“Damn, I love Fazoli’s! This was the raddest idea ever!” yelled Mike Miller, waving two complimentary breadsticks in the air like an aircraft marshaller. “Mama mia! Italy rules!”
Danilo Gallinari sat in a booth of the fast-food restaurant with several of his Nuggets teammates, a plate of fettuccine Alfredo untouched in front of him. A dour expression resided on his face. “I fail to see how a plate of pasta drowning in a watery cream sauce is at all a representation of the grandeur of Italian cuisine,” he said.
Danilo winced, but otherwise didn’t move, when Mike pelted his head with a breadstick. “Nobody said it was authentic, you dummy. You’re taking this way too seriously. We’re supposed to be celebrating your great game.”
“Yeah, you make Grizzlies into your bitch,” supplied Jusuf Nurkic through a mouthful of pepperoni pizza. “And now we honor culture of Italy by eating pastas. You are lucky; no Bosnian restaurants anywhere in America.” After supplying this commentary, he resumed his folding of a paper airplane out of the kid’s menu he had inexplicably ordered from.
“Hey, can we get some more Italiano cheesy-o breadsticks over here?” Mike yelled, trying to get the attention of the employee whose sole job was to walk around the restaurant with a basket of warm breadsticks and offer them to customers. “My friend over here just stole my last one.” With his supply replenished, Mike began to break the breadsticks into pieces and put them in his pockets. “They don’t give you takeout boxes for these things but I do this every time and they’ve never said anything,” he explained.
Danilo continued to look sullen. “I find that behavior to be rather rude. In Italy, food is to be savored at the table, not hoarded for later consumption.”
“Yo, Gallo, you gonna eat your fettuccine? I finished mine,” said Randy Foye, eyeing Danilo’s full plate with envy. His face and shirt were covered with white flecks of sauce. “I love Italian food so much.”
“You must have been too busy stuffing your face to hear what I said,” Danilo replied. “This Fazoli’s place is an insult to a food tradition that dates back a millennium.”
“Wow, who cares?” Randy said. “Just give me the pasta and it’ll shut me up for a while if you’re gonna get all offended.”
Mike suddenly pointed at a nearby booth. “Hey, Gallo, check out that hot chick over there. I bet she wants some of your special-recipe Italian sausage.”
Danilo grudgingly turned around in his seat. “Where? All I see is some fat lady inhaling a plate of spaghetti.” He visually scanned the entire restaurant to see if he was missing something.
“Yeah, her! Ask her if she needs any Italian sausage for her pasta!” Mike exclaimed, his voice getting uncomfortably loud before he exploded into peals of laughter.
“I think I’m going to leave now,” Danilo said angrily, standing up from the booth. “You guys are a bunch of children. And if you think this place has anything to do with Italy at all, you’re dumber than you look.”
Randy had not taken his eyes off Danilo’s plate of food. “Does that mean I can have…” But Danilo had already walked out the door.