The perfect taste that spoils you for anything lesser

[jmolinari]

Sanfilippo

Anchoas en salazon de Cantabria

Bajada del Gromo, Argoños, España, Avrupa

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=43.455139,-3.484163

(+34) 942626005

I brought back six kilos of salt-packed anchovies from these guys, on a fall excursion to San Sebastian and environs for Pintxos. The factory can be dropped in only by prior arrangement, and you'll only see the front alcove. Speak Spanish. They had three kilo tins ready, but as I wasn't a restaurant and they didn't know my OCD tendencies first-hand, they insisted on repacking into eight anchovy tins. This also raised the price, though I didn't mind.

Print the map or get those GPS coordinates into your navigator, or you'll never find the place. There are people who've never heard of eGullet, who will be finding this thread on Google for these coordinates. Most of them will wish I'd written this in Spanish.

Unequivocally the best anchovies in the world. Oil-packed are for the understandably lazy, though they make most of their money this way, for tapas bars. They relayer the anchovies every two weeks during fermentation; pretty much everyone else just lets the stack go.

To lay down my cards, I am pro everything Italian, but I recognize that in many ways foodie Spaniards have it all over Italians.

It is worth the flight over for the anchovies alone, but if one is going to be this close to Santander (a distant second to San Sebastian on the Pintxos front) one must fill out one's luggage with turron from Monerrris. A different league from any other in Spain. And I'm not even that much into dessert.

Funny story....

I LOVE anchovies..good ones i mean. My parents who live in italy brought me some. My dad said "these are the non plus ultra of anchovies. Theyre amazing"...i thanked him and put them in my pantry...kind of forgot about them until reading this post, and thought "hrmm, that name sounds familiar".

Long story short, San Filippo are the anchovies my dad brought me, packed in salt. Opened them last night.

No point going on and on about them.

All i can say is "wow".

[Bill Klapp]

As odd as it sounds, good bread.

I grew up in NJ, eating the same bread from the same italian bakery from almost day I was old enough my Grandfather could get me to gnaw on a piece until I move away 17 years later to SC.

I have found a handful of places where I can truely enjoy the bread, and they charge an arm and a leg because it's "artesinal". No it's not, it's just making bread the way you're freakin supposed to! After much trial and error I've resorted to making it myself and have it right where I like it.

Same for Italian sausage. We got a few pounds a week from the same little Italian deli, made fresh by the Southern Italian sisters who owned it. Simple, proper, and delicious. Don't get me started on their Arancine made fresh every Saturday for lunch.

I'll shut up now, I'm getting hungry.

agree. Growing up in NJ spoils you for bread, and things made with bread (pizza).

Yep. Ate it the last time in 1968, and never found anything truly comparable until 2008, when I discovered a panetteria in Alba, Italy that makes a loaf they call "monaca" that is indistinguishable from classic Jersey Italian bread. Ironic, but it was the first time that I had eaten what I grew up knowing as "Italian bread" in Italy. I talked them into making me hoagie rolls out of the dough. Speaking of which, what about the stuff that inhabits that bread? Sausage, meatballs, hoagie fixings, cheesesteaks, pizza steaks. All of that just "meat" without the bread...

[Hassouni]

Going to Lebanon 2-4 times a year for the past few years has utterly ruined me on Levantine food eaten anywhere else. Persian/Iraqi food and Turkish food are sufficiently different that I'll still eat them in the US/UK/wherever, but I don't even bother with stuffed vine leaves, raw kibbe, hummus, pickled turnips, falafel, or anything like that when I'm outside Lebanon.