A feast

Having once been fooled or, rather, been naive enough to believe reviews on TripAdvisor, I've become leery about hotel and restaurant recommendations - except in person, that is. Let me say, before I continue, that only once did I feel we ate badly in Italy and that probably was because we were too tired after a night flight and a walk around Rome to take a taxi on a wet night to a recommended restaurant. We stayed in the neighborhood of the hotel and ate, not actually badly, but certainly gracelessly in a room reserved, it appeared, for tourists who did not speak Italian. And therein, not speaking the language of the country one visits, lies the essence of the problem.

Assuming, as I must, that you and I are of like mind, let me say that we all have a list of places we want to visit; the architectural icons, repositories of history and culture, that frequently play a role as signifiers of quality in advertising, serve as identifiers of location in movies and television drama - for which film star has not been involved in a car-chase by the Ponte Vecchio, the Duomo, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, Houses of Parliament, depending on the need for local color in what are increasingly homogeneous cityscapes?

In most cases, modern guide books and travel magazines serve us well, but my skepticism is awakened when I read recommendations especially of those secret, known-only-to-the-writer, small off-the-beaten-path restaurants serving gobsmacking food from a kitchen the size of a closet, furnished with a miniscule stove and staffed by a man who learned to cook at at the knee of nonna - a woman who used no recognizable means of measuring - and whose wine is always local if not from his own vineyard. The world is too small for this or that best kept secret and probably if somewhere has been unknown for so long there is a good reason. Anyway, best kept secret really just means now being marketed.

Of course, it's the language of persuasion: the use of superlatives; the implication that if one goes to these places; is able to get a reservation; eats this ineffable food, one becomes a member of a select band of great refinement, and, latterly, is able to have yet another set of photographs for Facebook.

But what of food - that purely late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century reason for being a tourist? Before this vacation, our experience of Italian was limited. Not that we subscribe to the tomato-saturated pasta, greasy garlic bread and overdressed salad - staples of chain restaurants that rely heavily on family and friendship in creating their image. No, we are blessed with two, to my mind, excellent Italian restaurant restaurants here in Atlanta, which coincidentally are my favorite places to dine.

Last Friday, not a week after we came home, we ate at one of them and during that meal mulled over what I had eaten in Italy compared with what was on the plate before me. In one of the two local restaurants, Pricci, I usually eat fettucini alfredo with a dusting of nutmeg and, in the other, Veni Vedi Vici, spinach gnocchi with gorgonzola, speck and cream. I worked out a long time ago - and I recognize this might be considered picky eating or even a lack of curiosity - that when you find a dish to your taste, stick with it: a situation that cannot obtain in a city unknown to one, and nor should it. If either fettucini alfredo or gnocchi were on the menus in Rome, Florence and Venice, I have no recollection, for we were at pains to eat local, as it were.

On the subject of breakfasts, let me say that they were of superb quality, varied, and more than ample. Coffee, for that is my choice at breakfast, was of two sorts - the delicious smear of dark brown liquid with crema, or what is known, tragically in my opinion, as caffè Americano - the Italian version of the swill available in any gas station or restaurant in this country. What a pity that such a thin, stewed, brown liquid should be called American!

In Florence we ate very well, as we did in Rome and Venice. Breakfast at the Hotel Savoy was perfect and sufficient to keep us going through long cold days of walking until late afternoon when a chilled Manhattan served with aperitivi - delicious tapas-like snacks that accompany every drink - sustained us for our walk to dinner.

When we arrived at La Pentola d'Oro, we were shown to a basement room of white-clothed tables. We asked instead to sit upstairs in the main room by the door, on wooden stools at bare tables where it seemed to me, locals - and so it proved - were more likely to eat. Pappardelle alla lepre, wide noodles in hare sauce, were perfect for the Celt and surprisingly good to me. But, oddly, I'm not sure what I ate though I clearly remember telling the waitress, and meaning it, that it was one of the best things I'd ever eaten. I suspect what I ate was il pepos del Brunelleschi, beef in red wine, but mostly I remember the smiling face of a young baby lying quietly by her parents and who seemed to be so happy to see me.

Cibrèo, highly recommended, was disconcerting at first and my heart sank when we were told that someone would come to the table and explain what that evening's menu was. Perhaps Cibrèo is aimed at tourists, as I surely felt it was, but it turned out it didn't mean the food was unconsidered or the experience poor. In fact it was excellent. After the manager sat at our table and explained in perfect English that the restaurant specialized in game - the mention of roast pigeon made the Celt's eyes light up - I had the distinct feeling I was in the wrong place. The Celt, indeed, chose roast pigeon stuffed with fruits in mustard (marvelous combination) whereas I went for what I thought was a fish stew. Fish it was, if squid are fish, and stew it was if squid cooked slowly with spinach for hours make it a stew. What arrived at my side of the table was unprepossessing - a bowlful of dark green sludge that at first I couldn't even consider dipping a fork into it. I tried it, declared I was unable to eat it. The Celt, who had just begun dissecting the pigeon with all the delicacy of a surgeon, murmured sympathetically, and I being the big boy I am, speared a tiny amount on the tip of one tine, then another and another and another until, three or four minutes after announcing I couldn't possibly eat this damned muck, I was wolfing it down.

Walk we did, as in Rome, seemingly all over the city, but really within quite a small area, for the centro storico of Florence is not big. Brunelleschi's Pazzi chapel, part of the church of Santa Croce, where Michaelangelo, Galileo, and Ghiberti are buried, and the ruined Cimabue crucifix hangs, is a beautiful and subtle feast for the eyes - its interior as empty and as beautiful as the grey skies above it. The chapel, it struck me as I shivered my way around it, does not have the grand scale some textbook photographs have implied. It also occurred to me that as a tourist one needs balmier days and more supportive shoes if one is to do the job properly.

The perfect pre-prandial to get used to the idea of getting out in the cold again. With the aperitivi.

A fellow guest. Probably not a local.

Photo of the Basilica di Santa Croce from here. All other photos by the Celt.

Vin chaud and white lights

It's three in the morning and here I sit, glass of hot vin chaud - the spiced and brandied red wine I made earlier this evening to have with leftover boeuf bourguignon, and it finally hits me that after a more than a week of visitors, Christmas parties, finals, grading, faculty meetings, and yet one more party to come, that it is only eleven days before we set off on our winter vacation. Normally, we would take the winter vacation in New York but this year we going to Rome, a city neither of us has been to. Florence is on the itinerary as is New Year in Venice. Of all the buildings I'm going to see, Bramante's Tempietto is the one I'm most most looking forward to.

Christmas, in its own way, a festival of lights, when in the short, dark days of the northern midwinter fires were lit not only against the cold, holly and mistletoe, the greenery of the old gods, hung above doors and windows, and trees ornamented with candles. One of my most clear memories of childhood Christmases is of a card printed with a snowy coaching scene that because of its metal foil surface and a shred of embossing glinted magically in the light of the fire. The magic of that glint, the glow of fire in a dark room, the blue shadows beyond the slab of light from a window thrown across snow, has never left me. Last night at our condo holiday party the major decorations were large glass vases filled white lights and white twigs from which hung many icicles - to me the most glamouring of combinations, frost and fire. It's good sometimes to snatch a few seconds, just to appreciate how light in the dark is so essential and elemental a condition.

When, last weekend, I asked the Celt what we might serve for his sister-in-law's last-night-with-us dinner with friends he immediately said boeuf bourguignon, gratin dauphinoise and roasted asparagus with a bought-in fruit tart to follow - suggesting he'd hitherto given it a tad more thought than had I. Boeuf bourguignon it was but the odd thing is I realized I'd never made it before. I'd made the Flemish version of beef in beer, slowly stewed beef with prunes and red wine, even stroganoffed filet (the "t" is not silent in this household) with sour cream and mushrooms - in fact over the years I'd stewed a lot of beef but had never done the classic, Julia Child popularized, blogged-about and movie-starred boeuf bourguignon. Well, I made it and I can tell you honestly it was a total disappointment - until, that is, on reheating two days later and with the last minute addition of buttered mushrooms and pearl onions, it had evolved into the most salubrious of casseroles. There's a morsel, perhaps not served well by a second and third reheating, left for lunch tomorrow.

As to gratin dauphinoise, and this is where I recognize the irony of taking anti-cholesterol medication, I like it simple - well-seasoned, thinly-sliced potatoes, layered with cream and lots of garlic (none of the rub the dish with garlic nonsense) and slowly, slowly baked. Simple, subtle, and salacious.


I shall resume posts about connections, circles within circles, next week.