Boiardi

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a kitchen: pans, a spoon on a pot rim, Italian chatter)
Ettore. His name was Ettore.

[Verse 1]
He came over at sixteen and he went straight to the line,
worked the Plaza in New York, and he worked it very fine,
then the Greenbrier, then his own place — Il Giardino d'Italia,
Cleveland, Ohio, and the customers would badger
him for jars of the sauce to take on home,
so he filled up old milk bottles. That's how the whole thing goes.

[Chorus]
Boiardi! Boiardi! That is how you say it!
B-O-I-A-R-D-I, and every letter's paid for!
But the Americans can't say it and the Americans won't learn,
so he spelled it how they'd hear it and he watched his own name turn
into BOY-AR-DEE on a can with his face —
he sounded himself out for them. He did it on purpose. He chose it.

[Verse 2]
Now that's a small surrender and it's also very shrewd,
and I don't know which it was, and I don't think he'd have told you.
He got rich. He fed the army — Italian rations in the war,
he ran the plant round the clock, he got a citation for it.
He was a serious chef with a serious hand
and a cartoon of himself on a can in every land.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Here's the part that stays with me: the face on there is HIM.
Not a model, not a drawing of a man who never lived —
that moustache was his moustache, that toque sat on his head.
He is the most seen Italian chef who ever lived, and yet
nobody knows he cooked. Nobody knows he ran a floor.
They think he's a mascot. He held a Michelin-grade door.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(a pot lid settling)
Ettore Boiardi.
Say it right. Just once. Say it right.