An ode to Henry Hill, my favourite film foodie
don't let the sauce stick.
This is an annoying chorus to add my voice to, but Goodfellas really is that girl. It’s one of the movies that lives so deep in my marrow that I get random frames of it stuck in my head. I don’t have cable, but if I did, I’d watch Goodfellas from whatever point I found it playing, any time I found it playing. I could talk your ear off about literally any aspect of this movie; today, I’m talking about the one thing protagonist Henry Hill loved almost as much as he loved himself—food.
Just like his on-screen successor, Tony Soprano, food is intimately tied to a lot of formative moments in Henry’s life. The first time he sees someone shot even happens while he’s working at Tuddy Cicero’s pizzeria. (He “wastes eight fucking aprons” trying to staunch the man’s bleeding.) Decades later, when he and his best friends have to dig up and relocate the body of a man they murdered several months ago, said friends torment him by comparing the decomposing body parts to fried peppers and sausage until he pukes. Such an egregious perversion of Henry’s most beloved pastime!
On his first proper date with his luminous future wife Karen, Henry’s big dick move is to take her past the line and through the kitchen of his favourite restaurant, where the host magics up a table right in front of the stage for the two of them. (There’s a reason that this is one of the most famous one-shots in history. It’s totally exhilarating.)
When Henry is incarcerated, roughly his entire recounting of the experience is about the food he and his friends cook. That food includes medium-rare steaks that smoke up the whole joint, garlic sliced so thin with a razor that it would liquefy in the pan, and an obscenely decadent Sunday gravy with beef, pork, and veal in the meatballs.
But my absolute favourite foodie moment for Henry comes when he spends a frantic, coke-fueled day running various family and “family” errands while wondering whether he’s being followed by a helicopter. (He is. Oops.) Even as he’s racing back and forth across town and growing increasingly paranoid, Henry stays fixating on the dinner he’s planning for his brother. Just so you understand how much cocaine he’s on, here’s the menu:
ziti with gravy
including braised beef, pork butt, and veal shanks, bah gawd
flame-roasted peppers
string beans with olive oil and garlic
beautiful cutlets that were cut up just right, that he was going to fry up “just as an appetizer”
This is a Bob’s Burgers Thanksgiving dinner level of ambition here. Especially considering he won’t let anyone else do more than stir the sauce to keep it from sticking, even though he’s barely home all day.
It also feels like a fitting last dinner before Henry’s entire world caves in and he turns federal informant before joining witness protection. And of course, the crowning ignominy of his newly anonymous, clout-free life: “You can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here, I ordered spaghetti with marinara sauce, and I got egg noodles and ketchup.”
So here’s to Henry Hill, a charming narcissist who wound up in the foodie hell of his own making. And may we all learn a valuable lesson from him this holiday season: whether menu-planning or substance-using, don’t overdo it.
Not food related but I recently learned that My Blue Heaven (with Steve Martin and Rick Moranis) is also connected to Henry Hill. Nora Ephron was married to Nicholas Pileggi and she would talk to Henry Hill when her husband wasn’t available. She wrote down his stories of being in witness protection.