Chi Vapiano va sano e va lontano

Far from me to advertise something or someone.

However I think few words and considerations should be spent on 'Vapiano'.

This time I won't examine the quality of the food prepared at their premises.
It will be enough to say that I am a regular customer there since they have opened.

I won't see the things from the viewpoint of the success this business has been having. It suffices to notice that a second restaurant was opened in the city center.

What it does interest me is the main concept underlying its organization and vision that has led them to a successful food business(pardon my ‘business French’, I won’t do it anymore).

You wouldn't consider that behind an apparently simple self-service restaurant you could find a lot of cultural and cross-cultural indications. But you do.

The process of internalization of what 'Vapiano' represents for me has been slow.

I didn't draw any conclusions after 2 or 3 visits.
You just start to be pleased by the fact that you can taste a decent pizza margherita and get a 40 EEK change from your koidula banknote.
Elsewhere you have to surrender the entire poetess' portrait with just an eager smile in exchange.
They are happy to have made your trip back home 'lighter', that's why they smile at you!

After the tenth time you already feel at home.
''I go to eat to Vapiano'' it's like saying I'm gonna have an extra-care for myself as much as going to Mamma's place for an excellent mouth-watering treat.

After a year you have already tasted all the types of pasta and pizza available, sat on each type of table and got familiar with all the chefs.
If you are not Italian, you have also learnt that 'makaroni' is not the right way to address pasta without any distinction among its various types.

Then it comes the time to draw conclusions: why I have been attending this place for so long and why I will keep on doing?

What's beyond the food, the affordable prices and the unpretentious atmosphere of the place?

Customers are various: managers on the run, youngsters, shopping babes, group of friends, airline crews on lay-over, well-off's and not.
What is the common line drawing them together?
Of course I will not mention my country-fellows having almost made it their own home, it's a quite predictable topic. ''Mangiamo da Vapiano?'', let's eat in Vapiano, it's a favorite hit.

There’s no service in Vapiano.

This sentence does not account for ‘the service is bad’.
Usually the latter is the most spread judgment you could hear in Tallinn about a restaurant, good food but the service is bad.
When it’s both, you’ve been probably robbed.

It’s notorious that Estonia is not a service-oriented country.

Wherever you go (shop, restaurant or bar) the sweetest welcome you can receive it’s indifference, the warmest is a grunt.
Usually I prefer the first if compelled to choose.

To be honest things have improved a lot in 5 years.
However if you read on a glass window a head-hunting ad for sales people saying: ‘’we want smiles not sad people’’, probably there’s still a lot to be done.

If Vapiano is successful among many is because there are no waiters or waitresses.

No service, no embarrassment for bad service.

You order and pick up your food yourself at the chef’s counter.
It won’t matter if the chef is not that talkative or smiling.
Cooking is a mission, you cannot waste time in pleasantries. His dry manners are a guarantee your food is well prepared.

After all the guy is doing his job well, and that’s enough. He is also warning you against the perils of ordering a calzone rather than a caprese.

Of course he is right in doing so.

Being asked such a question, sounded like an insult to me:''hey, I am Italian! I know what they are!'' But evidently there have been many delusions in discovering that a calzone is a closed pizza (all the dressing is inside at 100*C) and caprese is listed under ‘salads’ but it is not a salad rather a delicacy for slow food connoisseurs (mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, oil and pepper and that’s it, you cannot beat frugality).

It should also be highlighted an important feature of ‘Vapiano’ that many either ignore or don’t know.

‘Vapiano’ is a German born chain of restaurants.

I know it sounds like saying that I was born in Sicily and my mother is blonde with blue eyes.

However, amazement apart, both statements account as true.

Vapiano is not the umpteenth invention of an Italian immigrate to Estonia who recycled himself as a caterer in order not to leave the country and continue enjoying the company of local bimbos.

Vapiano is a German creation which has been spreading through Europe and else (it accounts also one restaurant in Brisbane, Australia).

If someone had told me 4 years ago about this chain, I would have probably rolled down on the floor and laughed: how can possibly the Germans try even to think to compete with our mastery of the Italian cuisine?!? And, the worst of it, spread it through the World without our consent???

We have never tried to compete with them in beer brewery, didn’t we?
FIAT cars cannot account as a credible commercial rival for the German panzer-cars flashing past in Tallinn city center, can they?

''Please leave us the food at least!'', some Italian caterer would scream begging on his knees.

Germans are merciless though.

Vapiano is a striking example of how Italy would work perfectly if the organization of the state (say government) would be handled by Germans and the preparation of food left to Italians.

German organization and Italian food.

They have understood the perfect match to conquer the world and create a model of efficiency and taste at the same time.

In order the model to work, compromise on respective pride must be mutual.

Germans have acknowledged the Italian superiority in matter of food.
That is why no wurstel und kraut are served in Vapiano.

But at the same time Italians will have to come to terms with the fact that Germans can organize things better. Which they haven’t, as of today and according to my knowledge of the corporate, no Italian business partner is involved in Vapiano.

Fair enough.
Germans have accepted that their food sucks and kept the organization for themselves without asking anyone to give them a grant.
It’s enough for me.
A win-win deal, my school director would baptize it.

Germans are also quite intelligent.
They don’t sell ice to Eskimos.

This is the reason why they never dared to even think to open a Vapiano in Italy.

How can you compete with the gigantic army of ‘pizzerie’ scattered around every corner of the Italian cities, towns, villages and little boroughs?
They know that no Gothic Line would save them this time either.

The lesson is easy.

You cannot open a big food chain on the Belpaese soil without ‘paying duty’ to the local businesses and food traditions and eventually go bankrupt. Ask McDonalds who branded a new chain more suitable for our difficult taste: McItaly.

Centuries of food traditions have managed to curb the Americanization of our food habits without need of making a movie out of it whose title should have been ‘Italianize me’.

The Italian food resistance is too fierce and strong even for the persistent Germans.

I don’t know if the Russian couple sitting in the table in front of me and eating leaves from one of the basil plants on display on each table of Vapiano ever reached such conclusions.

They just probably grabbed the plant away to finish it at home.