robert brown

I buy it on line at minus8vinegar.com. It's all there. And it is great.

Fortedei, La Pineta must be a real gem. It's a spot I'll put in my restaurant desiderata. Your report on Gambero Rosso is even more dire-sounding than mine from last summer. Both visits we found Mr. amd Mrs. to be friendly and appreciative. Maybe he was having a bad day in the market. You can bet, though, that La Pineta just went into the computers of a dozen food/travel writers.

I knew it sounded familiar. I was only there this summer (San Vincenzo, Saturnia,etc.) !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanka for your reports, 40D. Keep 'em coming. Can you pinpoint Maremma? The name rings a bell.

Speaking of "Les Six",does anyone remember "Les Six de Bourgogne"?

I haven't had the chance to write about the three contemporary-cuisine meals I had in Italy recently at Villa Crespi, Cracco-Peck and Caffe Groppi. But what I took away from them was that no one country necessarily has a monopoly or part of an oligopoly on the so-called avant-garde. That a group of young chefs in France wants to expand its creative boundaries outside of France makes their purpose somewhat diluted. I, for one, would still eat this kind of cuisine in a country where the overall model of dining is more conducive to it, such as Spain and Italy. The problem that these French chefs have has to do with parsimony and taking short cuts than with some kind of loss of supremacy in the kitchen. As for the nouvelle cuisine chefs, they did at the outset share ideas and camoraderie, but this pretty much vanished by the end of the 1970s, or thereabouts.

Do they refer to the hands that feed them? How about a gourmand's manifeto to straighten these guys out?

Fengyi, thanks so much for your latest report. I'm willing to bet that our coverage of Piemonte is second to none, thanks to you and every one else who goes and contributes. Each of you have brought to my attention several restaurants I don't know.

I imagine that neighborhood restaurants should do normal, if not above-normal, business. Tourist restaurants or higher-price restaurants in hard-to-get-to locations or in neighborhoods that are middle-to-lower-middle class would likely feel the pinch. I'm thinking of WD-50 or fancier places in Brooklyn.

Fortedei, I can only tell you from looking at the bill that we had a Pinot Grigio (28 euros) and a Barbaresco (84 euros). The sommerlier proposed the former which was a new one on me, although I have only recently been a convert to the wine. The Barbresco also escapes me, but I would have remembered if it was from one of my guys. At that price it certainly wasn't Gaja. The great spaghetti dish was the same price as the Pinot Grigio and we had two truffle dishes "Ravioli di Carota al Forno (75 euros) and "Uovo al Vapore" for 66 euros. If you deduct the cost of the truffles and the above-average price for the red wine, I figure you can eat well and a la carte at Cracco-Peck for about 120 euros per person. Expensive, yes, but compared to restaurants in other world capitals, not so bad.

After sending a PM to Akiko titled "Cracco-Peck. What the Heck", I decided I may as well post it. Here 'tis: Dear Akiko, If you want to risk having about the worst service we ever had at a restaurant at that level, you very well could still end up having a stellar meal in terms of the food. As I wrote already, the spaghetti with coffee and sea urchin sauce is memorable and my wife's pork with, I believe, caramalized olives she found to be really fine. True our bill came to 600 euros exactly for four, but we had white truffles and good wines, neither of which are truly necessary. It's just not a place where you need to have truffles, which are expensive this year. I'm not a degustation fan, and it would be a shame to shortchange yourself with a small portion of a great dish. Service was both inept (several mistakes) and not friendly. Carlo Cracco, although spending a lot of time in the dining room with people he must have known, never even recognized our existance. At the end of the meal I had to tell the head waiter that he and his staff did a large disservice to a very good chef. I don't know what your other dining plans are, but Cracco-Peck is still a landmark of modern cuisine in Italy. Good luck. All the best, Robert

I raise my hand. I had dinner at Cracco-Peck on 11/18. I'll try to get around to writing something about it, but not until I finish my truffle post.

Russell, thanks for the kind words. I've compiled a bibliography or two in my day. I'm glad you are keeping the concept alive. For the time being, I wish I could say I could commit time to what would be a worthwhile endeavor, although I could contribute something on the fly, such as I am doing now. I'm wondering if we should concentrate on setting up a repository that would, as the great masscomm researcher George Gerbner put it, "grasp and retain" useful, fleeting information sources such as periodic literature (articles, fillers, tidbits,etc.) and web sites. In other words, make it unusual and even a bit quirky. I would hope we could store and present it on the site and hope that someone will volunteer to take in the information and organize it.

Vacherin you serve also with a spoon. There are all kinds of situations in France in which people serving me answer me in English when I begin by speaking in France. The service people at airport snackbars is but one example. It's possible that the moment it takes to untie my tongue at times or that I speak with a Western Massachusetts drawl may have something to do with it. But I find the practice prevalent on the Cote d'Azur. My favorite, though, and it seems to be a working class practice, is listening to people speak this kind of pidgin French to you in which they leave out words so as to speak to you in partial sentences. Translated it comes out as something like: "Dig here. Cover with skirt bottom of wall.. Then painting. Impeccable."

Here's a reprise of a matter I brought up in the pre-pubescent days of eGullet: Nine times out of ten a waiter in a restaurant in France will speak steadfastly to you in English even if your French is better than their high school English. I have yet to figure out why, although there is in all likelihood more than one reason. These are some of the possibilities: 1. They are trying to make communication easier for you. 2. They don't want to listen to your soiling their mellifluous language with your flat, constrained American accent. 3. It's a form of intimidation. 4. It's a power play. 5. They want the opportunity at your expense to improve their English. 6. They really believe their English is better than your French. (The worst is that it is, but it doesn't seem that way to you).

What happened to Sergio? Regardless, thank you so much for taking the time to write these very good and informative reports.

Before launching the project, I believe we should establsh parameters and categories so that people don't post into some structureless cauldron, so to speak. For instance, do we limit the information to that which is written in English? Do we divide the categories in terms of epochs (say pre-1900 and post 1900)? I imagine we would have basic categories such as "Recipes", "Produce/Agriculture/Gastronomic Landscape", "Chefs, Cooks Biographies" and so forth. What restrictions do we make on format; i.e. do we exclude trade catalogues, brochures, guidebooks, and other kinds of ephemera? Also, do want to think about publishing this as a book, in which case we could use the site to gather the information as opposed to organizing it in a cohesive manner as we go along.

This would be a service to the nation; in fact both nations. It's a worthy project, but one, alas, that once gotten going never ends.

Alberto, thanks for the recap. It just makes me realize (and nearly everybody else) how rich the restaurant scene is in Italy. I am not the least bit familiar with any of the one-stars you listed, even the one outside of Alba. Also, I never noticed the stars in red. Where do they appear in list form?

My best gelato memory is going almost ten years ago to Sergio (I believe that's right) at one level from the top of San Gimignano on the left side of the piazza. We used to take it out and bring it to the place we rented. It sticks in my mind as my reference for gelato in Italy. Please let us know if you can visit there.

Doc, there is a qualitative (and price) difference between lunch and dinner at dalla Marisa. I don't know if it's the same in the high season. It was more working class this time. I think we and a couple who translated our questions to Marisa were the only middle-class people I noticed in the two seatings. Book for dinner is my advice, just to be safe. Thanks for the kind words and to Marc as well. Yes, the sea urchin spaghetti was wonderful, the little I managed to take from my wife. But there was really bad service at Cracco-Peck which I'll detail in the next few days. And Marc, your meal at Cesare sounded better than mine, though I still love it there. I think my report will be after the one with Cracco-Peck. Doc, where and when did you first meet up with sea urchin sauce? It sounds modern Spanish.

We opened in Venice, we next played Verona, but instead of on to Cremona, our next jump was to Milan and after backtracking to Bergamo, we finished in Piemonte and Trecate. That was our trip; me, my wife, her cousin Rick, his wife Barbara and, after they left for home, Vedat and Linda, the Sultanic couple of dining. What a trip it was, too. Ten days of exciting, if sometimes imperfect, eating and drinking from the humble local trattoria to the heights of luxury in Italy’s newest Relais Chateau-Relais Gourmand, and all manner of restaurant in-between. The themes of the journey that jump into my head with the least effort are “The Revenge of the Sea Urchin” and dining volatility. The prickly-shelled creature showed up in four restaurants, always finding itself incorporated in a sauce. When added to spaghetti along with coffee at Milan’s quasi-avant-garde two star Cracco-Peck, it resulted in the dish of the trip as far as my wife was concerned. As for the more significant dining volatility factor, I can best sum it up by saying that restaurants that thrilled us in the recent past let us down this time, while others provided some nice bits of unexpected delights. For our first dinner in Venice, we took a tip from the cellist-turned-impresario Julian Fifer, co-founder of Orpheus and the man behind the new Venice Music Festival. In an e-mail he told me that Osteria Santa Marina was one of the two or three best restaurants in Venice. As a result, we asked the concierge to cancel us out of Al Covo, which may have been a good thing to have done. The Santa Marina appears to be a laggard in terms of recognition, but undeservedly so. This is Venetian dining at the top echelon. Nothing fancy here in terms of décor; just a tastefully understated trattoria with mostly fish, even though we thoroughly enjoyed guanciale in a soupy polenta. (Here I should note that we took no notes on our trip, not wanting to interrupt the social dynamics and conviviality of our meals. Diner’s notes are less important than overall impressions anyway, as the primary purpose is to sort out the good restaurants from those not so good). We had no whole fish dishes, but a tuna carpaccio was magnificent, maybe the best carpaccio of any kind we ever had, and my wife was bowled over the soft-shell crabs from the lagoon in a sweet and sour sauce. Most of the other dishes we had, including octopus and a couple of pastas, were wonderful.. Rarely would I do anything that made it impossible to go to a good restaurant, but given the opportunity to go a performance of the rarely-performed opera La Juive at the recently put-back-together Teatro La Fenice, I made an exception. Because of the late exit time, the concierge booked a table at Le Bistro de Venise. I need say nothing more than to avoid it at all cost regardless of its guidebook citations. It tried to play every tourist restaurant trick known to man. We sensed enough at the outset to limit the damage, but if I had it to do over, we would have gone to a nocturnal pizzeria or cafe instead. Once again we took the 35-minute vaporetto ride from San Zaccheria to Ponte Tre Arche to visit Marisa, the First Lady of Venetian Cuisine. We did it with the hope of recapturing one of our favorite dining experiences of this past summer, a meal at dalle Marisa. We had no inkling, and no guidebook or report ever mentioned it, but at midday out of season, the place is akin to a canteen for laborers. With a fixed meal without dessert for 15 euros, (half the price of dinner) the trip out there and back was a total loss. Two preparations of commercial penne (a ragu sauce and zucchini, cream and Parmesan) and thin, bone-dry slices of roasted meat with very overcooked vegetables were barely edible. Lucky for me I’m not Japanese and didn’t have to live with loss of face, especially after the splendid recovery that evening with a dinner that was a true highlight of our trip. Nothing would delight me more than to find a restaurant outside of Italy that can provide as intense an encounter of eating seafood than does alle Testieri. No restaurant in New York comes remotely close, nor do the seafood palaces I have visited in Europe. Alle Testieri is tiny, holding about two dozen diners and a kitchen barely bigger than a lobster trap. Yet, we surely dined on a par with Barnacle Bill the Sailor in what was a virtually perfect meal that was slightly marred by an over-cooked branzino. One restaurateur told me this past summer that November was the peak period for Venetian seafood, a situation we took advantage of by being in the hands of alle Testieri’s main man Luca. From the lagoon we had fried soft shell crabs, razor clams and that remarkable delicacy schilie, the tiny grey shrimps that were in a linguine with the ubiquitous artichokes of our journey. Nullifying the overdone sea bass of the main course was a thick, long piece of monkfish that was the best one could imagine. The only dessert my wife recalls was the only one that didn’t appeal to her, a persimmon tart. I kept my three convives waiting at the door while I chatted with Luca in order to pick his brain about which other restaurants served impeccable local fish acquired on a daily basis. He grabbed the brochure of the loose association of Venice restaurants alle Testieri is a part of and circled Al Covo, Corte Sconta and Vini da Giglio. We went on to dine at several less-humble and more expensive restaurants in the week following, but to my thinking our dinner here may well have been the closest to a flawless meal of our ten days of dining. (Part Two: Verona, Milan, etc.)

Given the circumstances you write about, your second notion seems best. Florence has so much to see even if you have accumulated a week's worth of time there. If you have yet to visit Siena, that would seal the deal, I would think. If you are traveling by yourself, then nothing beats museum-going which is best done alone, lest you spend half the time looking at pictures and the other half making sure you haven't lost your mate.

It took seversal years for Guy Savoy to receive his third star, so I wouldn't bet against Roellinger. What about restaurants that might lose a star? Le Louis XV recently went through a period of losing, regainiing, losing, regaining. Ten years go, this restaurant was as good as it gets. Now you have a better chance for good luck playing internet poker.

What about all the people who go to Europe; i.e. France and Spain, two to four times a year, year after year, and almost never order a la carte? If you want to bring in other endeavors, then ordering tasting menus is like walking out of the theatre after the overture.