Restaurants
On restaurants
Lunch Came With Teeth
Nom nom. Very good.
Iraqi Ice Cream
Osama got me an ice cream on our way to start the day’s work. Perfect on a 120F day.
It’s Tops!
Yay
Supper club diva
Dinner with Chris and Mona.
Lucien
“The best new restaurant” in Toronto.
And, indeed, very good.
Borgo Cafe
Our favorite cafe in Borgo recently changed ownership. Nikola has taken a new job and now it is the Gecko Cafe. 0.80 Euro for an espresso – the best coffee I’ve had. It’s a really cute coffee shop and the new owners are very friendly.
Winter in Borgo a Mazzano
Winter is beautiful in Tuscany. The light is more gentle all day than in the summer and the warmth seems closer when the distant mountains are covered in snow and the nights are cold. We had a lovely time there, if only for two nights, warming the house with the wood furnace and taking long walks down to town and up to Rocca.
We ate at I Macelli in Borgo a Mazzano the first night – I had the Minestra Di Cereali, then the Ravioli di Castagne and finally the Filetto Di Manzo, all excellent as always. The food at I Macelli is excellent, always. The second night we had dinner at The Butterfly, just outside of Lucca. Butterfly is a Michelin rated restaurant and perhaps the best restaurant I’ve ever been to. Everything there is amazing.
Carolyn and I both had the “of the land” tasting menu. Of I think about 8 courses, only the pasta with sardines was not to my taste, but I don’t normally like them anyway and even so it was good.
It is a source of constant amazement how affordable first rate restaurants are in Italy. The food there is much better than anything one can get in the US, probably because the supply tend to be local and everything is made fresh and from local ingredients, and possibly for the same reason the prices are surprisingly low, even with the painful exchange rate one eats better in Italy than one could in the US at 4-5 times the price.
And then there’s the bulk wine dispensed into your own bottle at less than 2 euro a liter…
Zagreb Restoran Dvorisce
We had a wonderful meal at the Restoran Dvorisce. The local Croatian wine was very good and the food excellent: Carolyn had the spaghetti with crab and I had swordfish. The restaurant is stylish and clean and the service was excellent.
The night before we ate at Masklin I Lata, a cute little local homestyle restaurant with a great selection of local brandies. I had vegetable farina soup, Carolyn tomato rice. She had seafood risotto and I seafood spaghetti. All excellent.