Momo’s three lunches at Nino’s fast-food restaurant

Momo’s three lunches at Nino’s fast-food restaurant turn a hoped-for reunion into a lesson in estrangement: as she tries to locate Beppo and the children, the familiar inn has become a crowded, impersonal business, and the friend she finally reaches can offer neither time nor answers. The repeated meals give the scene its shape. Momo keeps returning to the counter because she still needs to know what happened, while each trip leaves her more isolated from the world she expected to find.

Hopeful Arrival at a Changed Inn

Towards noon the following day, Momo sets out with the Tortoise under her arm, hungry and buoyed by plans. She expects Nino to tell her where Guido and Beppo are; then she means to find the children, bring everyone together, and perhaps persuade Nino and his wife to join a party that evening. She is eager to tell her friends about the flowers, the music, and Professor Hora. As she walks, she checks that Guido’s letter remains in her jacket pocket, hums, and sings melodies whose voices still seem vivid from the day before.

That anticipation breaks when she reaches what she takes at first for the wrong place. The little tavern with damp-stained walls and a vine around its door has given way to a long concrete building with plate-glass windows. The street is now asphalt, busy with traffic; a petrol station and an enormous office building stand nearby. Cars crowd the establishment, whose neon sign reads NINO’S FASTFOOD. The familiar destination remains in name, but its surroundings announce a different city and a different kind of welcome.

The Queue and the First Meal

Inside, Momo struggles to understand the arrangement. Narrow, high tables stand on single legs, with no chairs; behind glass cases, people shuffle along a barrier, taking plates, bottles, and cardboard cups as they pass. At first she thinks the food may be free, since nobody appears to stop the customers or ask them to pay. Only when she spots Nino at the far end of the cases does she understand: he is behind a cash register, pressing buttons, taking money, and making change without pause. The barrier channels customers past him on their way to the tables.

Momo calls to him and waves Guido’s letter, but the register’s beeping drowns her out. She climbs over the rail and works her way along the line; when Nino sees her, his glum expression vanishes. Yet the crowd soon pushes her away from the counter. She carries her tray to a table and finds herself nearly level with its top. The grown-ups beside her look at the Tortoise with disgust and complain about children. Momo can scarcely see what is on her tray, but she is so hungry that she eats every morsel. The meal is a practical necessity; it does not bring her closer to the answers she came for.

Two More Attempts to Find Out

Anxious to learn what became of Beppo, Momo joins the line again, although she is no longer hungry. She fills another tray rather than risk hostile remarks by standing there without food. At the counter she asks where Beppo is. Nino, hurried and afraid of upsetting the waiting customers, says Beppo had waited for her for ages and feared that something terrible had happened. He had kept talking about men in gray, Nino adds, dismissing the concern as one of Beppo’s eccentricities. The report establishes that Beppo was looking for Momo and worried about her, even as Nino brushes aside the warning that occupied him.

Momo is pushed along again and eats a second meal, this time with much less appetite. Still, she has not learned what happened to the children who used to keep her company. She goes through the queue once more, loading her tray with food to avoid attracting angry attention, and asks Nino what has become of them. He says everything has changed and that he cannot explain while he is so rushed. When Momo presses him on why the children no longer come, he again defers the question. His busy counter is not merely an obstacle to conversation: its constant transactions determine when, and how briefly, he can respond to someone who needs more than a meal.

The Third Lunch and the Unanswered Departure

Nino finally tells Momo to come back another time and says she is welcome to eat there whenever she likes. But his advice is to report to one of the child depots, where she would be looked after, kept occupied, and given what he calls a proper education. He adds that she will end up in one anyway if she continues wandering around alone. The offer casts Momo’s independence as a problem to be managed, while leaving unexplained the very change she is asking about: why her young friends have disappeared from the inn.

Momo says nothing. Swept along by the crowd, she mechanically takes a place at a table and forces herself to eat a third lunch. Now the food tastes to her like cardboard and wood shavings, and she feels sick. The progression from hunger to reluctant eating to physical revulsion makes the repeated meal a measure of how completely the visit has failed her: food is available, but companionship and explanation are not. She tucks the Tortoise under her arm and walks silently to the door without looking back. Only at the last moment does Nino call after her, asking where she has been all this time. His question arrives as she is leaving, after she has spent three meals trying to ask her own.