There's a type of unearned pride that comes with watching your buddies do well, but it carries some anxiety with it. Of course we were happy that Rohan Nadkarni, our frequent guest and lunch correspondent, was doing such good work for NBC's Sports Desk newsletter from the Milan Cortina Olympics; of course things like him interviewing Alysa Liu gave us that feeling of accomplishment by association. But there was also a whisper of concern that wouldn't go away, the small voice in my head asking, "But is he eating okay over there?" Well, I have some good news:
Rest assured that we do "get to that," but Rohan's return to the podcast after five excruciating weeks away also coincided with a very Rohan-specific turn in current sports news. And so, before we got to the carbohydrate content, we talked about Bam Adebayo's sublimely preposterous 83-point game and the noise surrounding it, how getting stunted on this hard might or might not help fix tanking, and the ways in which the NBA could but probably will not actually improve its product. The Kobe Discourse is considered; I briefly digress about Michael Porter Jr. speaking on these females. It's still a Rohan episode, but we were able to stay on topic for a while.
And I suppose, given all that, "How did Rohan eat in Italy?" more or less qualifies as on topic. Our guy was not really feeling the Milanese foodway, and work meant that there were more room-service club sandwiches than hoped, but he got to experience the thing that blew my mind the most about eating in Italy, which is how incredibly high the floor is for basically everything you eat. For him, that meant lights-out focaccia in the media lounge, being wowed by the spreads on All'Antico Vinaio's sandwiches (now available in the United States!), and eating a sandwich so good and so sizable that he could only, and this a quote, "sit making a low groan."
It would have been irresponsible to talk about all the lunches Rohan ate in Italy without also talking about the work that brought him there. It turns out that covering the Olympics was both a lot of work and pretty transcendent. Rohan spoke about getting his brain rewired by covering live figure-skating events, how stressful it is to watch high-level athletics on ice, and how immune Alysa Liu seemed to that stress. The kebab incident that gave this episode its title, and this blog its headline, is addressed somewhat later in the episode, but the two are related. Quite literally, we could not have had one without the other.
Before we got to the Funbag, we sped through some other stuff. I celebrated Team USA losing to Italy in the World Baseball Classic for the funniest of reasons and the general thrill of Italian-American Excellence triumphing over Default American stuff; Rohan gave his coveted seal of approval to the Dolphins signing Malik Willis; we all discussed the breakthrough experience of catching a minor buzz as a child after eating some liquor-filled chocolates. After all that, the surprisingly heated debate that followed a Funbag question about whether orchestra conductor is "a real job" was almost anticlimactic. But it might be more accurate to think of it as a petit four or palate-cleansing mint after a typically eclectic feast prepare by one of our great podcast guests. On the pod as in Italy, Rohan ate.
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