Andrew Fenton

Too bad, because I know you were looking for the real French-style service: professional, but oh, so very very disdainful. I KID, I KID. Sorry you had a disappointing dinner, David! But I agree that the Sofitel is very nice. I like the bar there, too; it's a good place to go for a drink. (And I mean, a drink, unless you're on an expense account.)

I heard the NPR piece too, and was really struck by this point. An interesting multicultural note to the cheesesteak's origins. I bet the Olivieris took orders in multiple languages, too...

Yum. You know, I think pasta alla Norma is just about my favorite pasta dish, and this looks great. I'm impressed by anybody who makes their own ricotta; that's hard-core. How long did you dry this cheese? You should totally keep drying some, to try to get a real grating texture. (And you should start trying to source some buffalo milk, so that whenever we do Campania, you can make ricotta di bufala. One of the greatest things I've ever tasted.)

Magnificent! I like the serving tray, too; is it Sicilian?

Last night I hosted a fairly large dinner party (nine people), featuring Sicilian dishes. Here's the rundown. Hors d'oeuvre. "The Tunisian-Sicilian War" (mechouia, egg, Sicilian tuna on grilled Italian bread). I spent a couple of weeks in Tunisia this summer and was struck by just how large a place canned tuna occupies in Tunisian cooking. Fortunately, I love canned tuna... Antipasto. Prosciutto and melon. Not Sicilian, but so good, especially if you can get a good melon (this one was pretty good, not exceptional) and good prosciutto (this was very good Parma ham). Pasta. Pasta 'ncasciata. This is the dish that obsessed me the most and gave me the most worry: the macaroni pie I'd been thinking about ever since posting that passage from The Leopard. As you can see from the photo, it has a filling of rigatoni, tomato sauce, eggs, prosciutto cotto (the same gran biscotto mrbigjas used for his braciolone), sausage (left over from a meal earlier this week), eggplant, and some caciocavallo. Here's the dish before cooking. It was big. Really big. That dish holds five liters. (Anybody want to come over for leftovers?): After coming out of the oven. Another problem with having such a large dish was that it needed a really long time to cook; a smaller version would have gotten browner, I think. Still, I carried it to the dining room and did the whole dramatic unveiling thing. And here's a view of the inside, after it'd been about half eaten. I don't think we got through more than two thirds of it. Funny how it is collapsing under its own weight: Most of the recipes I found for 'ncasciata are just for a baked pasta dish, but I wanted something more impressive. Gosetti has a recipe for a stand-alone dish, so I used a modified version of that, trying to aim for something close to the dish in the book. I made some changes: first, a rice covering instead of pastry (pastry would be more dramatic, but harder to deal with. I'll go for pastry next time). Next, I left out the chicken livers (some of my guests wouldn't eat them) and truffles (I am not a millionaire). And I skipped the sugar and cinnamon, as I just don't like the combination of sweet and meat. But on the whole, I'm pretty happy how it turned out. Pesce. Zuppa di pesce alla Catanese. From Clifford Wright, this has a more robust base than the Syracusan version I made earlier in the month. There's tomato paste, capers, basil and olives in there to fill out the flavors. I used shrimp, tuna and grouper. Tried to persuade the guy at the fish market to give me about a third of a pound of several fish, but he wouldn't. Bummer. Carne. Involtini di pollo. Everybody seems to be doing this, so why not me? Anyway, a satisfying dish, and as one of my guests remarked, the chicken's most noble calling in life is as a thigh-delivery system. This one has some good prosciutto, as well as a pretty standard breadcrumb-pecorino-herbs n' spices filling. I pan-fried them in advance and served them with a pan sauce: this let me avoid time in the kitchen... and by this point I'd had a few glasses of wine, so it was just as well! I served it with a contorno of capunatina di melanzane-- this one with no sugar, which I prefer to the sweet and sour version I'd made earlier in the month. (Yeek! The chicken in that second photo looks undercooked- that's an artifact of the photo-editing software, not the dish itself, I promise...) Dolci. A granita triumvirate (peach, watermelon and lemon), along with store-bought cookies (from DiBruno's here in Philly). And we opened up the limoncello that I'd started making at the end of June. At this point, a few other bottles of liquor started to make their way into the dining room as well... Wines. I wanted to focus on Sicilian wines, but inevitably colored outside the lines. Let's see; started with a very nice Frascati, moved on to a good insolia/grecanico (brought by mrbigjas), a bottle of 2004 "Archimede" nero d'avola, and then a negroamaro from Puglia: 2003 Castel di Salve Santi Medici. All in all, a lot of fun. And I have a ton of leftovers...

To be fair, you do see that kind of pizza in Italy. I used to eat it at pizza a taglio places all the time, sometimes with shaved parmesan (good) or tuna (better) added. Too bad the American places feel like they have to call it "bruschetta".

Waaaaah! Hathor, will you come over and clean my sardines for me? Pretty please? (And as long as you're at it, bring along some of those alici, 'kay?) Thanx.

For me, it was mainly the texture. And it didn't help that they're kinda cute. It's hard to anthropomorphize them, especially when those l'il severed heads are lying there in the sink, looking at me reproachfully.

Fortunately for me, the innards came out pretty easily; and a nice thing about sardines is that they practically scale themselves. And like Pontormo, I found them to be pretty stanky; glad it wasn't just mine. I expect grim, but figure I can stop the DVD to go wash the dishes. We should all know the source of our food and have some respect for the reasons so many Sicilians emigrated to North America and influenced how we eat. Absolutely; I'll watch it, but need to get myself psyched up first. Another movie (mentioned earlier in this thread) that shows the darker side of Sicily is Salvatore Giuliano, about the famous bandit and mafioso. Not much food (though a memorable scene of a non-Sicilian reporter buying granita), but it's exciting and engrossing, as well as a window into a fascinating period of Sicilian history. (Giulano lobbied Harry Truman to have Sicily made a US state. Weird.) Also, Excellent Cadavers is playing for a few more days at Film Forum in NYC. This is a documentary (based on the eponymous book by Alexander Stille) about the murders of Falcone and Borsellino by the Mafia. I hope that the movie gets a wider release; it's a story that is very important for all of us who care about Sicily to know about.

Gotta be true love. Anybody who makes a sardine and anchovy and onion-loaded dish on Valentine's day has to be pretty secure in their relationship...

Shouldn't the term be "food snob", not "gourmet snob"? "Snob" is usually combined with a noun modifier: so a music snob is snobbish about music, a wine snob is snobbish about wine, and so on. A gourmet snob, therefore, would be snobbish about gourmets, something quite different than what the author is describing. -Andrew, minor-league grammar snob

Well, if you're serious about CT, you oughta try the Goulash Place in Danbury. It's completely unassuming-- in a house in a residential neighborhood-- but the food is good and the place has a lot of character. We found the stuffed cabbage and the Transylvanian pork goulash to be especially worthwhile; and it's fun to order anything "Transylvanian". The beef stroganoff unaccountably came with a Kraft Single melted on top. I don't know why. A caveat: one of the owners died about a year back. If you're planning a trip, call ahead to make sure that they are still in business; here's the Sterns' page with address, phone, etc.

Indeed; a grease stain on the great tapestry of American cuisine. RIP. I'll definitely drink a toast to the gentleman today...

Word to that!

It sounds like you might be talking about Konoba Varos; that's where it was located. The fish market is great, by the way; it's small, but fun. Right, thanks for reminding me: we particularly liked Bobis, along the Riva. Great pastries there. Croatian coffee isn't so great in my experience (not enough Italian influence, I guess), but the Austrians left their mark on the pastry. Definitely. You sorta can't avoid it. The local archaeological museum is a little out of the way, but it's first-rate. And for real archaeology geeks, you can visit the ruins of Salona, the Roman provincial capital: it's about 20 minutes away on a local bus.

Hey, it's been a long thread! I can barely remember what I read last week. The most important thing is, you watched (and enjoyed!) the movie. Pontormo, I admit that I've never watched La Terra Trema. I'll also admit that I'm a little intimidated by it; two and a half hours of neorealist Sicilian fishermen... Well, it's a classic, and no doubt for a reason. I'll go rent it before the end of the month. Speaking of classics, I made pasta con sarde last night, and it was crazy delicious. I was a little short of sardines (underestimated the number I'd need to buy) and so pimped up the recipe with some tinned anchovies. Wow. It was like... you know how Randy Rhoads died? In a plane that crashed head-first into a tour bus? This was like that. Only for "plane" read "my tongue" and for "tour bus" read "umami". AND I LIKED IT. The downside-- and if a career in heavy metal has taught me anything, it's that there's always a downside-- is that working with fresh sardines is a little gross. I'm cool with cleaning fish, but sardines are tough to work with. There's something about the size of a sardine (plump, yet fits neatly in your fist) and texture (firm yet quivering) that makes me flinch a little when I rip its guts out and cut its head off. I plan to discuss this issue with my therapist, but in the meantime, maybe I'll use tinned next time. Also, I noticed that Batali's recipe called for caramelizing the fennel, then adding it to the sauce. That's a nice touch, except that next time I'll reserve a few sticks of fennel to add at the last moment, for texture's sake.

In size, sounds like an arancino; in filling, sounds like a suppli; in sum, sounds freakin' AWESOME...

I love Bologna too, it's pretty easy to mangia bene while you are there. Most civilized city? Yeah, but they have that nasty-political-like-to-send-mail-bombs thing going on as well.... True, true; also there are way too many scruffy university students. But also tons and tons of bookstores! And needless to say, some of the best cooking in Italy: what better measure of civilization?

Croatian food, at least on the coast, is pretty good. The main thing is seafood (especially grilled fish) which is quite good. Restaurants will show you several fish; you pick what you like and pay by weight. Octopus salad is a specialty; I ate a lot of that when I was there. There's also a strong Italian influence: smoked ham ("prsut"); risotto; pasta. Similarly, bean soup is a local specialty that I enjoyed; it's creatively called "fazul". I found it a little difficult to find actual restaurants; there are more bars & cafes than anything else, or fast food places (some of which are quite good). In Split, though, we liked Konoba Varos. Get the fish. I have some photos and discussion of my recent trip to Split (including food) here, here, here, and here.

Franci, I'll join the others in saying how lovely those involtini look. And that it's striking how many kinds of involtini there are in Sicilian cooking. With the partial exception of fish, Sicilians mostly don't seem to like "plain" cuts of meat; it's more likely to be wound up with some other stuff. I suppose it's a reaction to meat scarcity. But it's also a way to incorporate fantasia into cooking...

Okay, we've done South Philly Mexican; now here's a quick rundown of Jose's, in more northerly climes: I bet you can figure out the address from that photo... It's in a funny area; plenty of gentrification a'goin' on, which led to a distressingly large number of hipsters in the restaurant. There. That's my biggest complaint about Jose's. Other than that, it's pretty good. We'd been tipped off to Jose's by Rick Nichols's very handy rundown of Philly Mexican, which mentioned the chicken-lime soup as a standout. We called ahead to learn that he doesn't usually make it in the summer, but if he has some notice, he'll make up a batch. And here it is: Good broth, and I always like the addition of lime to soup. It's a pretty spicy soup, as well, and spicy in an interesting way: there's that hot sauce on top, but also lots of sliced ginger in it, giving it heat in two very different ways. Definitely call ahead for this soup; it's worth it. The rest of the menu subscribes heavily to the "tortilla with lots of stuff piled on it" school of Mexican food. Some standouts include the huaraches: So called, I assume, because it looks like a sandal. Huh. Anyway, I think we ordered this with chorizo, which was in no way sandal-like; it was pretty tasty. Grilled shrimp salad: Pretty self-explanatory, I think. If the photo is blurry, it's only an accurate representation of my state at this point in the evening, after drinking lots of tequila... Mushroom quesadilla: Again, pretty self-explanatory, except that I don't think that I've ever seen mushrooms (except for huitlacoche) in a Mexican restaurant. And finally, here's tostadas (or whatever: the key point is that they're corn tortillas) with carnitas: Chock-full of carnita-y goodness! Conclusions? Jose's doesn't break any new ground, but it's worth going to try the soup, if nothing else. edited to add: my, how nice it is to be able to be blasé about a good new Mexican place in Philly. Oh, how the city has changed over the last few years, and hooray for that!

My favorite restaurant in Bologna is Caminetto d'Oro. It's a Slow Food joint, with a menu split between very traditional Bolognese primi and more creative secondi. Among the primi, I'd recommend the tagliatelle al ragu (the composition of which changes seasonally) and the really wonderful tortellini in brodo. The best secondo I've had there is the polpetta: a meatball the size of an orange, topped with two fried quail eggs (cute!) in winter or mushrooms in spring. There's also a very good wine list with a focus on small producers and unusual and local varieties. There are also lots of good gelaterie in Bologna. I especially like Stephino; it's actually a Sicilian-style gelateria, so get the granita. If you're there in September, there should be a good selection of seasonal flavors. Have fun in Bologna! It's one of my three favorite Italian cities; it's charming and in many ways the most civilized city I've ever visited.

I can't definitively say what has caused the specialty coffee market to grow. I'm just saying that this is a solid piece of evidence against the notion that Starbucks drives independents out of business. You can hate Starbucks all you want (and I won't defend them); but you can't argue with numbers.

You mean, like naming a restaurant "Pasta Blitz"? I have an image of terrified patrons hiding under their tables, waiting for the approach of the dreaded Linguinewaffe...

Oh, there's nothing wrong with the Lady and Sons. I have no opinion on Paula Deen as a TV personality-- I've never watched her-- but I've eaten at the restaurant several times, and my in-laws have eaten her food for ages. I'm not going to claim that the restaurant has the best Southern food out there; it doesn't. But the buffet offers a good selection of reliably well-prepared dishes, and the restaurant is always crowded enough that there's a lot of turnover: everything stays fresh, crisp, et cetera. The downside is that there's usually a long wait, which I think turns off a lot of locals. Still, it's a good choice for downtown Savannah.