The other day I was at South Beach walking down Lincoln Road when I was stopped by a middle-aged woman with a stack of flyers in her hand. She started speaking to me in what I immediately assumed would be Spanish, until I realized she was speaking English, but with a very heavy Italian accent. She asked me to visit her restaurant, handing me the flyer. My friend asked for one as well but the woman shook her head and said"one per table." I asked what they were for and she said for a free pizza, any on the menu. So my friend and I headed there for lunch.
I was expecting a humble, work-in-progress restaurant with paper covers on the tables and plastic silverware, with maybe a store in the back for some extra cash. What I got was nothing of the sort, as we walked inside a gust of A/C greeted us, the freshly waxed linoleum floor reflecting our feet as our sandy flip-flops squeaked on the hard tile.
The idea of the restaurant being a small-scale example of Miami's reality vs. spectacle didn't occur to me until I checked out the menu. They had the most ridiculous types of pizza that I had never heard of before in my life. One in particular caught my eye: Istanbul pizza. My family being Turkish, I had the great idea to try out this pizza; being free and all, there was nothing to lose.
The reality was, however, that the ingredients of the pizza were simply dried tomato slices, mozzarella cheese, and some leafy green vegetable I had never heard of before in my life. There was absolutely nothing Turkish about the pizza. In fact, I don't think it could be claimed to be in any cultural food category. When I saw the pizza, it dawned on me that they claimed these pizzas to be inspired by cuisine from all over the world, but in reality they simply used quirky combinations of random ingredients to make an otherwise perfectly normal meal into a "special" kind of food, claiming a new look and flavor that was supposedly developed right in the kitchens of Europe! Although I must admit I did fall for the spectacle, I'm happy it didn't cost me a penny.
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