All Entries in the "Food and Drink" Category
Some new places to eat in Venice
It’s amazing to think how much Venice has improved in terms of food over the past decade. Once it was hard even to get a decent pizza here. Now things are so much better, provided you avoid the tourist traps around San Marco and the Rialto.
Here are a few gems from my latest trip to the lagoon. First, a wonderful place for coffee and beautiful home made pastries. Bar Pasticceria Toletta (Dorsoduro 1192, tel 041 5227451) is in Sacco de la Toletta, a narrow alley running from San Barnaba to Zattere (you can get exact locations on Google Maps). Fantastic and inexpensive sweets and beautiful coffee, open seven days a week.
Al Timon (Cannareggio 2754) is in Cannareggio where the popular Fondamenta de la Misericordia becomes the Fondamenta degli Ormesini. There are a few tables by the canal, beautiful cicchetti (Venetian tapas) of bacala and other specialities at one euro a pop and a decent and very inexpensive wine list. Friendly local service and definitely a place for anyone looking to conserve the pennies.
Osteria Enoteca Ai Artisti (closed Sundays) is in Fondamenta della Toletta, just on the San Barnaba side of the pasticceria above. It’s a smart, ambitious enoteca with a great wine list, a daily menu of fish, meat and salad, and a few canal side tables. Somewhat cramped and the service can be a touch erratic but very congenial. I’d book a table if you want to eat though - tel 041 5238944.
In the same area you’ll find one of the best pizzerias in Venice, Ai Sportivi, back on form after a bad patch. It’s in the big square of Campo San Margherita, tel 041 5211598) and serves late for Venice, up to 11 pm. A few years ago the staff seemed to become entirely east European. Today they are Indian I suspect but the service is efficient and friendly and the pizzas, thin, as in Rome, are superb, with an enormous range including seasonal specialities.
Around the corner, in Rio Tera Canal, on the way to San Barnaba, you’ll find the Sardinian restaurant l’Incontro (tel 041 5222404m closed Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes). This has a lunchtime special of two dishes for 20 euros, a good way to try Sardinian cuisine. We had some interesting pasta dishes - trofie with artichokes and an orange flavoured ravioli dish - followed by stinco, a whacking great smoked ham shank, and roast suckling pig. The pig was just out of the oven and could have done with a bit more cooking I suspect but it was still worthwhile.
Finally, for the blowout, I heartily recommend the hotel restaurant of Agli Alboretti, which is just round the corner from the Accademmia. This has a daily changing menu that uses local ingredients but in unusual ways - turbot with artichoke cream, swordfish with lime and ginger, and unusual game dishes. You’d need to be very hungry to manage antipasti, primo, secondo and some fantastic dolci too. The wine list is excellent as well. But with three courses expect to pay around 120 euros for too - well worth it for an elegant dining room with charming service, an oasis from the tourist bustle outside.
Food and crime in Catalunya
Barcelona Negra was a unique event - a celebration of the crime and dark genre organised in the beautiful Palau de la Virreina. This was a busy and fun festival, the brain child of the very enthusiastic local book store Negra y Criminal. I’m just sorry I had to leave early which meant missing the closing event - a mussels and chips lunch in the pedestrian street outside the store.
It was fun to meet up with Mark Billingham again, and for once have time to chat (and try some great Basque pintxos - a kind of tapas). And to make the acquaintance of the other Brit on the panel too, Andy Oakes. So many thanks to Negra y Criminal and my Spanish publisher Nausicaa for the invitation.
You never see a city properly unless you’re guided by the locals, of course. Without Nausicaa’s Manolo Pintor I would never have found the restaurant 7 Portes. This is an astonishing establishment just out of the centre, where the kitchen opens from 1pm to 1 am every day ’sin interrupción’. Amazingly, it is over 150 years old, and over the years has counted John Wayne and Che Guevara among its customers (as well as Himmler, says the website).
We ate a fantastic lunch -mixed seafood starters of anchovies, prawns, mussels, salt cod fritters and bread with tomato. After that it was one of the best black rices I’ve ever encountered - a lovely paella of squid ink. And after that it was siesta time before the panel in the evening.
Barcelona really is a foodie city. Take a look at some of the fresh stuff on show in the main market on La Rambla below.
A book for the wish list
I gave an author chat at the very impressive Borders in Fulham not long ago. At the end the store very kindly said, by way of thanks, ‘Pick a book.’ It was not was easy to choose. There were two floors to the place, all of them stacked with interesting fiction and non-fiction, and titles I’d never heard of too.
And so to a real discovery… The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. This is a wonderful work by Gillian Riley, no mere recipe book but an encyclopaedia devoted to recording the astonishing richness of Italian cuisine. Anyone who spends much time in Italy comes to be fascinated and, to some part, infuriated by the variety of food on offer. This is not simply regional. Each borgo seems to possess its own specialities, or variation on a theme. Riley can’t have caught every last dish in Italy. Is such a thing humanly possible? But the breadth of her research is simply awe-inspiring.
Finally, I know what agretti, the sharp, grass-like vegetable seen in Rome in Spring, really are. And lardo di colonnata too, cured lard, stored underground in marble tubs, immersed in brine and rubbed with herbs. Bread, wine, meat, vegetables, fowl… nothing has escaped Riley’s beady eye, and alongside the food she recounts tales of illustrious epicures, the eating habits of famous Italians, and casts the odd reflection on the role of eating in Italian art (remember, one of Caravaggio’s several convictions stemmed from his beating of a waiter for serving an artichoke improperly).
This is a great book and a wonderful present for anyone with half an interest in Italian food. Thank you Borders… for the talk, and being such a clever book store you stock delights like this on your shelves!
Some new places to eat and drink in Rome
My last trip saw me staying in a different area, between the Colosseum and San Giovanni. Quiet, a little sparse on the cafe and restaurant front, rather too near some of the tourist tat of the Colosseum… but as always not without promise.
One much overlooked area in Rome is Monti, which lies behind the Via dei Fori Imperiali, bounded on one side by the Via Cavour and on the other the Via Nazionale. This is a charming neighbourhood of local cafes and shops, well worth exploring. Al vino Al vino (Via dei Serpenti 19) is a typical wine bar, with a good selection of bottles, plus inexpensive plates of decent cheese and salami. Friendly service too. Close by, at Via della Madonna dei Monti 28, is Fafiuche, a new wine and food shop open every day from ten in the morning to one a.m. Again, very good wine, and in the early evening there’s an excellent all you can eat buffet for seven euros. In the Via Panisperna at number 251, near the Serpenti, you will find Ai Tre Scalini, a local pub and bar with cheese, salami and hot plates, and inexpensive wine. The place dates back to 1895 and has lots of character - including the clientele.
At 313 Via Cavour you will find one of the classiest wine bars in Rome, called simply 313 and almost hidden behind a tiny entrance. The wine list ranges from the cheap to the extraordinarily expensive, and you can get plates of cheese, salami, wild boar specialities and fish. But get there before 8.30 in the evening or you may have to wait.
One restaurant in Monti I didn’t get to try is Al Boschetto (Via del Boschetto, 30, tel 06 4744770). This has a good reputation, particularly for fish and wild mushrooms, and is a sister to an establishment which is a rarity of good value and excellent cooking near the Colosseum: Hostaria Isidoro, 59 Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, closed Saturday lunchtime. Isidoro is announced by nothing more than a notice board up the street from the Basilica San Clemente. But it is fantastically popular with Romans for excellent pasta, meat and fish dishes - and very reasonably priced. A plate of pasta with fresh porcini cost me a mere eight euros.
Another find near the colosseum is Il Bocconcino, a newish place at 23 Via Ostilia, closed Wednesdays, tel 06 77079175. This is a small and elegant restaurant serving very real local dishes - puntarelle chicory when I couldn’t find it anywhere else, for example. We just ate pasts, which was superb, but the many locals there were tucking into lovely looking meat and fish. Take along a food translation guide for all of these places if you don’t know Italian cuisine by the way - many of the dishes are local and few staff speak English well.
Finally, one oddity we never got round to. La Tana dei Golosi (The Lair of the Greedies) is associated with the Slow Food movement and has a menu that changes regularly, featuring different areas of Italy. It looked very impressive, and gets mainly good reviews from locals. You can find it at Via San Giovanni in Laterano 200, a little way up from Isidoro. Evenings only, closed Sundays. Tel 06 7720302.
The art of Roman bread
Panella is a bit snooty. The place describes itself as ‘L’Arte del Pane’, the Art of Bread. I got a very Roman matronly wag of the finger for daring to take a picture - without flash I might add - inside the shop. But I suppose if you’re this good at your job….
Panella makes bread of all kinds - from flour and potatoes and chestnut. And all shapes… animals, famous buildings, reptiles….
And pastries and chocolate things and fruit cakes and… well, that’s enough. Suffice to say that on a Sunday morning when every Roman lady is filled with a hormonal need to buy cake this place is like Harrods during a sale. Not cheap, but pretty much unique. You’ll find it in the Via Merulana, the long busy road that leads from Santa Mario Maggiore to San Giovanni in Laterano. It’s next to the auditorium of Maecenas which is at the head of the Via Mecenate if you want to locate this on a map (Via Merulana 54-55 to be precise). The restaurant next doors, the name of which I forgot, used to be pretty good too, and the nearby Baia Chia in Via Machiavelli has a reputation for fish and Sardinian dishes.
Sacro e Profana, an unusual Roman restaurant
I hate recommending restaurants in Italy for two reasons: they change quickly, and my preference may not be yours. Two old favourites - the pizzeria Li Rioni near the Colosseum and Ditirambo in the Campo Dei Fiori - have been pretty poor of late and are definitely off my list.
But here’s a very unusual place that’s never let me down, and last night was on its customary sparkling form. Sacro e Profano is situated in the former church of San Giovanni del Maroniti in the narrow Via dei Maroniti, little more than an alley behind the Trevi Fountain. The interior is wonderful - joky ‘classical’ paintings of a heaven and hell theme on the walls, a few tables outside, a ground floor entirely devoted to cooking around a wood fired oven, then two floors for diners, the highest next to a fake organ, possibly where the real thing would have been.
The food is southern, with a lot of Pugliese and Calabrian influences. So the 15 euro starter (one is more than enough for two) has fresh swordfish and tuna dishes, and searing hot njuda (sausage cream) and peppery fish row among other items. The wood fired oven is used for pizzas which are among the best in Rome - and very economical at eight euros or so up. Get a table with a view of downstairs though and you get a free show too.
Here one lone chef does the front of house cooking. Some dishes, such as pasta, happen out back. But for the most part this solitary chap is busily cooking pizza, bread, vegetables and other dishes, while stoking up the fire with logs too.
I hope they pay the chap well. He was hard at work when we walked in at 8.30, and still at it when we left at close to eleven.
The food was the best found anywhere on this trip to Rome. Highly recommended: wild boar casserole with wild asparagus covered in gorgeous smoked scamorza cheese, one of the most expensive items on the menu at 17 euros.
Barramundi please
The last time I was in Australia a friend in Melbourne introduced me to a very Australian dish: barramundi, or giant perch, a fish that’s native to the country and one I’d never encountered anywhere before.
It’s a big ‘un. The one at the top is lazing around in a tank at Sydney Aquarium at this very moment, and looks to me not a lot short of the maximum size this fish reaches - namely 1.8 metres in length. It was also incredibly delicious - and happily the kind of fish, I was told, that didn’t freeze well, so eating it fresh was the only option.
I went back to the UK and soon found my Aussie mates were barramundi fans too. Then, out of the blue, a bunch of the things turned up on the counter at Tesco (not a place I like to shop but I was in a hurry). These things weren’t much bigger than a trout and had been raised, it said, in the New Forest, presumably in a lake set aside for the purpose.
Naturally, this being Tesco, they cost a fortune, about £4 per fish if I recall correctly. They also looked long dead and with those opaque black eyes that should deter any fish buyer. So barramundi is no longer simply an Australian species. In the UK we’re so short of the overfished natural species we used to eat - cod and haddock mainly - that we’re bringing in foreign stock and raising it in ponds in the wood.
Maybe it tastes wonderful. But will it be like Australian barramundi? I doubt it somehow. The real barramundi needs brackish water to breed, not muddy lakes. Also it’s just… bigger. But this is what fish eating means in the UK today. The next time I was in UK the freshest fish on the counter was something called ‘Vietnamese cobbler’. In reality this is a kind of catfish raised in the Mekong Delta. So to make up for the fact that British trawlers have fished out the north sea we’re now flying in unknown fish from south east Asia and raising Australian species in pits in the woods.
The funny thing is that if you go into a fish market in Italy you’ll find plenty of produce on show, all of it local, and pretty much all of it European. What’s the difference? The Italians are willing to pay what it costs for good, fresh fish. And the Brits aren’t, so we buy whatever comes along.
It’s an odd, odd world. I live just twenty miles from the English Channel. Finding a good fishmonger is a real battle. Cross the Channel to Boulogne and you’ll find them everywhere - most of them selling fish that was caught in British waters then exported to French buyers who are willing to pay the market price.
It’ll be nice to try barramundi again in Melbourne. I think I’ll regard it as a treat to be enjoyed in Australia and nowhere else. Funnily enough my first panel on Thursday at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival is about food and literature. Don’t worry… I won’t mention Darling Harbour, promise.