A Culinary Journey through Italy

The title of this post is not that accurate, as we didn’t cover the entire gastronomic landscape of Italy in this trip, especially the country side. Yes, it was in the original plan, but a last minute illness caused us to cut down a few precious days from our much awaited trip to the culinary capital of the world. So this post is really about our culinary experiences in Rome and Venice; thankfully these are two cities with some rich and diverse cuisines to offer, more than enough to fill a single post.

The first thing that struck us about the food in Italy was the freshness. Regardless of what we ate or where we ate it, the ingredients were as fresh as it could get, especially seafood. If a dish was made with previously frozen ingredients, it was called out clearly in the menu. Venice was our first destination and it was all about seafood, as one would expect from a city built on water. I think the best place to start our culinary expedition in Venice is their most famous outdoor market – Rialto Market.

Rialto Market – Venice

We got to the market in the afternoon, when the action was winding down, but there was still a nice crowd hanging around. This is where the locals shop, I read that one must always haggle over the price of the seafood here. We found so many varieties of vegetables in the market, so there was no surprise that the restaurants in Venice offer so many vegetarian options. Almost all of the restaurants had an antipasti plate of grilled vegetables to offer, in addition to the salads and sautéed greens and not to mention the pizzas and pastas with various vegetable toppings.

We found these strange looking white disks immersed in water with the sign that says “Fondi” in many stalls; but we didn’t know what these were till we found the preparation of “fondi” behind another stall.

So it turns out that Fondi is artichoke slices. Apparently it was artichoke season and it is a delicacy. We found the sautéed artichokes in many restaurant menus. Simply sautéed in Olive Oil with some parsley, these were just delicious!

I was surprised to find persimmons in the market, as I was under the false impression that Persimmons were of Asian origin, but apparently it is grown in southeast Europe as well. Greeks call it the Fruit of the Gods and I agree, we bought many from the market and took back to our room for an after dinner fruit fix.

The seafood variety available in the market was just mindboggling! One of our favorite dishes in Venice were what they call “Fried Little Fish” and we found so many types of “little fish” here at the market. We were so tempted to pick some up and cook at home as were staying in a condo with a small kitchen, but there were so many restaurants to explore in Venice that we decided against it. Wish we had a little more time in Venice to do both!

The not-so-little fish were abundant too, sea bass, gilt head, eel, salmon to name a few we found in the restaurants. These were normally served grilled or fried whole or sliced.
 
  

All varieties of shellfish were seen there, we tried everything but crab in Venice, a fact I just realized! Oh well, there is always a next time.

Spice Markets

For centuries, Venice used to be the port that supplied spices to the rest of Europe and a visit to the spice stores in Venice is a must. The aromatic spices are usually displayed in the windows and one can pick up many different types of dried mushrooms, oils and all colors and shapes of pasta you can imagine from these shops in addition to all the spices.

What We Ate in Venice

Venice was all about seafood for us. As I mentioned before we fell in love with the fritti plate they call Fried Little Fish. Lightly breaded and fried crispy, these are more addictive than potato chips. After a long walk we would just walk into a bar and have a quick snack of these with a pitcher of some vino or birra, depending on how thirsty we are. These are normally served with a polenta cake, one of the most common starches in Venice.

Another favorite was the grilled langoustine aka scampi – these lobster’s little orange cousins were so fresh and delicious, though a bit tricky to get the meat out of the shells. I don’t know if it is rude to eat with one’s hand in Italy, but we sure weren’t shy to use ours to get the last bit out of these suckers.

When the fried little fish were not available, we’d go for the mixed seafood platter. It is normally an assortment of seafood like squid, prawns and a variety of small fish all breaded and fried.

We also tried different varieties of bigger fish, both grilled and pan fried, these stood out for nothing but their freshness. You can’t go wrong with a simply grilled fish with some olive oil and lemon.

 

An assorted antipasti plate like the picture below with both cold and warm seafood is very common in Venice, we tried it once and were pleasantly surprised by the taste and variety. The sardines you see in the picture is a very famous Venetian preparation called Sarde in Saor, it is sardines cooked in wine with onions, parsley and pine nuts.

Talking about famous Venetian dishes, I have to mention the liver and onion preparation called Fegato alla Veneziana. This dish made with equal amounts of calf’s liver and onions is served with polenta and tastes heavenly.

Of course we tried pizzas, both the meaty ones and the veggie ones, but I prefer the thinner pizzas served by the slice in Rome than the whole pizzas we had at the Venetian restaurants. But still these were infinitely more delicious than the pizzas we get here in the US. 

What We Ate in Rome

Rome is a great place to get a good starter course in Italian cuisine as there are many restaurants specializing in regional cuisines in the city. We didn’t find as much seafood as we found in Venice, but still there were more than enough to choose from. We couldn’t find the little fish fry in Rome, so we always stuck with the mixed platters like the Fritto Misto – fried shrimp and calamari or the mixed fried seafood platter, just like the ones in Venice, may be a bit scarcer.

 

Steak pieces of fish like Sea bass and Salmon were also offered in most of the seafood menus in Rome.

Roasted baby lamb is very famous in Italy. While we loved the baby lamb, the lamb chops were too tough and over cooked, I don’t know if it was just the restaurant or if that’s how they cook lamb out there. But the baby lamb was extremely tender and juicy everywhere we tried it, it seems to be the safer choice.

We tried many different pastas both with Pomodoro sauce (tomato based) and Carbonara sauce. While the pomodoro tasted somewhat like the tomato based sauces in the better Italian restaurants here, the carbonara was so much richer and creamier and I must say cheesier too. And the best part was it was made with Guanciale – the unsmoked Italian bacon, only thing better than bacon! And the lasagna – even though it isn’t much to look at – was unlike any lasagna I’ve had here. I am drooling just thinking about it.

 

Restaurant Recommendations in Rome

Out of all the places we tried during this trip, two restaurants stand out. Both were in Rome and were recommended by Rick Steves.

Ristorante Sacro e Profano serves the spicy Calabrian cuisine from Southern Italy. We had the most amazing appetizer platter, where they had to bring in an additional rollaway table just to serve all the dishes. Eggplant with cream of sword-fish, rolled sword-fish, crepes with sausage, Italian salami, a potato dish and two of the spiciest chutneys/dips I’ve ever tasted! One was a sardine paste and the other had anchovies. I never imagined any dish to be this spicy out there in Italy.  This was served with a nice basket full of flat bread and it filled us up nicely.

We just had enough space for a meat dish and we went for the Wild boar baked in the wood oven with asparagus and cheese, which came in a nice flavorful thick gravy.

While the spicy Calabrian dishes offered a nice break from the traditional cuisine, it was Ristorante il Gabriello that really knocked our socks off. This restaurant was so good that we had dinner there twice. The ambience is great and feels much less touristy than many of the other places we went to. We found a lot of locals dining there and everyone were dressed up. Rick Steves says just point to any dish in the menu and you can’t go wrong and I fully agree. We had the best quail dish we’ve ever had here. I am not exaggerating, we got the same dish the second time as well, that shows how much we enjoyed it.

Both the seafood pastas we had were so good, we really wanted to spend another day in Rome just to make a third trip and try something else. First day we had a mixed seafood pasta with shrimp and scampi and squid, it was so amazing that we had to really struggle hard to restrain us from ordering the same dish second time around.

So the second night, we went for the ravioli with radicchio and walnuts in a shrimp sauce, OMG, it was one of those dishes where you take a bite and you want to make an orgasmic noise, which I almost did. Yes, it was that good!

The desserts here were out of this world too. We tried the panna cotta – the lightest, creamiest panna cotta ever and the chocolate and pistachio crepe was pure bliss.

Snacking in Italy

Bars in Italy are not like the American bars, these are mainly meant for coffee and snacks like a quick sandwich or a pastry or a slice of pizza, even though some of these bars would serve alcohol as well. Most of the bars charge more to sit at a table, it is cheaper to stand at the counter. Most places have two different prices posted, al banco meaning the price for eating at the bar and al tavolo, meaning the price at the table. If you are in a touristy area, they’d try to get you to sit down at a table, but the bars that cater to locals don’t care, they’d just serve you wherever you decide to be at. You can really make a lunch out of these pizzas and paninis from these bars, it will work out much cheaper than the sit down meals if you just want to get a quick fix in between sight seeing. For us, food is part of the experience, so we opted for restaurants where we can sit down and enjoy a multi-course meal with some nice wine for both lunch and dinner. So all our bar fixes had to be in small dozes in between meals or for breakfast.

Depending on our hunger level, we’d sometimes get a small pastry with our coffee.

 

Or if we are a in the mood for something savory, we’d go for a small grilled sandwich/Panini. 

 

We even got a slice of pizza sometimes for a late breakfast. Some of the best pizzas I’ve ever tasted were in Rome.

 

Well, that’s a long post and I don’t know if I did any justice to the amazing culinary experience we had. I am already missing the food and have started looking at the menu of all the Italian restaurants in town. Writing this post just made me a bit hungrier! I know what I am having for lunch tomorrow, are you in the mood for some Italian too?

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Category: Rome, Italy, Travel