Follow-up to lovingly teasing banter between husband and wife/Porta Napoli pizzeria owners Sandra and Roger Cappucci:

Pause, then exchange of adoring smiles. Such a romantic past and present. There’s just one contention: the future.  Sandra dreams of Fiji, draped on a chaise in her open-air lagoon cottage. But Roger is sipping Sangiovese in his Tuscan villa, surveying his vineyards, rolling out dough.  Sandra considers, then makes a concession:  she’ll switch out the South Pacific for the Amalfi Coast.  “We’ll meet in the middle,” she says.  Roger beams at her, and once again, there are those smiles.

Larchmont’s Angela Ingrao cites two artistic influences: Marc Chagall and Uncle Herb. One wowed her, during family forays to the Metropolitan Opera, with paint, the other at her kitchen table with paper.

“Uncle Herb was an art teacher and lived near us in Bronxville, so after school we’d do art projects,” she says. There were Calder-like mobiles and Mattissean cut-outs. “He inspired my artistic aesthetic, which plays into my chocolate making. I always loved working with my hands.”

We’re sitting in her confection of a confectionary, powder-pink walls enveloping sheaves of nut-stippled bark, peanut-butter cup domes and bonbons gold-flecked like fairy dust. Uncle Herb’s portrait gazes down upon it all.  “He passed away, but got to see the shop,” she says softly. “He was thrilled to have the portrait here.” But his influence extended past art.  He’d take her out for Chinese food, exotic to her family’s  traditional Italian fare. “He always pushed me to try new flavors; he opened my eyes.” She named a bark in his honor, as she does for cherished family and friends. His is gingerroot. It’s a top seller.

Friday came and a waiter led me into the kitchen. Two men stood at the stove, dark and compact, foreheads glistening. I greeted them and smiled broadly. They barely looked up. One, short and slight, had a navy bandanna tied around his head. The other, broader and cheek-stubbled, wore a silver hoop earring. I was in my school chef’s jacket and shined cook’s shoes, they were in denim and sneakers. “I’m Diane,” I ventured. “Did Gwen, uh, chef, tell you I’d be helping out on Fridays?” Bandanna shrugged and turned back to his saute. Stubble gestured to a rear alcove. “In there,” he said, the words freighted with Spanish. He glanced at me through narrowed eyes. “You cut vegetables?” “Sure,” I bubbled, showing the chef’s knife I had brought, “I practice all the time.” He hoisted a crate of carrots, then others of leeks, shallots and celery onto a steel counter and pointed to a bin of meticulous dice. “Good,” he said, and walked away.

Chef came in and brought out a tray of raw foie gras from the walk-in, showed me how to dress them into pristine lobes, then filleted a crate of  glistening seabass in a few sweeping strokes. I learned to place a sprig of chervil atop each filet, each at the same precise angle. I diced a mountain of vegetables and filled my bins. For a break, I got a broom and swept around the counters and the sneakers at the stove. I learned the salad cook’s name, Daniel, and Bandanna’s too: “Chico,” David answered when he came to collect my scraps for stock and I asked. The three of them were cousins from Puebla, he said. I told him that I lived blocks away, up on the hill. He said the three of them shared an apartment downtown Yonkers. He and Chico had worked in this kitchen six years, he said, and had just brought Daniel over. I told him I had a husband and two sons. He said they lived alone, without women. Chico had a baby daughter in Mexico.

I don’t remember how we arrived, after the hour-long subway ride, by foot or taxi. But there it was, a burgundy awning with ivory cursive letters above a revolving door two steps down from the sidewalk. We pushed the glass, and the night dissolved into luminous crystalline light, glinting silver, hushed talk and intoxicating smells in a windowless sliver of a room. It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. We were led along the narrow center aisle, a single row of tables on either side, past gold-coiffed ladies lifting heavy forks and heavier rings, and graying pinstriped men. But I was in my best suit with a boy that loved me, in a French restaurant in Manhattan, being led by a tuxedoed captain to my future: a red banquette against a gilt-mirrored wall.

Week 3 found us at Praiano’s Hotel Onde Verde, dangling high on an Amalfi cliff. Dinners were included in our room fee, and every night we’d snake our way along the cliffside path to the dining room, and every night, my boys would order the pasta with tomato meat sauce. Now understand, my sons are intrepid eaters, children’s-menuphobes from day one. “This sauce is better than yours,” they’d say, and tasting it, I had to agree. Not easily, though; I prided myself on my Bolognese, made once a week every week, the pot always scraped clean. My sauce was buttressed with garlic, oregano, red wine and beef, a wintry night’s sustenance. This sauce was spring: vivid scarlet, pristine and jaunty, with no hint of garlic. I wanted to own it.

Morning comes early to a river. Caws and warbles pierce the brush, ride the mist and fade beyond the next bend.  From our tent I see the white cattle egret peering downstream from his perch upon a stump; he’s been with us from the first. At shoreline, Ron casts to lounging fish dimpling the pool. But the palms are showing the first hint of sun, and breakfast must be eaten, camp broken, and the canoe loaded. Somewhere a woodpecker taps reveille and so I’m up, pulling on my boots and turning my thoughts to coffee and eggs.