The Flying Espresso in Martina Franca

Welcome to the second installment of The Blooper Reel, my series exposing the chaos, missed turns, and culinary drama behind The Great Italian Road Trip. Today, we head to Martina Franca, a grand, Baroque jewel box perched high in the Itria Valley, where ornate palazzi tower over narrow, polished white pedestrian alleys.

On our last night on the Adriatic side of Italy (or what I now call “Grandpa’s Side”) before heading further south, our host Bruno kindly made us a reservation at Trattoria Ai Portici. Centrally located in the hilltop town’s circular piazza, Bruno secured us front-row seats facing the action of meandering Saturday night strollers, bustling boutiques, a street musician, and a drunk guy taking selfies with him.

Dressed in our Saturday night best, with me in bold summer colors and Aurélien wearing my grandfather’s cream-colored summer knit from the 1960s, we joined the tourists and locals for one last evening in the Itria Valley.

Our golden rule for dining out was to order at least one item we knew nothing about. We’d had horse steak, olive-flavored gelato, octopus sandwiches, peach pizza, and dark chocolate tortellini, so when we saw le bombette, we ordered it blind, knowing we’d either love it or call it “interesting.” What arrived was essentially a savory pork popsicle, round, juicy parcels pierced on a stick that lived up to their name as “little bombs” bursting with flavor, making it a winning blind pick.

Over a shared pizza, we regaled each other with stories from the first leg of our trip as dinner wandered into dessert. The evening took several eventful turns, starting when an ambulance pulled right up to the patio to wheel out an elderly man on a stretcher. Shortly after, a selfie-snapping drunk man was shooed away by annoyed servers in a scene so tense we actually thought punches were going to get thrown. No one, by the way, seemed fazed by any of this, except for me, as I let out a hearty Long Island, “Oh my God!” And then, just when we thought we’d seen all the action for the night, walking past with his family was Bruno!

Bruno’s name, my family had decided, inherently requires an exclamation mark. Over the course of the week, we’d taken a liking to this lively kind of guy who’d show up bursting from the olive trees in his white shorts and his very tanned legs to check in on us. Earlier that week, he had entertained us with tales of his travels, including how he was scandalized at a restaurant in the South Bronx called Luigi’s, where no one spoke Italian and pasta was served as a side dish.

“What is this afterthought of pasta?” he had cried out, fingers pinched in classic Italian hand-gestured outrage. “In Italy, pasta is not a side dish.” His eyes glazed over for a moment, looking off as if seeing the memory. “It upset me deeply,” he said quietly. I nodded my head in recognition that pasta was indeed not a side dish, and on behalf of all Italian-New Yorkers, I apologized.

Bruno was such a man on the go, wheelin’ and dealin’, movin’ and shakin’, that we’d usually only get a few brief moments of Bruno time before he was off again. So when we saw him walking past our restaurant, simply because it was Bruno, and because we knew virtually no one else in the country, seeing him triggered absolute Elvis Presley-style hysteria. Unfortunately, that peak moment of excitement coincided precisely with me handing Aurélien his espresso.

In an instant, the hot cup took flight, splashing onto my grandfather’s 1960s cream sweater and turning the watermelon we’d ordered a murky brown. A collective gasp echoed from nearby tables, a reaction I couldn't help but laugh at, because a man being wheeled away on a stretcher or a near-fistfight in the town square barely raised an eyebrow. But coffee on vintage wool? Well, that was the line in the sand as far as reactions go.

Bruno strolled over, completely unbothered by the airborne caffeine, and launched into cheerful conversation while Aurélien sat there dripping in espresso. As we thanked him for the reservation, Bruno introduced us to his children. Meanwhile, two servers rushed over clutching stain remover and a laundry brush, frantically shouting instructions at me in rapid Italian. I began to lightly scrub the wool, which only ignited more panic from the staff. “Dopo! Dopo!” they yelled, gesturing wildly. After! Brush it after! Once again, the frantic hand gestures saved the day, and I began applying the stain remover first.

Bruno eventually bid us ciao, leaving me spraying Aurélien with the product under the wide-eyed, anxious gaze of the waitstaff, whose expressions told me it was a lost cause.

“I have to take it off and soak it right now,” Aurélien declared, staring down at the disaster. “Otherwise the sweater is ruined forever.”

This was a sweater my grandmother gave Aurélien after my grandfather died, saying he’d look “smashing” in it, so losing it was not an option.

“Do you have a shirt on underneath?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

Scanning the piazza, I spotted a boutique glowing across the crowded cobblestones. I told him to sit tight while I went on a rescue mission for a shirt. With Georges following along, we popped into Pugliatutto, where a chic Italian woman in kitten heels welcomed us inside.

“Ciao!” she said brightly.

I was immediately taken by this artisan haven filled with hand-painted canvas pouches, linen totes, and straw fedoras styled with regional motifs of figs, prickly pears, and taralli. There were watercolor illustrations of orecchiette, all paired with little sayings and catchphrases I had to imagine were witty to an Italian speaker. I didn’t know where to look first and, for a brief moment, completely forgot why I was there, utterly distracted by a cime di rapa t-shirt I knew I had to have.

But I quickly refocused. In frenzied, broken Italian, accompanied by wild pantomime, I explained that my husband was doused in coffee and that I needed a t-shirt.

“Che taglia?” she asked, understanding the dilemma.

“Medium,” I replied.

Sensing the emergency, she began flipping through shirts while murmuring, “No, no, forse, no...” Then she pulled out one that was absolute perfection, as if she’d been sitting with us at dinner.

“Eh?” she said, looking at me like this might be it.

And indeed it was. “Perfetto!” I clasped my hands in delight.

While I was on my fashion mission, Georges had wandered over near the register, making himself right at home on the floor alongside the owner’s young son. Chatting about video games, they bypassed the language barrier entirely, speaking in a mix of broken English, broken Italian, and universal gamer code.

I paid for the shirt, and Georges asked if he could stay behind to hang out with his new friend. (You have to love this age, right?) The owner gave me a warm smile and nodded that it was totally fine. I am not exactly celebrated for being this sort of laid-back mom, as I read way too much online and always picture a headline like “American Mother Loses Child in Store in Italy,” but everything about our exchange and the energy in the store felt completely safe. She introduced herself as Annalisa, and I introduced myself as Lisa. Piacere. An acquaintanceship was born.

Across the piazza, I hurried back to the restaurant and proudly handed Aurélien his new shirt, a crisp tee featuring a hand-painted illustration of a skewer of bombette.

“Ça alors,” he said, amazed that I’d managed to find a t-shirt with our exact dinner printed on it.

By now, the restaurant needed our table, which meant we would spend the next twenty minutes commandeering the basement bathroom as a makeshift laundromat. We soaked and then scrubbed the vintage sweater in the sink while a group of Italian teenagers—friends of the servers, perhaps?—hung out drinking soda at a table nearby, totally indifferent to the frantic foreign tourists doing laundry in a trattoria cellar.

We returned to Pugliatutto with Aurélien proudly sporting his new bombette shirt. Annalisa beamed, letting out an enthusiastic “Bellissimo!” before snapping this picture of us for the store’s Instagram stories.

Naturally, we ended up doing more shopping. I bought the cime di rapa tee for myself, and Annalisa directed us down the alley to her home goods shop, where we met her husband who is the artist, and knocked out our entire souvenir gift list for our family, friends, and the neighbors feeding our cat.

A spilled espresso on a vintage white sweater could have ruined the night. But in Puglia, it turned into an opportunity to connect, a basement laundry rescue, and the story of that time we met Annalisa, saw Bruno (!), and survived the flying espresso in Martina Franca.

Coming up next in The Blooper Reel of The Great Italian Road Trip: Just when we thought the flying espresso was our peak wardrobe disaster, a mystery meltdown inside my tote bag declared war in the scorching Pugliese heat. Tune in for Al Burro in Alberobello.