miss stracciatella? If you're a customer, go where they still make it, go there in numbers. If you're a professional, make a forward-thinking gesture and take over one of the many closing establishments, with a history and a soul, support the owner, learn from them, and send them into retirement content and happier, because not all is lost.
If you like the past so much, it's also because, at least at the table, often things were better.