This Boot Is Made for Eating
Try though he might, be it at cichetti bars, gelaterias, or even train stations or spot either old or new, Merrill Shindler couldn't locate a disappointing mouthful.
Posted: October 22, 2007
Let me get the nasty details out of the way first. The dollar is doing so badly against the euro that the cab ride to central Milan from Malpensa Airport cost a wallet rattling $110. The 20 minute water taxi ride from the Venice train station to St. Mark's Square was $90. (A deal—on Sunday, the cost goes over $100.) A cup of chocolate gelato across the street from the Sistine Chapel—just one scoop of chocolate gelato—went for $12. (Fool that I am, I added on a Diet Coke and a small mineral water. That brought the cost up to $28—The Last Judgment visited upon me in a small cafe.)
A simple lunch of salad and pasta for three regularly topped $100. Toss in an entrée for dinner, and the check passes $200. And yet, when it comes to those of us who love Italy—who regard Italy as Disneyland for grownups—the weak dollar just doesn't matter. The pleasure derived from a trip to Italy is so intense that money is irrelevant. You can always cut some stock coupons when you get home. The kids don't really need to go to private school. Two Buck Chuck will do for the nonce.
Conventional wisdom holds that you cannot eat badly in Italy. Conventional wisdom is right (unless, of course, you opt for a feed at McDonald's). Consider the remarkable quality of the food at the train stations in Milan, Florence, Venice, and Rome. While you wait for your train (and yes, they really do run on time, though whether that's thanks to Mussolini or not, I cannot say). It's possible that only Japan offers food as consistently good at its train stations as Italy.
Since we were traveling with our 8 year old daughter Sarah—and since my driving terrifies my wife at the best of times—I opted to take trains rather than rent a car. A very smart move, and a reasonably priced one. First-class tickets between Milan and Florence, Florence and Venice, and Venice and Rome cost between $60 and $80 a person, sometimes less with a pass from Rail Europe or Italia Rail, which is a real deal when you consider the cost of a tank of gas in Italy. And thanks to the food at the stations, you can pack quite a meal. And if you forget, there are still dining cars, where food is served both hot and cold. And since this is Italy, even the food on the trains is worth eating.
But it's the food at the train terminals that can make the trip a real pleasure. The stations offer food courts that put those in most airports to shame (though admittedly, that's a bit of a back-handed compliment). There's a pizza station, where a cook so covered with flour he looks as if he's wearing white face, pulls hot pies from an oven. There's a panini bar, offering some two dozen sandwiches, the best of which may be the ubiquitous combination of arugula and buffalo mozzarella—sprinkled with a little balsamic vinegar, it's a taste of Italian heaven. There's a salad bar as well, populated with mounds of fresh greens and heaps of marinated mushrooms, chicken, hearts of palm—the combinations are nigh-on infinite. You know you're on an Italian train because all the passengers arrive with shopping bags, out of which they produce wondrous picnics. In Italy, eating is everyone's favorite sport.
And feeding children is a subspecies of eating in Italy that can raise the journey to the level of art. At home, Sarah lives for pasta (mostly penne with butter and cheese) and pizza Margherita. Some of the first words she learned in Italy were olio e balsamico, for she loves to dip her bread in olive oil dappled with balsamic vinegar. Waiters would kvell when she'd ask for her oil and vinegar, thrilled a small (and very cute) girl knew so much about food. Italian restaurants don't offer children's menus—there's no need. If there's a particular dish that's wanted, it can always be made—as long as it's made with pasta. And for us, one of the triumphs of the trip was Sarah's discovery of gnocchi. "I thought they were shrimp," she said. "But they're not. I love them. Can we get them at home?" (Our refrigerator is now filled with packages of ready-to-make gnocchi in every color of the rainbow.)
Old hands at negotiating the Italian table understand that menus in Italian restaurants change with the speed of metamorphic rock. Go to classics like Trattoria alla Madonna near the Rialto in Venice or Sostanza down an alleyway just off the Arno near the Grand Hotel in Florence and you'll be eating the same dishes, cooked the same way for the past half century. Nothing has been added, nothing subtracted. The cooking is carved in stone, and absolutely perfect in its way.
But in recent years, a slow shift has begun that's been the cause of some shock to Italian gourmands. Lennard Davis, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has lived in Florence for one month a year for the past 24 years. He says that when he first visited Florence, it was with his young son Carlo. "When Carlo was little, we were actually asked not to return to a restaurant we loved. Their objection was that we didn't order three courses for our meals. We were vegetarians at the time, so we'd just order an appetizer and pasta. Now, you can do as you will. Things are loosening up. Places are open to letting you eat the way you want."
It's a trend found in Florence at restaurants like Beccofino in the Piazza degli Scarlatti on the banks of the Arno, where the outdoor patio buzzes with life late at night. This is a destination for young Florentines who show up for the 50 wines by the glass and the cooking of chef Francesco Bernadelli, who returned to Florence after several years cooking in New York with a sense that Tuscan cuisine wasn't preserved in amber. The result is a new cuisine of dishes that range from poached eggs with onion confit and white truffles to risotto flavored with fried vegetables.
There's a similar experience to be found in Florence at Baccarossa Enoteca on the Via Ghibellina, Le Barique Wine Bar on Via G. Mazzoni, and, of course, the most famous of Florence's new Italian fare, Il Cibreo on Via dei Macci, where Fabio Picchi dazzles with his cold tripe salad flavored with garlic, oil, and lemon; his polenta with fish ragú; and his whitefish carpaccio flavored with sea salt and olive oil.
In Venice, a new wave of cooking is found at Acqua Pazza in Campo San Angelo, where whole fish are rushed from the nearby market and cooked with a minimum of sauce—this is Italian sashimi that's been given just a hint of heat. They're famous for the creativity of their pizzas just down the way at Ristorante Masaniello in Campo San Stefano.
And locals swear by the wild duck ravioli at a sublime spot in an alley off St. Mark's Square called Osteria Oliva Nera, which is (everything in Venice being close) just down the canal from the most famous of Venice's nouvelle seafood restaurants, Corte Sconta on Calle del Pestrin, where it's best to ignore the menu and let the kitchen send whatever they wish. The cost will be staggering, but when it comes to Venetian seafood, it's worth every penny.
Venice is also home to one of the hottest trends in Italian cuisine—the tapas equivalent called cichetti. There are cichetti pubs all over Venice, almost all of which follow the Spanish formula of counters and trays groaning with small dishes, most going for no more than a euro each (roughly U.S.$1.35, less than the cost of a bottle of Diet Coke), washed down with glasses of bubbly Prosecco.
Most of the cichetti bars are situated on the north side of the Rialto, in the alleyways adjacent to the produce market. Perhaps the most elegant of them is Naranzaria (on San Polo), which sits right on the Grand Canal. The dishes may be simple (and the salads as fresh as fresh can be—with the produce market a few steps away, you shouldn't expect otherwise). But the last time I was there, a wedding party was taking up most of the outdoor tables. Dishes never stopped emerging from the kitchen. It was an all-you-can-eat feast without end, an auspicious start to a marriage.
As a Venetian phenomenon goes, cichetti has gone from little known to ubiquitous in no time at all. There's La Caneva in a backroom of Ristorante Canaletto (Calle della Malvasia), run by wine merchant Mauro Lorenzon, with a selection of more than 1,000 wines. You'll find 600 bottles at Al Prosecco (Campo San Giacomo dall' Orio), and a world-class collection of corkscrews at Cavatappi (Campo della Guerra), a word that translates as…"corkscrew." The oldest bar in Venice (dating back to 1462!), Cantina do Mori (Calle Do Mori) has gone the way of cichetti as well—though it hasn't lost a whit of its venerable Venetian essence. There are more—just look for a crowd of Venetians standing with a drink in one hand and a plate in the other. Cichetti is never eaten sitting down.
Where the trend of the moment in Venice is food that's small and salty, the trend of the moment in Rome is small and sweet. Gelato has long been a way of life in Italy, as important as a restorative cup of espresso and a calming glass of vino. But where the selection of gelato at classics like Vivoli in Florence remain minimalist, the selections in Rome have gone over the top and beyond the edge.
There are, for instance, more than 100 flavors available at Della Palma (Via della Maddalena), at least a quarter of which are built around chocolate (chocolate with peppers, chocolate with sea salt, chocolate with cherries—if you build it, they will come…). And the joy of gelato isn't just built around the flavors—the displays are nothing short of breathtaking, with every bin of gelato topped with a small mountain of the ingredients that give the product its flavor—or an equally sizable heap of mix-ins that can be used to make your cup and cone works of art.
It's an artistic statement that connoisseurs of designer gelato credit to Alberto Manassei of Gelateria del Gracchi (Via dei Gracchi), a man described as standing at the boundary of "transgression and tradition," which has led to flavors like wormwood and green apple (separately, they'd be unusual enough; together, they're outré in the extreme), coffee with anise, cream with limoncello. He's a master of combining flavors—his pear gelato topped with shards of caramel has inspired a new generation of gelateristas to push the envelope.
Those who would explore the exotic gelati of Rome need to do some serious walking to use up the calories, as they head from the intense fruit flavors of Il Gelato di San Crispino (Via della Panetteria) to the fabled tartufo of Tre Scalini in Piazza Navonna and the remarkable zabaglione gelato that's served in a glass of espresso at Fiocco di Neve (Via del Pantheon). And gelato has one further use: If you want to get your 8 year old to climb to the top of the Duomo in Florence and St. Peter's in the Vatican, promise her gelato when the journey is over—no child (or spouse) can resist.
One last suggestion in Rome: On Piazza Pasquino, just off the Piazza Navonna, there's a diminutive enoteca called Cul de Sac. It's as down-home funky as can be, a destination known almost exclusively by Romans. Somehow, this broom closet–sized wine bar manages to offer more than 1,500 wines—by the glass. The wine list is the size of the Roman phone book—it thumps when it's dropped on the table. To go with the wines, there's a fine selection of smoked and cured meats, exotic cheeses, and some of the best lasagna I've ever had. Killer meatballs too. Pardon me for repeating myself. But in Italy, you just can't eat badly—Italians don't know how to prepare anything that doesn't make you hungry for more.
