A lot of people have asked me
about the food in Italy. “Was the food
great?” Speaking from my own experience
I’d have to say: not really.
What I ate the most of were
ham and cheese sandwiches – un panino al
fromaggio e proscutto – the best I could do in the way of portable snacks
for when hunger struck at inconvenient times.
But these were not on our kind of bread; the ham and cheese (and
sometimes lettuce) are in a kind of pocket, long and narrow, and crispy,
especially if the vendors pop it into some kind of a toasting machine, which
they usually do unless you stop them.
Really not bad.
I’ve already mentioned the
excellent dinner several of us had at Anima
Bella, our first night in Venice (See
Note of June 2, 2013), and the mediocre meal we had our second night, at Al Giglio,
in the Campo Santa Maria Zobenigo (Note
of June 17, 2013). And by the way, I
didn’t stay for the main course, as I slipped out and went to the concert, but
Pat told me the beef steaks that most people ordered – rather than the fried calamari
– were tough. The place gets mixed
reviews on TripAdvisor. But the lunch
Pat and I had in Florence, when we were all set loose for an hour and a half,
after visiting the outside of the
Duomo and the Baptistry, was one of the best, and most Italian meals I had while in
Italy.
This was in one of several small restaurants (and many small shops) that rim the large Piazza di Santa
Croce, at the far end of which is another beautiful church, the Basilica of
Saint Croce, which we were to visit later.
But right now—after pointing us in the direction of a large leather and
gold goods market (like the glassblower’s shop in Venice, and the souvenir shop
we were steered to after visiting the Vatican, there was always someplace that
you suspected had an “arrangement” with Perillo Tours) – Gianni encouraged us
to have lunch somewhere around the square.
Pat and I settled on the Ristorante
Boccadama, a rustic looking little place with a long narrow front room,
that held a few tables for one person, a bar at the back, and around the corner
a long, narrow dining area, with two small tables pushed together on either
side of a central aisle. We were seated
at a table with two men next to us – whom I fairly quickly ascertained were a
middle-aged American, trying to both get to know and charm his younger – though
not young – potential playmate. But as in all such seating situations, the
two sets of strangers maintained an invisible curtain between them, so as to
preserve a sense of privacy. And next to
us was a whole wall of bottles of wine.
What I ordered was the Tuscan
sausage dish, and it was out of this world delicious. A huge coiled rope of sausage on top of beans
in a tomato sauce. There was so much, I
offered some to Arthur, one of our fellow Perillo Tourists, who was sitting
across the aisle with his wife Madelyn and his sister-in-law. These three had become to a certain extent
Pat’s best friends – she always tended to sit with them, in dining situations
(whereas I tried to mix more, sitting with different groups each time), and to
walk with them as we were “touring” especially when I had done one of my
disappearing acts. Arthur and Madelyn
sort of fascinated me because they were both retired from the IRS. I mean, how often do you meet someone who has
worked for the IRS, never mind a married couple that has worked for the IRS?
Anyway,
Arthur had ordered pasta, and as usual it was this huge mound, with nothing but
tomato sauce, so he was delighted to be able to add some sausage to it. And after I got back home, and checked
TripAdvisor, I found that this little restaurant that Pat and I just wandered
into, gets universal rave reviews, with many people saying what I did: best
meal I had in Italy.
We also had dinner at two of
the hotels where we stayed. At the Grand
Hotel Villa Medici, there in Florence, the antipasto (what we would call the appetizer)
was this very tasty, unusual little pale green mound of who knows what. It
looked like it should be sweet but was actually delicately herbed. Then came
the pasta dish – lovely little squares of ravioli, stuffed with ricotta cheese,
and covered with a fine, thin sauce. My idea of of a manageable pasta course.
But then
came the main course (which Rick Steves, in his travel guide, says is
almost always a disappointment), and while they called it veal, it neither looked nor tasted like veal, nor was it
as tender as you expect veal to be. What
it looked like was a thick slice of rare roast beef. The little joke I made (that
did get a little laugh) was that I suspected this wasn’t young calf, but
adolescent cow. It reminded me of
ordering veal in Greece, where it always
looks more like pot roast.
The final blow was that
dessert was vanilla ice cream. Vanilla
ice cream! How pedestrian.
Our dinner at the Rose Garden
Palace Hotel in Rome was of a similar caliber. My main course of fish was quite
tasty, but not noticeably Italian. And there was the usual impossible pile of
pasta.
Perhaps the best aspect of both of these meals were the plentiful
bottles of red and white wine, and carafes of water, on all the tables
Of course, it could be argued
that one rarely gets really spectacular meals at hotels, even first class ones
(Pat and I stayed at the very expensive Boston Harbor Hotel, the night before
we flew to Italy, and were quite disappointed in our dinner). We did have a very good dinner our last night
in Rome, when we were taken to a small restaurant, called all Arco di S. Calisto, deep in an area of very narrow lanes full
of restaurants and artsy-craftsy shops, the Trastevere. Another long, narrow room, where tables were
pushed together to accommodate us all.
One thing I really liked was that they put a huge bowl of excellent salad
– all kinds of good stuff in it – at the end of each table, for us to “pass
down” as needed. Once again there was
too much pasta – if you don’t like spaghetti with tomato sauce you should
probably steer clear of Italy – but the fish I ordered was quite good. Again, not noticeably Italian. But perhaps I just
don’t know what to expect in Italian cooking.
Except, now that I’ve been there…pasta.
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