Slow food heaven
Peter Grogan tours Italy's regional, family-run eateries British foodies at large in Italy this summer had a distinct spring in their step. Their pesto-stained copies of Osterie & Locande dItalia had been given emeritus status on an upper shelf and replaced on tour by the first ever Englishlanguage edition of the book, which is better known here as the 'Slow Food' guide.
The emphasis is on informal, family-run restaurants serving traditional local and regional dishes, and inclusion is restricted to establishments where you can eat yourself comatose for under €35 a head (excluding booze). The moment you risk exceeding this amount, a kindly nonna will take away your cutlery and chide you gently. I made the last bit up, but the arrival of the English edition has brought sighs of relief from monoglots nationwide. It's so much better to know that the name of that intriguing-sounding local speciality translates as `pappardelle with duck-innard sauce' before it arrives on your table.
Il Nocchio in the little town of Vinci — birthplace of Leonardo — could, to all appearances, be any one of a hundred eateries that one passes in the course of a morning's motor tour in Tuscany. The reality — that it is, in fact, one in a hundred — is known only to the cognoscenti, be they savvy locals or the zealous possessors of the Osterie. The menu certainly doesn't give much away — nothing unusual in the antipasti or primi departments — and 'roast chicken' and 'grilled steak' among the secondi don't exactly set the pulse racing.
But wait, the swordfish carpaccio is silksmooth, smoky perfection, and did penne an-abbiata ever taste this richly smoky and intensely tomatoey before? A soup of 'spelt and vegetables' turns out to be such a one that if you could only ever eat a single thing for the rest of your life, it would make the shortlist.
And the grilled steak? A bistecca Fiorentina, of course, and as good as any I've had — and that's including at New York's favourite steakhouse, Peter Luger in Brooklyn. There they serve the same thing without calling it a B.E or a porterhouse steak — which is what it is, I think, as it's fillet on one side of the bone and sirloin on the other — and, like here, they'll sensibly slice up one of these Desperate Danfillers to feed two lesser mortals.
If the best thing you eat in a restaurant is the homemade potato crisps, it can only mean one of two things. Either it is a very bad restaurant, or the crisps are not only crisp but are also cut with such surgical accuracy and cooked with such fanatical precision that each sliver retains a central layer of melty loveliness that makes you try to eat your own weight in them. They may only just have pipped the Lilliputian take on fish and chips at Pistoia's aptly named Trattoria de la Abbondanza — salty marble-sized fritters of baccala served with little batons of featherlight fried polenta — but they were certainly helped up the rankings by what I suspect will be my only encounter with vitello tonnato. Confusingly, the wine list has on it only topnotch stuff at very restrained mark-ups.
In tiny Mazzolla, a corkscrew south of Volterra, the question is posed: 'How tiny does a village have to be before even one local crazy person is too many?' There's only one street, so even intermittent imprecations from the barking German dog-lady were ample for the outdoor lunchers at Alb ana. They serve a swoon-inducing dish of fettuccine with fresh tomatoes, walnuts, pecorino and chicory, and lots of sumptuous casseroles of local game, of which wild boar got the nod over deer, hare or pigeon. The puddings looked good but we didn't find out how they tasted as the service by then had become so traditional as to put us at risk of missing our plane south.
It must have been the gently chiding nonna of the Nota's day off when we lunched at La Torre, around the corner from Sorrento in Santa Maria dell'Annunziata, overlooking Capri. That chameleon island seems to change colour with every passing hour when viewed from the mainland and it had been through most of its wardrobe by the time we were served — gratis, naturalmente — our post-prandial limoncellos. Drowsy grunts of approbation from around the table clearly made a favourable impression, as several more homemade digestifs soon arrived to help blur the numbers on the bill.
Mind you, the restaurant does sport one of the guide's 'snail' awards — presumably for slowness above and beyond — and we had given the owner Tonino carta bianca to serve us whatever would make us happy. He did, and the melanzane parmigiana and the roast sea bream with fennel were among much else that will linger in the memory long after the pile of crumpled repossession orders is forgotten.
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