Osterie d'Italia by Slow Food

[Steve Plotnicki]

Well that might make it interesting to me, since I have never had it before. But it sounds like redundancy might prevent a preponderance of knowledgable people from saying it is interesting in an objective sense. Unless, something about it was so compelling and unsual that it stayed eternally interesting. Kind of like Starry Night can be interesting no matter how long you stare at it. But I submit that Penne with Sage and Cheese, is not the equivelent. But the Raviolo Aperto at San Domenico, well now maybe you're on the right track.

[Claude Kolm/The Fine Wine Review]

Claude - Well everything at the winery tastes 10 times better.

It was at a restaurant. We ordered it because another friend in the trade, whose taste I regard very highly, had been raving about the wine.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Well I've had that wine 3-4 times, and it has always been diluted as far as Latours go. One drinks Latour for the power. The wine I had last week had anything but power.

[Claude Kolm/The Fine Wine Review]

Plenty of power, beautifully precise definition. Given the size of Latour, one wonders, different lots?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Could be a function of how the importer shipped them. I guess I need to go to Bordeaux to drink the wine. That ain't a half bad idea.

[Craig Camp]

We better all taste it again. Steve, what time can we come over?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Craig - You know you're welcome anytime. In fact I'll make us all a Latour fest and grill up some Lobel's steaks. I think I have '55, '59, '61, '64. 66, '70, '78, '82, and '90. No '75 though. Someone will have to provide it. I used to have '95, but I sold it.

I have to say that I am drinking a 2000 Soumade Rasteau Cuvee Confiance as I am writing this and the wine is DEE-licious. I thought it would be overextracted and oaky, but there is no oak at all. And it's extracted, but not over. Great mineral quality to it.

[marcus]

I have the 75 Latour and I think that it's a genuinely near great wine. Very impressive. Much better than the 78 which seems to sell for a bit more.

Edited April 8, 2003 by marcus (log)

[Steve Plotnicki]

Marcus - Then I guess you'e going to have to crack open one of those "near-great" 75's . I used to like the '78 mich more then I do now. It has lots of power. But it always seems a bit underripe.

[Craig Camp]

Marcus - Then I guess you'e going to have to crack open one of those "near-great" 75's  . I used to like the '78 mich more then I do now. It has lots of power. But it always seems a bit underripe.

By under-ripe do you mean a herbal 'green' bitterness?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Green yes, herbal no. I think they picked too soon. Or it was a cool summer etc.

[Manu]

I had many wonderful meals listed in the Osteria D'Italia guide. I don't think this book is about home cooking at all, but it is also not about strongly French influenced Italian restaurant. The book is about a new group of restaurants that want to give new life to Italian cooking. Top ingredients, creative chefs, the pride of the owners of doing something special with the food they offer, and often togher with great wine lists. Very often the restaurants listed in this guide are popular places for Italian, and you can also touch a little Italian culture there.

Yes, the guide is only in Italian so far, and there is no rating, but I guarantee you that they only list very interesting places. To understand what type of ambiance you will find I usually check the average price for a meal listed at the beginning of each restaurant description. I also look for the wine and cheese symbol that means that the restaurant has a great wine list and a fantastic cheese card. Few key words you need to know in Italian if you are consulting this book are "chiuso" (closed) and the days of the week (lunedi 'Mon', martedi 'Tue', mercoledi, giovedi, venerdi, sabato and domenica), because every restaurant in Italy has one or two rest day a week.

[Steve Plotnicki]

The book is about a new group of restaurants that want to give new life to Italian cooking

You mean like the entry for La Pesa in Milan which is marked novita? That's a 100 year old tratorria that cooks in about a traditional (home cooking) style as you will find in the entire city of Milan. So there has to be other dimensions to the book then you are realizing.

I just thought that it's a listing of restaurants that adhere to a principal of cooking with the freshest, and best quality ingredients. It didn't make a difference if they were modern or traditional. But it seems to be limited to tratorrias, which is home style cooking. It might be interesting home style cooking, but it is not high cuisine, which is the distinction we were trying to draw between the Osterie and the Gambero Rosso.

[Manu]

I think that novita' only means that it is a new listing not necessarly a new restaurant. I of couse have to admit that I did not eat (unfortunatelly) to all 1700 restaurant presented in this guide, and I am sure that some are featuring somewhat more a homecooking then other. The ones that I ate are not a good representation of a Italian homecooking. I can give you a couple of examples: Osteria dell'Arancio in Grottamare, near Ascoli Piceno and La Mescita in Pisa. My grandmother did not have aged cheese in caves.

[peterpumkino]

To find a chef that can elevate a dish that has been done a million times is an unbelievable thrill to me. This constant flagellation of semantics and definitions seems to ignore how the food actually tastes.

Craig, I couldn't agree more. Some of the home-style cooking is not interesting, it's amazing! It's amazing that something that you can have every day and is pretty average can be like honey in the hands of a good chef. I really don't know how the Italians do it!

Steve, with 7 seperate appetizers and 3 seperate pasta dishes don't you think that notwithstanding the fact that I was in a 'rustic' place there would be some 'very interesting' food (your definition).

Apart from anything else Steve have you actually HAD home-style cooking in Italy. One of the best meals I have ever had lasted 4 hours and was in a converted farmhouse of a friend whose complete family came and everyone cooked one dish each. This was Michelin 4-star, very interesting encompassing, as it did, 200 years of Italian cuisine. Literally unbelievable.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Steve, with 7 seperate appetizers and 3 seperate pasta dishes don't you think that notwithstanding the fact that I was in a 'rustic' place there would be some 'very interesting' food (your definition).

No. Good yes, even great. Interesting no.

Experimental food is interesting. Unusual techniques or unusual ingredients when applied to traditional dishes can be interesting too. But a better prosciutto isn't interesting. It's just better. In fact, you lessen greatness when you try and misppropriate language. Bistecca Fiorentina is a glorious thing to eat. But to call it interesting is an inaccurate description of the dish.

[Craig Camp]

But to call it interesting is an inaccurate description of the dish.

Why? It is always interesting to someone who has never had it. It is also interesting if you have had it 1000 times and this is the best one you ever tasted.

[Claude Kolm/The Fine Wine Review]

Green yes, herbal no. I think they picked too soon. Or it was a cool summer etc.

Lots of 1978s had problems with uneven ripening of the grapes on the bunch. In Burgundy, today, they'd triage. In Bordeaux back then, not.

Edited April 9, 2003 by Claude Kolm/The Fine Wine Review (log)

[Bill Klapp]

Steve, you are truly amazing, and I mean that in the worst possible sense of the word! I am new to egullet, but your recent posts have inspired me to research your older posts (alas, not all 5,500 of them) on a variety of subjects, just to get a sense of your overall perspective (or lack thereof). I have concluded that you are best described as a "21st-Century Ugly American".

Craig gives you entirely too much credit when he links you to the "temples of haut cuisine". Anyone who believes that the inclusion of pasta in a national cuisine is a fatal drawback to that cuisine ever achieving greatness, that "stinco and osso buco" are the proper measure of Italian culinary technique and that the pinnacle of technique should be to cook a bunch of things together in an effort to create a new taste, rather than enjoying the taste of "one ingredient at a time" is, to my mind, clueless respecting great food. Your most telling statement for me was that you prefer not only French, but also AMERICAN, cuisine to Italian. Clearly, you are more comfortable in France than in Italy, and the reason is simple-the French have now realized their own worst nightmare: they have become American, or at least, adopted most of our least desirable attributes. Gone is the 3-hour lunch in Paris, in favor of grabbing a sandwich and staying at your desk to make more money. Gone is the ubiquitous artisanal baguette in every corner bakery, in favor of cheaper, mass-produced loaves with a higher profit margin (but I grant you, still better than Wonder Bread!). Been in a French supermarket lately? for a frozen moment, you can easily believe that you are in suburban New Jersey! My Parisian friends tell me that the best new restaurants in Paris are either ethnic or Northern Italian, and one went so far to suggest that we open a chain of soul-food restaurants in France together, in that he believes that the French would go wild for fried chicken, collards and cornbread. And the recent French assertion that they should get a full share of the spoils of the Iraq war after trying to keep it from happening because of their fear that it would destroy their secretive but lucrative contracts with the regime (including weaponry, of course) makes the movie "Wall Street" seem like a fairy tale by comparison! Perhaps your most telling precept is your unwillingness to cope with restaurant guides that do not provide you with a simple number by which to judge how good your food is. Even Robert Parker, the guru of numerical evaluation, cautions you against the failure to heed his written notes. All of this is symptomatic of the typical American approach to life: tell me what to eat, read, watch, whatever, and then serve it up to me without delay, in the most convenient manner.

We agree on this-Italy rarely does that for you. Italy requires that you exhibit some fundamental intellectual curiosity about things Italian, good and bad. Italians unfailingly love foreigners who love what they love, and they will go to any length to show that type of person the very best of what Italy offers. I know-I am one of those fortunate few who has learned to set aside most of my American bias and to go with the Italian flow. They do not consider it a virtue to speak English, but they will do everything in their power to help you communicate in Italian if they sense your love and respect for their language. They could give a rat's ass that you are inconvenienced by their inability to speak English. They have little interest in things American, for the simple reason that there are few things in America that do not have better counterparts in Italy. (How about some Kraft Parmesan, domestic prosciutto or California Sangiovese?) In point of fact, when the Italians bend themselves to the American culinary will, as they do in Rome, Florence and Venice, it all but destroys the local heritage.

But back to food. Given the diversity of styles of food preparation on earth, it is hard to imagine that all great chefs could agree on a single set of principles, but the evidence is that they do. If something is flavorless no matter what you do to it, don't eat it (or eat it to survive in an emergency). Otherwise, seek out the freshest, most flavorful, seasonal ingredients that you can find, and prepare them in a manner that maximizes the unique flavor of the ingredient at hand. Balance is all-important, so even though bearnaise sauce and lump crabmeat are both delicious, covering lump crab with bearnaise diminishes both (although it does create a "new flavor"). The Italians have known and practiced this simple concept for centuries. Unlike us, they use only a little sauce on pasta because great pasta has a taste and texture that should enhanced, not obscured. In season, asparagus is offered as an entree, not a side dish, in many fine Italian restaurants, and then with a little butter or oil and lemon to bring out its flavor. The asparagus are baked, rather than steamed or boiled, because they know that baking concentrates the sweetness and richness of fresh asparagus. And, by the way, so do the best French chefs. Ever hear of Alain Ducasse? Of course, he has now become a wealthy American matinee idol, in the very best French tradition, but when I last checked, his restaurants seem to be doing very well. His culinary style? Based upon the dominant style of the Italian Riviera (I say Italian rather than French because the excellent examples of the style are much diminished west of Monaco), which is to say impeccably fresh seafood, Ligurian olive oil and vegetables and, GULP!, pasta, all simply treated. No cooking stuff together until a new flavor emerges for that boy! Finally, I just wanted to remind you that Catherine de Medici not only taught the French how to cook, but also how to eat with some implement other than their fingers! I think you either need to sample the best that Northern Italian restaurants have to offer (I would gladly provide you with a foolproof list, but Tuscany doesn't count, by the way-their native cuisine, based upon beans in the old days, has been decimated by invading British and American tourists), or stay the hell out of the Italian kitchen...

[Steve Plotnicki]

Bravo. After all of that, it's still simplistic home cooking from chefs without much imagination.

[Craig Camp]

Bravo. After all of that, it's still simplistic home cooking from chefs without much imagination.

Are you sure that's what you feel? Perhaps you are missing something. So many disagree with you there may be something there to consider. It is possible that there is something in this type of cuisine that that you just can't feel?

[Bill Klapp]

Are you reading this, Alain, you simplisic, unimaginative home cook, you? Your own people are turning on you. First the contretemps at the U.N., and now this. Could another loss of a Michelin star be far behind? Worse, could the sales of Alain Ducasse cookbooks and memorabilia fall off at your restaurants?

[Steve Plotnicki]

Only the Italophiles disagree. To them, packaged prosciuttto that you can buy in the rest stop on the autoroute is "interesting."

Can you point to any independant literature that believes that Italian cuisine is cutting edge? Or how about you cite some cutting edge dishes from the restaurants that you like to tout in the Slow Food Guide?

It seems to me that Vedat had a fair rendition of what modern and "interesting" Italian food is. You didn't seem to be able to muster too much of an argument against his position. Well I'm standing behind him peering over his shoulder.

The funny thing about Bill's rant is that it is a typical distortion of reality based on a personal preferrence. It invokes the Italians don't care that they don't speak English because their country runs less efficiently, and they are happy about that standard. And it tries to imply that it is a correct standard. Yes, the streets on the Swiss side of Chiaso are clean and beautiful and on the Italian side it's a little grungy and seedy because our GNP isn't so good BUT WE LIKE IT THAT WAY DAMMIT.

Bill - You are barking up the wrong tree with Ducasse. If you read my musings on the French boards, I find Ducasse to be a bunch of hype. And I point to his attempted misapropriation of Italian cuisine in Monte Carlo as evidence of his lack of creativity.

You can't make Italian food "better" by talking about French food. You have to demonstrate that Italian cuisine is interesting and modern and not stuck in a 30 year old time warp.

Edited April 9, 2003 by Steve Plotnicki (log)

[Craig Camp]

Only the Italophiles disagree. To them, packaged prosciutto that you can buy in the rest stop on the autoroute is "interesting."

Can you point to any independent literature that believes that Italian cuisine is cutting edge?

It seems to me that Vedat had a fair rendition of what modern and "interesting" Italian food is. You didn't seem to be able to muster too much of an argument against his position. Well I'm standing behind him peering over his shoulder.

The prosciutto on the autoroute is very interesting by the international standards of expressway cuisine.

I believe that it is you that said the cuisine of France is in the doldrums. Italy is just starting to express itself. I would rather be on the way up than on the way down.

Vedat must be very uncomfortable with you looking over his shoulder. Give him some space.

[Steve Plotnicki]

I have to say that it was great stuff for packaged proscuitto. Better then the packaged stuff they have in NYC.

And why do you say that Italian cuisine is on the way up? And I'm not saying that it isn't. Just what evidence is there that it is?