Rome

I had a big agenda for Rome:  

1. Cacio e pepe (an cheese and pepper pasta made by emulsifying pasta water, oil and/or butter, and cheese)
2. Bucatini alla Amatriciana
3. Pasta carbonara
4. Tripa alla Romana (Roman-style tripe) (that’s cow intestines, for you knuckeheads out there)
5. Codo alla vaccinara (braised ox tail with celery)
6. Carciofi alla Giudea (deep-fried Jewish style artichokes)

These are also things that simply must be eaten while in Rome. I’ve had the carbonara before (and I also make it myself), but everything else would be new. Oh, I also wanted to go to the Borghese Gallery, Trastevere, and the Jewish Ghetto while I was there, too.

I made pretty good time, and was able to tick off all the items on my list. The ox tail and carbonara, were great, and the rest was varying degrees of tasty. On top of the to-do list, I also covered deep fried squash blossoms stuffed with cheese and anchovies, and pollo alla Romana, neither of which was special. The thin-sliced beef tongue with mustard sauce from the wine bar also gets and honorable mention, although that is not a typically Roman dish. The Cacio e Pepe I actually had to take two different stabs at. The first time I had it was at the hidden place without a sign in the Jewish ghetto. The fried artichoke and fiore di zucca there were great, and the taste my pal Christian that I met there gave me of his meatball with peas was phenomenal, but the cacio e pepe was a huge disappointment. It was dry, like they had just cooked noodles and sprinkled cheese on. There was no emulsion, and really no sauce at all. Not only was this not what I was expecting, it wasn’t that great. Having already filled up on two different fried antipasti, I didn’t even finish it all so I could save some room for my secondo (more on that later). So the next day I went back to the fancier place with the good carbonara and codo I had been to the day before, hoping they would have a better take. This place came through. The sauce was tasty, light, and had a perfect emulsion, making it not too thin, and not too thick, heavy, and gloopy. I’ve been experimenting with this dish at home, and this definitely gave me the standard which I’m shooting for. I was also able to pry some intel from the waiter on how they prepare it, so I can better replicate it at home. There are a couple minor differences in approach between theirs and mine, so hopefully I can tune mine up a bit.

I find that people appreciate the amount of interest I show in the local food, and that’s what sparked the conversation with Christian at the place in the Jewish ghetto. We ended up having a lively chat, with him translating the admonitions I was getting from the waitress for not finishing my cacio e pepe because I was saving room for my meat course. I was able to follow the conversation a bit in Italian, and asked Christian to confirm that they were in fact talking about what I big pussy I was for not cleaning my plate. He informed me, “No, this doesn’t translate directly; in Italian you don’t call someone a ‘big pussy’, you say they are a ‘half pussy’”. So I’m apparently a half-pussy. These linguistic differences really are charming, aren’t they? I guess I should get ‘half-pussy’ carved on my tombstone.

Walking out from lunch, I then got the most quintessentially Roman moment of the trip as Christian, who was in town on a business meeting from Parma and was dressed in a suit, went to refresh himself in the fountain in the square. Seeing well-dressed business men giving themselves a spritz in the public fountain just isn’t something you see in Chicago.

So that wrapped up the trip. Lots of good food, no new Italian shoes, and met lots of new people. Meeting all the new people was great. Maybe I’ll have better luck with the shoes next time.

Firenze and San Gimignano

In Florence, I saw what is quite possibly the single greatest thing I had ever seen in my life:

Porchetta!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And not the half-ass porchetta I’ve made by wrapping a pork loin in a large sheet of skin-on pork belly, but a honest-to-god whole deboned pig body with the head still on rolled up in its entirety like a huge, pig-headed torpedo. Boom!!!!!!!!!!!! It was pretty tasty, too. Note quite so impressive, however, was the steak Fiorentina. It was pretty much a plain, not particularly high quality steak. My expectations actually weren’t all that particularly high, but I figured it would be a crime to have come to Florence twice and still never had it. All my Italian peeps had always said that while lots of our vegetables are bullshit, we do have better steak than in Italy, and I can see why. It wasn’t bad, but when you’re 22-euro steak is significantly outshined by the bruschetta with cavolo nero and white beans you had for antipasto, you’re not really getting your money’s worth. Other meal highlights were a tripe salad, porcini soup, and grass salad I had for lunch on Saturday, and the pizza that Caterina’s cousin Guiseppe took us out for Saturday night.

San Gimignano, was a pretty cool little place, but lunch there was a disappointment. I was jazzed to hit this fancy-pants restaurant my gourmet travel guide had written up, but it didn’t quite live up to the billing. The town definitely did though—very picturesque, and very, very touristy. The bus ride out there and back was also a nice way to check out the Tuscan countryside and to help out a group of Malaysian tourists with travel trip for a future trip to the US.

Aside from not coming through on the bistecca alla Fiorentina, Florence also failed to deliver on the shoes. I basically had two high-level objectives for this trip. 1: eat and drink and much good stuff as possible. 2: get some stylish Italian shoes. I’ve been looking in every major city I’ve been to so far, and nothing. They’ve got lots of nice stuff, but not items that are my style and what I’m looking for. Leather goods are big in Florence, so that may have been my best shot. Only Rome left at this point.