robert brown

To my way of thinking, unorthodox as it sometimes is, there are two kinds of destination restaurants: those in what I call the "restosphere" and others that are personal and include those yet-to-be-visited "hit list" ones. There are those that are destination restaurants after you get to your destination, like all those misguided people who want to have their one splurge meal at La Tour d'Argent once they get to Paris. For the neophyte, such restaurants as the French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, Daniel, and even el Bulli are addresses in the restosphere that the multitudes read about in the general press. For me, the only restaurant I would make a special trip for from, say, Nice would be L'Ambroisie which I somehow have managed not to visit in all these years. On the other hand, della Marisa had been on my hit list for five years, but I never contemplated making a special trip to Venice just to go there. Rather, once I knew I was going to Venice, I made sure I booked three months in advance. It's obvious that el Bulli is the ujltimate destination restaurant because it is the only one that gets people to plan or rearrange their vacations once they grab a reservation.

The problem and the challenge in a so-called good restaurant is to avoid a bad meal or to make a good meal even better. Good restaurants are known to serve bad meals. It's the job and the challenge of savy diners to get the most they can from a restaurant. Menus, particularly surprise menus, are no-brainer menus; at best a crutch for neophyte or apathetic diners. Surprise menus level the playing field in this regard, conceived for both idiots and savants. They are made to save labor and money for the restaurant owner more than anything else. They are about as opaque any anything in what is mostly an opaque relationship-that of chef to client. They rob the gourmand of his autonomy and, in fact, are killing off connoisseurship in the culinary domain. Like good design specifically and problem solving in general, the idea is to reduce the possibilities without eliminating the solutions, which is why making a considered selection of a relatively few courses enjoyed in generous portions has been, and still remains, the best way to dine. Were it not, Auguste Escoffier, Fernand Point or Paul Bocuse would have thought to serve several courses of little portions. Generosity is not serving the same little dishes ("free food" for those who follow the Italy Forum) to the entire room, but serving a whole duck in two courses, covering a pasta in Alba white truffles for a 15 euro supplement, and bringing out two or three dozen cheeses in peak condition and charging the same price regardless of how many you want to have. (or even offering cheese to begin with). Surprise menus, along with such other gimmicks as bite menus and multi-course menus are like exiting the theatre after listening to the overture.

But John, my informal survey finds Miles Davis as the king of restaurant background music. Muzak must be out of business.

Moby, your report back was very enlightening and shocking, especially to those of us who had the good fortune to dine at Michel Bras beginning 20 years ago when he had a simple hotel-restaurant in the center of town whose relative humbleness, I believe, accounts for the long time it took him to obtain a third star. We made it a point to go way out of our way nearly every summer from about 1985 to 1997 to visit and have at least two meals. I remember succulent dish after succulent dish based on the obscure-sounding herbs and flowers of the “neighborhood”. My favorite recollection is going with him in our friend’s car to get some of these materials. I though he would direct us to a garden, but instead told my friend to stop on the side of the road where he took out his scissors and cut the herbs right there. Some of the ingredients you mention are those I couldn’t possibly imagine him ever using. What you write is not only an indictment of him and the restaurant, but a glaring example of “restaurants only get worse” and the state of cuisine at the alleged top in France. It sounds to me that he is in the midst of turning the restaurant over to his son who is trying to play in some other culinary bailiwick.

I couldn't decide among "ex", "ageing" or "old".

Two ex-hippies thinking alike.

I think what we're talking about here is dilution, internationalization and a start towards regression to the mean. What we are seeing in these restaurants has similarities to we are seeing in other domains of high leisure, say, "luxury" hotels and resorts or so-called luxury goods where you see Prada and Gucci stores in factory outlets for which such companies are making deliberately inferior goods. It's bringing the so-called good life to, as Bux writes, "a broader middle class." It's a fact of life, and being elitist or defeatist about it (which I am sure everyone thinks is the way I am about it) isn't going to change it. All I can do for myself is try to work around it, but always keeping an open mind. In fact at dinner tonight I reminded my wife of a one-fork-and-spoon-in-the-Michelin restaurant in Cavaillon (Auberge de Cheval Blanc) that fits into the kind of restaurant we have been discussing. We enjoyed the meal a lot, and it was a far better choice than these town square brasseries where all the food has become industrialized. It's a good address to know about when antiquing in L'Isle s/Sorges, (maybe better than the former one-star that's there) but one that I wouldn't go out of my way for. On the other hand, it doesn't change the unalterable truth that the French aren't making restaurants like they used to. I don't think the people who call these young chefs the next generation after the Nouvelle Cuisine guys realize that in the 1960s, '70 and '80s restaurant-goers in France saw the creation of the restaurants of Bocuse, Troisgros, Guerard, Chapel, Lameloise, the expanded Mere Blanc, Senderens, Peyrot, Gagnaire, Verat, Girardet, Robuchon, Passard. Meneau, Bras, Loiseau, Outhier, and on and on. But even to put it in a present-day context of Spain, where the good restaurants are closer to the way France used to be (or still is, but less so) points out what happens when government gets off the backs of business. (My uninformed hypothesis is that the end of Fascism upon the death of Generalissimo Franco unleashed the creativity of chefs and other artisan businessmen and somehow allowed for more laissez-faire-ism). So write your French congressman and tell him to ease up on the fiscal burdens the government has placed on chefs and restaurant owners.

A few young chefs are getting the grande luxe hotel jobs, of course; but only little chef-restaurateur places in which chefs can at least take pride of ownership comprise the overwheling majority of new restaurant formation in France. Also, I consider L'Astrance (where I have eaten) a rare quasi-exception. (Does anyone know how many chefs Barbot has in his kitchen?) Regardless, I'll never forgive them for giving us two bottles of supermarket Morvedre (a white and a red) with the chef's tasting menu; a real insult to our host who was a regular client of the restaurant. By "good, honest" bistros, I meant the ones that still try ro offer classic French food in a generous fashion.

Bathor, it's a self-appointment. But where is your place in Italy? You're very fortunate to live near Locando Gambero Rosso. I'm sure you'll be going there a lot.

I tried to find a web site for "Omnivore". Can anyone provide a link? It's really nice to hear that the guidebook writers are putting their jobs ahead of adroitly and as clear-minded as possible guiding the people who buy their books. All I am saying is that I find these shoestring restaurants unexciting and unfulfilling. They symbolize what restaurant-going in France has been reduced to. I haven't been to a lot of them, including all these new bistros in Paris. But I have a good idea of the concept from having dined in several in the Provence-Cote d'Azur region. It's new-fangled everyday dining that is the primary reason for driving me away from France into Italy. The new restaurants may or may not be a Godsend for people who want to dine without blowing a whole lot of money. It's a matter of taste. At that price level in Nice, I prefer La Petite Maison or La Petite Alsace over places like Jouni or Kai's Passion. In other words good, honest bistros which, I believe, these shoestring restaurants are killing off. I can't blame the chefs who have no other path to follow. It's really the fault of the idiots who run the country. Before I forget, when are food writers in France going to stop comparing a plate of food to the works of illustrious painters?

I have seen several of these alliances of French chefs come and go. They either have a guide or a manifesto. This one is another marketing ploy, it sound like to me, but they must all be written about in other guidebooks.They should just call it "La Guide du Lacet de Soulier" (Shoestring Guide). It's not a bad idea to make their guide from a business point of view. The "Nouvel Observateur" article is just another fawning over chefs piece that the journalists over there always write. I guess this marketing project is a way to put together under one roof all these young chefs who open up these little places that offer three choices in each category (entree, plat, dessert) and have a staff of four, two of which are the chef and his or her spouse. I don't mean to disparage the genre because every new restaurant that opens in Nice is one of these, and while I find them poor to mediocre, I have had several tasty dishes. What happens, however, is that I will like the first meal, but then when I go back I find that the menu hasn't changed and I have already exhausted half or more of the offerings between me and my wife. I'm afraid, though, that these aren't restaurants worth traveling to, though they can fill the bill if you are near by one of them. It's self-serving to take potshots at 300 euros meals and the Guide Michelin, however. It's those restaurants with their three stars that are for many the backbone of gastronomic touring. Enjoy them while they last, or at least those and as many as you can afford.

Thank you all for replying to my topic. In terms of the “time taken to write a new topic to number of replies” ratio, it was an awfully lot lower than that of my Italy trip reports. Some of you likened the “menu surprise” to other kinds of no-choice menus. The operative phrase in my post was “in which I didn’t know…”. At the first restaurant, a modest to medium-price restaurant in St. Laurent-du-Var called L’Appart, I asked the waiter what was in the “menu surprise”. As the name implies, he wouldn’t tell me since that would remove the element of surprise. The second restaurant from this summer where we had the possibility of ordering the “menu surprise” was the rather expensive “Le Pirate” in Erbalunga on the Island of Corsica. This tells me that the concept isn’t limited to just cheap restaurants. Some of the comments that a few of you made are well-taken, but worth rebutting. The notion of someone telling you that the chef would like to cook for you strikes me as disingenuous. Cooking for people is what chefs do, and the more people they can cook for, the better off they are in their livelihood. Even when there are chef’s tasting menus in restaurants as exalted as L’Arpege, the maitre d’hotel will tell you what the menu is comprised of. At the other extreme, say, in the Italian restaurants Jonathan Day talks about, the waiter will often recite the menu, usually with the possibility of your making reasonable changes. In fact, I have never been in a restaurant in Italy where “what you see is what you get” was the modus operandi., although at della Marisa in Venice, we had the same meal as everyone else. However, I wasn’t able to ask in Italian if there could be any changes in my meal. And certainly our waitress would have told me what the dishes would be had I asked. In this particular instance, it was a moot point since every preparation I had (and there was a great variety of them) except dessert was impeccable. Suzy’s point about Omakasi strikes me as reasonable in the universal context of restaurants. It’s interesting, however, that in my one sushi book, in English and published in Japan, Omakasi doesn’t appear in it. Does anyone know where and when the concept started? Regardless, I have had breakfasts and keiseki dinners in ryokans where you have the dinner in your room. But such meals are composed for reasons that are particular to the Japanese. Furthermore, what goes in Japanese restaurants and sushi bars doesn’t merit consideration in the context of the French practice of “menus surprises”. I recollect that at Chez Panisse, they post the menu for the entire month, making changes only if the food markets dictate. Maybe I’m old-fashioned in adhering to the notion that the idea of being gourmand or an experienced diner is to try and excise the maximum from a chef’s abilities and his larder. It always means absorbing the content of the menu and asking question after question. It’s why I never order any kind of “menu” unless I have to at, for instance, el Bulli or the rare instances in which a menu strikes me as providing the preparations and produce that I suspect will give me the sort of meal I am looking for. But mark my word, you’re going to see a continuously increasing number of restaurants offering these surprise menus (most likely at a higher price than a restaurant's other fixed menus) with the result that there will be even more loss of the diner’s autonomy.

A couple of times in France during the past several months, I have dined in restaurants in which the order-taker offered me a "menu surprise" in which I wouldn't know what I would be eating until someone put it in front of me. Since I almost never order fixed or tasting menus, I would certainly never put myself down for a surprise menu. I thought a fixed menu in a no-choice or limited choice restaurant was the ultimate height of parsimony and cost cutting. The "menu surprise", however, seems to take them to its ultimate, though maybe one day soon there will be "le menu left-over" in which you get at a rock-bottom price food that the chef would otherwise have to throw out. I have yet to meet up with a "menu surprise" in Italy or even the USA, though I wouldn't be surprised if it already has come to these shores. Edited by John Talbott Sunday August 28th.

Having devoted more time than is prudent to reporting on my culinary exploits in Italy, here is a succinct round-up of the restaurants I have yet to mention presented in the order I visited them: La Cucina di Nonna Nina. Between Genova and Portofino, and close by to Rapollo, sits Camogli, a brightly-painted vacation town on the sea. Nonna Nina is east of the town in a residential area. Dining there in summer is a bit like being in someone’s backyard, but the family that owns it is friendly and cares about fresh seafood simply prepared. We had delicious marinated fish and a mixed grill of fish that were both very good. The restaurant is in "Gambero Rosso", which substantiates my feeling that the food at this restaurant is better than that at amazingly-sited Ristorante Rosa, which sits on a cliff overlooking the town and the Mediterranean coast. Le Calandre.In his little food village, Massimiliano Alajmo is everywhere you look. If he isn’t in the kitchen prepping meals or circulating in the dining room during the service, he is holding forth in the combination bar-shop-casual restaurant that adjoins the kitchen. Le Calandre is neither in the center of Padova nor in the countryside, but solidly in the urban sprawl just west of the city. Here the Alajmo’s have built a small, modern food empire that also includes a food shop with a good selection of salumi, cheese and wine, and a serviceable hotel that offers breakfasts so bad that you wonder if the family really owns the place. Better to go next door to where Massimiliano hangs out and have a coffee and pastry to get you started to your next destination. Bowled over as we were by Alajmo’s saffron rice with specks of licorice that was one of the two or three best dishes of our trip, my wife and I nonetheless did not quite share the unbridled enthusiasm of Le Calandre that some of our friends have. A house specialty of cappuccino of black squid was not really a cappuccino in the sense of being foamy like Alain Chapel’s cappuccino of mushroom soup, but tasty nonetheless. The highly-touted pigeon was a good example of the breed, but the dark sauce was short on flavor and richness, and the puree of potatoes was standard issue. The other savory dishes and desserts are gone with the wind. But don’t get me wrong: Le Calandre is rock solid and worth repeated visits. The cuisine is one of near-brilliant-to-brilliant execution. Alajimo’s time spent with Michel Guerard is apparent in the polish and lightness you see and taste in every dish. I imagine that this accounts for much of the reason Michelin gives Le Calandre its highest rating. Hotel Tosca Romagna/Ristorante Paolo Teverini. If there is one downside to family succession (and at the Hotel Tosca Romagan is has been going on for a staggering 525 years), it’s that the next generation doesn’t produce a chef truly born to the profession. It’s not that Paolo Teverini is technically lacking. It’s just that he, like the hotel property itself, lacks the requisite taste. Located in the charming, sleepy spa town of Bagno di Romagna, Hotel Tosco Romagna, complete with a full spa, is the best address around. However, the town is bourgeois to the core (except for some of the clients in Teverini’s restaurant) with the people who come for the waters being mainly old-age pensioners unlike the spa at Saturnia that attracts significantly younger clients. “Bad Missoni” covered the corridors and bedroom walls of the Tosca Romagna and the dining room was a hodgepodge of retro Art Deco and tasteless murals. Teverini’s cuisine was that of a chef who never left his hometown and couldn’t quite figure out what worked with what. Our dinner, however, got off on the right foot with a relatively simple and refreshing carpaccio of melon with balsamic vinegar. Spider crab with cous-cous, a tapenade, balsamico on the side, a gelatin of red onion and a dried beet on top made for an overly-fussy and salty dish. A risotto of tripe was foamy and eggy , but not at all creamy. It had a sliver of dried tripe stuck in the top and a foamy saffron sauce. The meal carried on in this overworked vein, more or less, with quite tasty river shrimps and radish sprouts served with homemade cavallini pasta; then veal cheeks with a thin slice of air-dried cheek as a little show of avant-gardism, and bergamot orange, which is a delicious aromatic citrus of Southern Italy.I had hoped to add sobriety to the meal by ordering a filet of Chianina beef. I didn’t find the meat itself of very high quality, but it was mildly helped along with an onion and red wine sauce joined by mushrooms and carrots in a candied, but not soft, bitter orange sauce. Desserts are a distant memory and were apparently not worth noting. There are a couple of positive aspects to our two-night stay worth noting. First is the sweetness and caring of Paolo Teverini and his wife. We would return to the hotel or finish dinner late at night and Sr. Teverini was at the front desk doing some paperwork and bidding his clients a good night. His wife reassembled a breakfast buffet that the staff had half removed by the time we arrived from upstairs. And what terrific breakfasts they have there. The buffet is copious and fresh. Beside a chef making omelets, the Teverini’s had what for us were two all-time firsts: One was a freezer containing a few flavors of gelati, including one of the best chocolate flavored ones I have ever had, and an automatic orange squeezer so that there would be no question that you would be drinking what the term "fresh squeezed orange juice" is suppose to mean. If I have made Bagno di Romagna sound like a town not to bother with, there’s an establishment just down the road in St. Piero in Bagno that will make you think twice, Locanda al Gambero Rosso. It was the one-two punch of full page coverage of Teverini and this Gambero Rosso in the "Ristorante d’Italia del Gambero Rosso" that brought us to this lightly-visited region. Teverini received its full page by being one of 20 Tre Forchetti restaurants in the entire country and Locanda al Gambero Rosso one of eleven to receiver the guide’s Tre Gamberi rating, given to the most outstanding trattorias. How grateful we are to Gambero Rosso: the guide, the restaurant, the mollusk. It’s what made our two-day layover in Bagno di Romagno worth the voyage. The restaurant , along with Vissani and della Marisa, won our award for most memorable of our trip, not because it had the breath-taking food like Vissani or that it was the most serendipitous and unexpected as was della Marisa, but because it was so endearing and honest. I don’t think we have ever felt genuinely more embraced on a first visit to a restaurant. Put a little alcohol in the mix, and Gambero Rosso could bring tears to your eyes. This is a rather small restaurant tucked in on a narrowish mixed use street.. There is nothing ostentatious or in bad taste about it, given its white walls and original photographs documenting the early days of the restaurant. Gambero Rosso is into its third generation with founding “mama” and the mother of chef Giuliana Saragoni still with us at age 92. Giuliana’s husband is in charge of the dining room and their daughter, her boy friend and a Japanese stagiere also looks after the clientele. The Locanda is one of the rare establishments that if you evince curiosity about the cuisine and the staff, the world is your oyster. Aware that our neighbors were a young American and her Italian boyfriend from the area, both of whom teach Italian at UCLA, Giuliana’s husband asked the woman to explain the five Romagnian dishes we were going to be served : tortelli sulla lastra (stuffed large tortellini made on a slab); bassotti ( a thin egg pasta); manfrigoli (a pasta in broth with polenta and chickpeas); migliaccio di grano ( a quiche-like dish made with corn flour, olive oil, grated pecorino and formaggio di Fossa, the local cow’s milk cheese); and lattaiolo, a rustic tart made from eggs, flour, milk, butter, sugar, vanilla and cinnamon. This was hearty food and, as our Italian neighbor told us, not spicy like some of the food in the Emiglia part of the region. Having never been before to this part of Italy, we greatly enjoyed what were classic dishes that were entirely new to us. The cooking here is flawless, homey, and delicious. It therefore came as no surprise that Locanda al Gamero Rosso is one of the most revered informal restaurants of Italy. We lingered after our meal, talking to Giuliana and her family about the restaurant and having everyone explain some of the cuisine of the region. Seeing how hard they were trying to find the right English words for preparations and ingredients, I made them a present of my copy of Maureen Fant’s “Dictionary of Italian Cuisine” which they then asked me to write a dedication on the flyleaf. With a promise to return soon, we gave our farewells and, especially having left something to be remembered by, look forward to returning to as a friend of the house.. Southern Tuscany’s pair of two-star restaurants weren’t much better than holding a pair of deuces. Ristorante da Caino in the village of Montemorano, about 40 miles SW of Grosetto is good at serving up arrogance and disdain which I associate more with a big-city restaurant than a charming stone house in a small, quaint village. We smelled trouble when the Andrea Piccini, husband of chef Valeria Piccini seated us in what is commonly known as “the American room” which was out of the sight of the Italians who occupied the other small dining salon. We didn’t avail ourselves of any opportunity to talk to the four people to my left, a gay couple and a married couple from Nevada, brokers all, enjoying the fruits of the real estate boom. They even order a 350 euro Gaja Barberesco, while we had to be content with a 1990 Ciacci Brunello di Montalcino at a mere 150 euros. I have devoted some thought to the American room, having experienced it many times, especially at Restaurant Girardet in Switzerland where, in my six or seven visits, I never saw what the second dining room looked like. These situations are different from the occasions when you are having breakfast in a luxury hotel in Paris or Venice and complaining about “all the Americans” when you yourself are part of the very phenomenon you are inveighing against. Apparently the restaurateurs who herd Americans together are either engaging in a form of discrimination by shielding the natives from what the restaurant owner imagines to be abhorrent or ostentatious behavior, or they somehow think that Americans want to dine with other Americans, as if that is what they traveled thousands of miles at great expense in order to visit a foreign country. Close your eyes in one of these rooms only if you’re homesick. Judging by the cuisine at da Caino, the target clientele must be people staying at the Hotel Terme di Saturnia or in Porto Ercole. Valeria Piccini’s cooking is fussy, overly-inventive and not very appealing to taste. We have an innate dislike for dishes whose components are laid out in strips across the plate or otherwise more separated than they have to be. There was some of that going on with our dinner with the result that a few dishes were both good and forgettable at the same time!!! The best was a little round “cake” appetizer with layers of roasted eggplant, tomato, sweetbreads, brains and formaggio di Fasso that was roasty and deep-flavored. Ravioli filled with liquid capers, fresh tomato sauce and olive oil was just so-so, while snails served on a toothpick with caramelized red onions and lackluster pureed potatoes, but a marvelous puree of green vegetables was overly played with, but pleasant. Our two main courses were ingredient-heavy. Rounds of lamb came with another puree of green vegetables, but with orange peels included; a sauce made from the skin of eggplant; small green peppers stuffed with tiny cubes of red and green pepper; potato puree; and cubes of something that reminded my wife of Junket. My roasted rabbit with its liver also included red peppers, spring onion, olives, sun-dried tomatoes , and an olive sauce, most of which were painted across the plate. We lack notes on the desserts, none of which ended up in the memory bank. We finished our visit in da Caino’s dispensary where we bought some of their good olive oil and a few jars of confitures. Here we settled the bill with Andrea who, casting his eyes on the euro notes I was about to give him, smiled at us for the first time all evening. Gambero Rosso. “I though my meal was as good as the one we had at Robuchon” I said to my wife after our lunch at Gambero Rosso, located in San Vicenzo on the Tuscan coast about 45 minutes north of Grosseto. It’s too bad that this was the summer of 1996 when Robuchon was just a few months from closing his magnificent and revered Michelin three-star restaurant and the cuisine at Gambero Rosso provided us a meal as great as any we had ever had in Italy. Not so this summer, however. In what was the biggest disappointment of our trip, Gambero Rosso went from first to almost worst for reasons that one can only guess at. We would like to think that it was because we went for dinner this time when the small restaurant was filled; or, like the Sultan of Dining believes, chef Fulvio Pierangelini cooks meat better than fish. That may be right since nine years ago I had a remarkable pigeon dish that Pierangelini had arranged in a circle. We think, though, that like so many other formerly great and fallen restaurants, the perceived decline is a result of belt-tightening with perhaps a case burnt out added in. My wife has never forgotten Gambero Rosso’s twenty-five year old signature dish of shrimps on a bed of chickpea puree made with massancole, a large shrimp found off the Mediterranean coast around Capri. If there is such as a combination of comfort food and luxury, this is it. Because it sounded intriguing and fun, I ordered a “sandwich” of raw sea bass that wasn’t anything like a sandwich. Instead it was an agglomeration of a piece of sea bass; its liver; artichoke; and salad greens which tasted as desultory as it all looked. Better were green and white raviolis filled with fish with a kind of vol-au-vent sauce with little pieces of baby octopus. The two main courses were both significant disappointments. My wife ordered a filet of Saint Pierre with olives and peppers and, inexplicably thin slices of foie gras. The fish was dry and overcooked, and when my wife asked the chef’s son who works when needed in the dining room what the reason was for adding the foie gras, he shrugged and said he didn’t know. My fish, a filet of sea bream (dentici) with balsamic vinegar, olive and egg plant was only slightly less banal. My wife noted her dessert as a fried crepe with “silly watermelon sorbet”. I had fried dough that had inside sweet bean paste and red pepper ice cream. With Fulvio Pierangelini and his wife standing next to the entrance of their restaurant, it would have been awkward to leave without talking to them. So we reminisced about our first visit to Gambero Rosso and asked what their son did, which turned out to be making olive oil and raising pigs. We tried not to mask our disappointment, let alone mention it. They are sweet people which only added to our gastronomic heartbreak. When you feel this way about the single highest rating in a serious guidebook (Gambero Rosso is at the top of its guidebook namesake with a rating of 96), you begin to wonder both about the degree of objectivity or competence of the guide and the accuracy of your own culinary judgment. Our meal may have been an aberration, but it would have had to have been a severe one. All that remained of the most disheartening day of our trip was the 45-minute drive back to the wildly overpriced hotel called the Gallicia Palace in Italy’s biggest disaster area, Punta Ala where condos, golf courses and marinas make it the country’s Pebble Beach for the haute bourgeoisie. We bailed out two days early and spent it up the coast in Lido di Camaiore where we lucked into a gem of an old, stylish hotel named Villa Ariston, and ate terrific seafood in Viareggio before taking the car ferry from Livorno to Bastia on the Island of Corsica. (Note: With a couple of exceptions, I did not cover several wonderful small, informal restaurants that the "Osteri d’Italia" guide recommends. I hope to write about them in the next several weeks).

Francesco, thank you for straightening me out. It sounds like I'll have to make a visit.

Now I'm wondering if there are more Il Sole's than Gambero Rossos. This is the one near Cremona where the owner shot himself about ten years ago? It was great in the early 1980s and then supposedly went downhill. I'm glad it has climbed back. The cuisine sounds Modernist.

Note: As the fourth installment of my eating trip in Italy this summer, I didn't intend to devote an entire post to Ristorante Vissani, but rather, as the first paragraph below states, a summary of the five fancy restaurants I went to (six if you count Al Bersagliere, which I have already described). However, I couldn't stop writing about Vissani and am happy to join forces with Francesco to give detailed coverage to this great institution of Italian gastronomy. It’s dining at the top end that occupies nearly all of the foreign gastronomes to Italy, particularly the four Guida Michelin three-star restaurants and several of the two-stars. Also there are several with one star and no star ratings that make the radar screen by being in one of the four major touristic cities. In planning the 16 full days we recently spent in Northern and Central Italy, we decided for the most part to play the country bumpkin and small-town hick with the result that we dined only at one three-star ( Le Calandre), three two-stars (Vissani, Gambero Rosso and da Caino) and a single one-star (Paolo Teverini) that is one of the 20 Tre Forchette establishments in the Ristoranti d’Italia del Gambero Rosso guidebook. Looking back, visiting the great provincial restaurants of France in the heyday of La Nouvelle Cuisine was close to shooting fish in a barrel. I’m not at all convinced that star-chasing in Italy is quite worth the effort and expenditure even though with a modicum of intelligence and open-mindedness, eating in general in Italy most certainly is. Batting .400 in baseball has eluded all the great players since 1941, but going two for five such as we did at the top end is not, practically speaking, much above the Mendoza line. Note: Named after Seattle Mariner and Pittsburg Pirate shortstop Mario Mendoza whose batting average one year kept bouncing above and below the .200 mark, which in baseball lore is now the Mendoza line. Dining at Vissani was an experience that can make going far out of your way highly worthwhile. If you’re lucky, once every several years you will step inside a restaurant and have not just a meal, but an entire afternoon or evening when the gustatory Gods have singled you out and rewarded you for living an exemplary gastronomic life. Our lunch at Vissani was one of those very rare occurrences. “People either love Vissani or hate it” a young Italian who teaches at UCLA told us. Because he was at the table next to us with his American girlfriend and colleague at Locando al Gambero Rosso (the one that’s the low-price bastion of delicious Romagnese cooking) the chef’s husband introduced us. I must have heard that about Vissani before because I kept telling my wife that her birthday dinner could be either great or awful. While the couple had never been to Vissani, they gave us a little background on his place in Italian gastronomy. Yet what was most interesting is that the owner of Gambero Rosso, Sr, Saragoni, had no idea where Vissani’s restaurant was. Neither did we, for all practical purposes, when we set out at noon three days later from our hotel in Orvieto to honor our lunchtime reservation. Had I paid attention to the guide books we had with us, I would have known that Vissani was in Civatella di Lago, a “localita” of Baschi instead of in Baschi itself. It made the trip twice as long and nerve-wracking especially since we saw various signs for hotels, campsite and other restaurants, but not for Vissani. Not posting any signs was clearly deliberate because, as I found out on our departure from the restaurant, that his carte de visite doesn’t have an address on it either. Of course in the end we had the restaurant in our grasp, but not before driving past it, only turning around because I strongly suspected that the imposing white structure, 1970’s brute with Provencal touches, by a lake had to be it. Francesco correctly described it as looking like the headquarters of a big catering/private events business, but given my roots, it could also have passed for a supper club on a lake in New England. Regardless of what it reminds you of, Vissani may be the biggest provincial structure devoted exclusively to dining that I have ever seen. There should be a hotel lobby in it somewhere, but there isn’t; just three very large rooms being a reception area; a salon for dessert, coffee, cigars and after-dinner drinks; the dining room;and, additionally, a really big kitchen. One of my big unrealized fears prior to our meal was eating in a world-famous restaurant with only my wife. I would imagine that the entire front of the house would be annoyed at us for depriving them of an unanticipated afternoon off and that the cooks in the kitchen would play some practical joke with our food. When we walked into the empty dining room at 1:00 PM,. I assumed that since Italians often breeze in as late as two o’clock just for one course, we would have some company. It never happened. Yet instead of worrying if we were being unintentionally mean-spirited, we felt powerfully important, particularly when we learned we had 18 people at work for us, 15 of whom were in the kitchen. First, however, we had to win over the three waiters who had the bad luck of having to work that afternoon. At first they were standoffish and not forthcoming in helping us decide what to order. The maitre d’hotel, when I asked what he thought were the best dishes, replied, “They’re all equally good.” When I answered back, “Every great chef makes some dishes that are better than others”, he began to take us seriously. Together, then, we hammered out our a la carte order. Are there any instances when a flawed meal can play on your mind with the same intensity as a perfect meal? I had always reserved in my mind that the best restaurant visits I had were those in which every dish we tasted was sober and balanced in conception and whose flavor danced in your mouth. External circumstanced surely played a part to make our lunch at Vissani one of our great restaurant excursions, even though every dish was not on the money. That we were celebrating my wife’s birthday may have made us want to like the food more, while having the restaurant to ourselves imbued the occasion with an unanticipated sense of being the lord of the manor. Every diner knows the old corollary of “if the bread is great, so is apt to be the food.” The best grissini we have ever had now belongs to Vissani. These semolina ones were joined by tiny rolls of zucchini and eggplant, not just with pieces of the vegetable stuck in, but infused with flavor. At various times during lunch our waiters brought other bread that was equally delicious. On our tour of the kitchen we lingered at the bread station where our waiter told us that the pastry and bread chefs baked all the bread a la minute. Almost never, if ever, have I had a meal in a great restaurant where the dish that I longed for most was what a woman from New York on our Venice hotel’s vaporetto shuttle called “free food”, otherwise known as the amuse-gueule. ( "I liked all the free food we got at the beginning of our dinner” was how she put it). Yet a small rouget from off Sardinia in a cucumber sauce with a baby scallion was a coming-together of flavors that reached every part of our palates. A soft spot in the meal was a risotto with morels. On the other hand, our other first course of gamberi rossi with small slices of squab, carrots, leek, and fennel covered with black truffle was terrific. The gamberi were so fresh, they seemed to disappear in our mouths. Another melt-in-your-mouth dish was the faraona or guinea hen in a balsamico sauce with green peppercorns and a radicchio soufflé accompanied by two bon-bon wrapper pieces of pasta filled with beet. Our free-range venison with pea pods and a Sicilian herb called “baie” that came with morels and soft polenta was in keeping with the succulence of the other masterly dishes. Whether it was the luck of the draw or a chronic weakness of the restaurant, our desserts, which we took in the large, airy salon that faced the lake, were without much interest. All I can recall, as we were probably too far gone with the help of our 1990 Ciacci Brunello di Montalcino, was one dessert made with a rice ball that sounded much more interesting than what it tasted as, but marvelous gelato that came with each dessert. We then had a guided tour of the kitchen, which is one of the better-equipped ones I have visited. The gelato section particularly caught my interest since, as are the breads, the ice cream is made to order. Before we left we spent a few minutes surveying the array of products that Vissani has for sale. Our maitre d’hotel gave us what turned out to be delicious confitures. We intend for our names to be in the reservations book before next summer is out. I can’t, of course, know if the next meal will be magical as this one was. One aspect that surely won’t change is the feeling of dining at the top echelon regardless of the country. While my wife and I were acutely aware of the lapses in taste of the interior design and accoutrements and accessories, we felt Ristorante Vissani to be a privileged place. For foreign tourists Vissani has the disadvantage of being a long drive from Rome and Florence. But the Cathedral in Orvieto is spectacular, and given its opulent façade and richness in major works of art, is one of the more memorable in Europe. Coupled with a visit to Vissani, it could well be worth spending one less day just about anywhere else.

Thanks you so much, GG. Slow Food has published an English edition of their Italian cheese book ("Cheeses of Italy"?) that is a good ploace to start to learn about them, although like every book oj the subject, you often can't find the exact variety you just came in contct in. Yet there must be close to 200 that they cover. There is some sort of artisinal cheese production activity being done by the younger generation in France, though to what extent I don't know. You see them at the various markets, but not in large numbers. I guess the business isn't exactly a cash cow.

Last spring I was in New York City's most revered cheese shop and could not find a single cheese I wanted to buy. Every one was either pasturized or aged beyond its optimum period. I like buying the Parmesan cheese at Di Palo's, but other than the odd goat cheese that tastes like it has escaped the US Customs, I don't buy cheese around here. I also don't like to be put in the position of having to buy more cheese than I want, which is always the case since I don't know of any shop that generally cuts cheese by hand except Di Palo's. Some don't do it at all. The best cheeses are young ones; French goat, Reblochon, Camembert, etc. that you can't get here unless it's contraband. I also don't think the French are taking great pains in ageing cheese like they used to. If you want impeccable cheese, then you have to live in France and order the stuff at high prices from a guy like Bernard Antony, although there are some cheese shops left that really care, but none around the Cote d'Azur. Still, some of the best cheese around is from Italy. Finding a great cheese tray in a restaurant in Italy is a joy. People don't realize that the cheese varities in Italy are close or equal to what it is in France. So many surprises and varieties to discover.

For me an organic restaurant is one that lives and breathes, that tells a story, or shows us a facet of human nature we might not readily see in the world in general. It’s unpredictable where you might experience this in your restaurant comings and goings. It can happen in any kind of restaurant, but not in every restaurant. Also, a neophyte or insensitive diner might miss such themes altogether. What I like about eating in Italy is the immense variety of restaurants that there is once you go beyond the heavy touristy cities and regions. This diversity shows itself not just in atmosphere and what you can eat, but the personal dynamics (which are often more pronounced and memorable because more often it’s a member of the family who is serving you); the vibrant life of the dining room that Italians have a knack for creating; and that special theme or story you take away with you. Sometimes a theme needs more than one restaurant to become apparent. In Venice, though with an admittedly tiny sample size, I learned first-hand what everyone says: namely that thanks to tourism Venice is not a good dining city. I am now certain that you can exhaust the supply of good restaurants there in a matter of days if you take the time to “do the research”. Della Marisa was our most satisfying, delightful and memorable meal in Venice. Had we gone to Harry’s Bar, I doubt we would have eaten better at four times the price: thus a reinforcement that the best restaurant in town doesn’t have to be the most expensive, or, for that matter even expensive. Al Gondoleria, best known for its fegato alla Venezia was as touristy as a gondola ride itself. The liver was overly-sweet and heavy-handed. The food came too fast, besides, although our two young and attractive servers were unfailingly nice.. Most satisfying were the two ice cold bottles of San Pellegrino, which, in our very-dehydrated state because of the walking around we had to do to get to the restaurant, that we knocked off in ten minutes.. Da Fiori has wonderful seafood among which we can count the best soft-shell crabs we ever had. The owner, however, should disappear at meal times. When we phoned to ask if we could arrive later than we had booked, he asked us if we wanted to cancel instead. He elicited no interest at all in his customers, and this attitude infected the men who served us. It’s a cold place, that Da Fiore, but a good one if you want to hide in your shell. The Sultan of Dining apparently had a nice chat with the boss, but after having to hire a water taxi from our hotel far out in the lagoon to get to the restaurant (and a hard one to find, at that) during the one torrential rainstorm of the summer, we were in no mood to try to lick the master’s boots. As good as it is, I would like to know how Patricia Wells gets to name Da Fiore the best restaurant in Italy. How many others in Italy has she been to? If there’s a bad apple in every bunch, then R.W. is entitled to a bum steer every now and again. While Trattoria Laguna is not in Venice, but rather on a long peninsula that extends from the mainland, stopping short of Venice, it’s okay, I figure, to consider it a Venetian restaurant. It indeed is reachable by a 35-minute vaporetto ride from near San Marco and either a 10-15 taxi ride or, in our case, a free lift from the restaurant owner’s son , who met us at, and returned us to, the Punta Sabbioni vaporetto station. Yes, it was Apple of the Times’ glowing review of Trattoria Laguna that had us devoting an entire afternoon to dining there. It was our misfortune, however, to experience the motif of a restaurant that tries too hard. During our SUV ride to the restaurant, it appeared we would the beneficiaries of a memorable dining occasion. We learned a lot about fish in the lagoon, when the best time to have them were (not when we were there, but in November, which the natives say is also the best time of year generally to be in Venice) and the restaurant procured its fish at the night time professional market in the Tronchetto secton of Venice, not at the Rialot market. Unfortunately our visit didn’t work out as anticipated. Father and son tried hard to please us, and perhaps we might have appreciated their efforts a bit more if there had been more than four people dining in the dining room. The father tried some showmanship and cutting up, which is always a bad sign. We received plate after plate of fish, not much of it from the lagoon and some of it such as smoked salmon not even from Italy. We suspected that the low turnover in clients compromised the freshness of the fish. In fact, the son pretty much conceded that although Apple’s review was useful, the restaurant’s position of being too far from Venice and in a desolate area in terms of tourists, business often wasn’t so good. We left so stuffed that realizing we would never be hungry enough for dinner, we were forced to postpone until next time our visit to alla Testieri. But we’re planning to return in November, just like the natives told us we should.

Piragde, I am sure you are right. Bux, just make sure your hotel books you a table as soon as possible. Edward Behr wrote that he had meat at della Marisa because it was a Monday when he dined there.. Now, however, the restaurant is closed on Mondays. If they serve meat, I would love to know when. I neglected to ask.

They must be jumping the gun. since Vittorio's daughter told me that September was the opening time for the facility that will also be a 10-suite hotel and the new restaurant. I suspect the old man has very mixed feelings. His original restaurant has a certain feel and atmosphere that I am going to missed. It has a spit and polish without being overtly elegant; a real old-time Italian gastronomic temple, if you call 1962 old time. I won't be going until November at the earliest, so maybe you can be the first to report on it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the gastronomic experience is of the same level. By the way, it's five minutes from the Bergmo Airport, which isn't that far from the center of the town.

I have been having web access problems; hence no posts. I am in Corsica using a French keyboard which slows me up. Cy, the boat ride is nice, especially after dinner. Water taxis run about 60 euros. I will get into Trattoria Laguna later. It was not very good.

Having arrived yesterday at the Terme di Saturnia, a spa-hotel in the south of Tuscany, my wife and I are heading into the home stretch of a two-week trip through Italy that is half for dining and the rest for shopping and sightseeing.. We may be in Etruscan burial grounds territory, but in the face of many copious meals, our appetites still live on. The purpose here is not to give a stop-by-stop, blow-by-blow account, but rather a practical overview that I hope be useful before much of the information gets out of date. We started out in the picturesque Ligurian town of Camogli, a highly picturesque and charming place, a kind of Portofino for the lesser-heeled. A day later we decamped in Mantova for a night to visit a restaurant nearby that had been a long- unaddressed entry in our restaurant desiderata. Then we spent four days in Venice and one outside of Padova before heading to the less-visited Romagna part of Emilia-Romagna. We wasted a night at a hotel near Cortona that we bailed out of a night early and pushed on to Orvieto to dine at a restaurant between it and Todi that had been on our hit-list for close to 20 years. Ahead of us remains three nights on the Tuscan Coast in Punta Ala, our launching area to revisit the great restaurant Gambero Rosso. This and a dinner tonight at da Caino are the last two big-name restaurants of our trip. Like every extensive culinary trip ever taken regardless of where it leads, not a lot of stops turned out to be in tune with expectations. In Venice we booked della Marisa well in advance as advised by Edward Behr in his Venice issue of “The Art of Eating” five years ago. He wrote more about this restaurant than any other in Venice, which led to our high expectations. Still, the visit in total exceeded even those. From San Marco, the boat ride is thirty minutes as you pass through the day-tripper stops of the Piazzale Roma garages and train station. When we did dismount at the Tre Archi stop on the Canareggio canal, we saw on the other side an array of parasols alongside the water, one of which had the logo of a commercial ice cream maker. Not knowing if this was della Marisa or a run-of-the-mill café, we crossed the bridge to the other side of the Canareggio. A decorated wood plaque announced the restaurant where a waitress seated us at the far end of the rather long row of those ubiquitous cheap, industrial tables of brushed aluminum and matching chairs. I next told her colleague, an attractive young girl who may have been Marisa’s granddaughter, that we wanted to be where we could observe the life of the restaurant. She obliged us, and we watched. People from the neighborhood passed by, as did a few tourists who asked about a table and were turned away. Most of the clients were regulars and clearly of a humble existance. We struck up a conversation, limited as it was given the language problems, with a gondoliera and his wife. They told us their son also was a gondolier and that Marisa’s son was a colleague in the profession. Any worries we had of being discriminated against for being non-Venetian were quickly allayed when we saw that every client was having the same meal. To begin, our waitress brought five small plates of appetizers, each except for perfectly-executed polenta (shiny and appropriately rubbery on the outside and soft inside) that were surely made with seafood from the lagoon. These were mussels with breadcrumbs, cheese and herbs; bacala with mayonnaise; arugula, olive oil and red peppers with cold, marinated branzino; and baby octopus in an intensely-flavored tomato sauce. Marisa followed on with a seafood lasagna unlike we have ever tasted. She filled it with branzino, mussels, clams, small shrimps and noodles and covered it with olive oil and a béchamel sauce. A light and delicate fritto misto of squid, shrimp and baby sole that my wife noted was sweet as sugar and light as air, maybe even the equal to the one at da Vittorio, finished the savory part of the meal. Only the dessert of a mascarpone spiked with brandy and rhum was ordinary. Just before dessert, Marisa, rather plump with short-cropped hair and wearing a cheap green floral dress, came out to talk with our neighbors, the gondoliera and his wife. We joined in as best we could and found out that she is 69 years old and, fortunately, has a daughter who works with her in the kitchen. It was clear to us that she loves her work, doesn’t care about money and probably is the recipient of the best and most desirable seafood in the city. At 35 euros a person with a carafe of serviceable wine included, della Marisa is a gift and just may provide the most dining pleasure in Venice.

For several years now, Madrid has played second fiddle to Barcelona as Spain’s leading restaurant city. But can this truly be so? My wife and I had two magnificent meals that exceeded any we have had so far in Barcelona. Combarro, the Gallician seafood restaurant, has seafood as pristine as we have ever had. The cigales del mar were even better than those at Rafa’s. I also ordered some percebes or barnacles that I adored, acquired taste that they may be for many people. The other diners had baked turbot that they couldn’t stop talking about while my sea bass served with olives and potatoes was delectable. Only Susan’s giant crab, good as it was, failed to be judged by us as in the top category, but hardly because of any lack of freshness. There are two locations for dining at Combarro. We chose the more upscale one on Ortega y Gasset. The food is rather expensive and the atmosphere solidly comfortable with the trappings and self-promotional accoutrements typical of large luxury restaurants that have been well-established for decades. Situated on a quiet residential street between the Banco de Espana and the Museo del Prado, Viridiana is appropriately an exercise in the art of eating that won’t break the bank. The moment I laid eyes on the amply-girthed, middle-aged chef who greeted us and eGullet forum host Pedro Espinosa at the door of Viridiana, I suspect something quite good was about to unfold.. It was comforting to look at Abraham Garcia since I had the notion, false as it turned out, that we might be in for one of those meals with lots of one-bite samplings of nonsensical food. Instead, Abraham was my kind of chef: a somewhat aloof, dogmatic and devoted artisan without pretense and apparently uninterested in what the culinary media thinks about him. Without a Michelin star (although it used to have one), Viridiana has to be one of the more overlooked and underrated restaurants in the world. In fact, what he cooked made me think of Pierre Gagnaire when he was in St. Etienne in the 1980s and Claude Peyrot of the defunct three-star Le Vivarois in Paris. “Crazy cooking” is what they called it back then, but the passing of time has made it closer to the traditional. Abraham offered it up in a chef’s tasting menu, but like the one tasting menu at da Vittorio in Bergamo, this meant nearly a la carte portions. Just to give you a scintilla of an idea where his cooking is at, we began with the best gazpacho of my life; intense, a bit creamy and opaque. Meatballs of boar in lentils flavored with cinnamon was delightful, while a duck foie gras served on vanilla-flavored toast with a tomato chutney and wild grapes was as good as one would find virtually anywhere. A dozen snails, each served with garlic, green peppers and herbs; a fried egg with a mushroom puree along side; and sensational pre-sale lamb from the Pyrenees rounded out the part of the meal that wasn’t seafood. There we found Garcia’s two fish dishes somewhat less exciting, Desserts, however, ended the meal with a flourish: “Los helados y sorbets con su Aguardiente (brandy) and a brochette of grilled tropical fruits Viridiana is a theme restaurant in its décor; a homage to the famous 1961 Luis Bunuel film of the same name. The room is decorated with stills from the film while the overall feel is that of a personalized thoughtfully-put-together idiosyncratic bistro. Also like da Vittorio, Viridiana is a throw-back to the days when chefs cared about the gastronomic enlightenment and well-being of its clientele. Da Vittorio was my personal discovery of 2004 and, so far, Virdinia is the one this year. Thanks again, Pedro.