Italian Cuisine in Rome: Made in China

by David Farley on

Compared to other capital cities, Rome doesn’t have a lot of ethnic restaurants. But locals and tourists are happy to forgive the city for its lackluster cosmopolitan dining scene because Roman cuisine – especially in the last few years – has been placed in the culinary sancta sanctorum. (Just look at the mouthfuls of chefs who have opened up high-profile Roman restaurants in New York City in the last two years, as evidence.) But spend enough time in the Eternal City (as I have a few times) and your taste buds will start to grow restless. The thought of more penne alla arabiata or spaghetti all’ amatriciana or even coda alla vaccinara (oxtail stew) might inspire a long, long walk until eventually you stumble upon the odd ethnic eatery.

Undoubtedly the first one you’ll come across is Chinese. Sprinkled throughout the periphery of the historical center, Chinese restaurants are the Eternal City’s answer to, well, Chinese restaurants just about anywhere outside of China. Quick, distinctive, affordable and dripping in MSG, the Chinese restaurants in Rome have elbowed their way onto the staunch Roman dining scene.

Unless of course, an air-born illness (followed by media hysteria) breaks out. Case in point: there once was a Chinese restaurant in Rome located near the Vatican. It did steady business, particularly at lunch with local office workers and Vaticanisti. And then SARS hit the newsstands. Remember that? The pre-swine flu Apocalyptic end-of-us-all that was made in China?

During the scare, business dropped at the Chinese restaurant precipitously. Even though this Chinese restaurant was far from China, local eaters couldn’t divorce themselves from the reports they were reading and hearing about on the news. And so with few options, the owners decided to transform the restaurant. They would go Roman. Same Chinese owners. Same Chinese chef. And so, General Tso was unceremoniously purged from the menu and any dish with “Buddha” in the title finally found its way to Nirvana.I know this because I knew a woman who worked at the place. Maria, originally from Spain, was a waitress, which meant for most diners she was the face of this change. The first day, a few curious eaters wandered in at lunch. The menu listed typical Roman trattoria fare and was organized like any Italian menu: there was antipasti like bruschetta; primi, which take the form of pasta dishes; and secondi, more meaty dishes.

A businessman in his forties ordered a bowl of carbonara, a classic Roman pasta dish with pancetta, eggs, and cheese. A few minutes later, Maria set down the bowl of carbonara in front of the diner and walked back toward the kitchen. She was promptly called back to the his table.

“What’s this?” said the forty-something businessman, pointing to his steaming bowl of pasta. “This is not carbonara,” he said, picking up a piece of what was meant to be pancetta. “This is bacon. And this sauce. What is this? It’s like a gloop of cream,” he said. “And this rigatoni,” he said, picking up the half inch, tube-shaped pasta. “Look at this limp thing. It’s way overcooked. Take it back to the kitchen. Now.”

So she did, dropping the plate on a back counter in front of the chef and the owner and explaining that the customers weren’t buying that this is real Roman carbonara, a dish that Rome has made famous but whose exact creation in the city (and the reason for it) is cause for an eternal debate.

“This is real,” barked the Chinese owner. “What city are we in?”

Maria responded: “I know, we’re in Rome, but –“

“Then take it back out there” –the owner handing her the dish back –“and tell him this is the real thing.”

Maria did as she was told. She took the plate out to the diner and held her breath.

There’s actually a food police in Rome who patrol the city’s restaurants, popping into the kitchen, to look around, maybe glance at a few dishes, and then, if everything looks okay, move on to the next restaurant. They’re not looking for bad hygiene practices in the kitchen; they’re actually checking to make sure chefs are correctly preparing Roman dishes according to tradition.

In 2002, the Italian government had an even more ambitious plan: to police every Italian restaurant in the world (there are 20,000 Italian restaurants in the United States alone), making sure eateries that claimed to be Italian were complying with tradition — that is, using San Marzano tomatoes or mozzarella or olive oil made in Italy. If so, they would be rewarded with a “Made in Italy” designation.

The “Made in Italy” program started a test run in Belgium. But it never crossed the Atlantic. It never even got out of Belgium, actually. After all, Italy, in general, and Rome, in particular, has a hard time policing its own restaurants. As Maria quickly learned. She approached the man with his unwanted bowl of carbonara and set it down in front of him. “The chef says this is real Roman carbonara and you have to eat it,” she said.

The businessman, a hunger-induced anger hanging over him, didn’t say a word. He got up and walked out. After this same incident happened a few days in a row, Maria followed the costumers: She left and never came back. She found a job sewing “Made in Italy” labels on clothes that were actually made in China. “Tourists would buy the clothes,” she told me. “They didn’t know the difference.”

Round-the-world: Why Melbourne is the best city in the world, part two

by Alex Robertson Textor on

There are lots of other arguments for Melbourne as the world’s best city: museums, parks, open spaces; good bookstores. Add all these things to the list I began on Sunday, and soon these posts on Melbourne will begin to look like explicit promotional material. As much as I dig the city, this is certainly not my intention. So let me acknowledge that there are downsides to Melbourne. There is a tendency among Melburnians to undervalue their city and, more disturbingly altogether, there is an unhealthy obsession with Australian rules football, a completely inexplicable sport. So there you have it. Not perfect at all.

Missing from my list on Sunday is one of Melbourne’s signature strengths, namely, its culinary scene. Melbourne is a remarkable place to eat at both ends of the budget scale. And while it may not be a cheap place to dine by US big city standards, it is far more wallet-friendly than Sydney.

I’d eaten very well in Melbourne on my last visit, and I made sure to do some pre-visit research. I emailed Melbourne-based chef Tony Tan for restaurant suggestions, and he responded quickly. Many of Tony’s tipped restaurants are pretty high-end: Cumulus Inc, Attica, Cutler & Co., Vue de Monde, among others.

We ended up sampling a few top restaurants: The Press Club, Cutler & Co, and Bistro Vue.

The Press Club’s “symposium degustation” menu is quite strong. Highlights include the starting snack of cold seafood skewers and an incredible rose-focused dessert course (titled “Aphrodite”) with berries, rose petals, and a fragrance component. This was a very good meal in a buzzing location with delightful servers.

At Cutler & Co, the degustation menu is even more extraordinary. Every course is deeply satisfying, though if I had to point to a single favorite course I’d name the crab, abalone and sweet corn soup. The palate-cleansing course of carrot granita includes puffed rice and sheep’s milk yogurt. It is like a heady, deeply considered breakfast. Dessert stars violet ice cream and provides a very pleasant shock to the senses. This meal is seriously amazing, studiously well-considered. It is, all things considered, a decidedly intellectual meal, though it is also fun and spirited.

Our third high-end meal is at Bistro Vue, an offshoot of the popular Vue de Monde. I eat oysters, house-smoked salmon with toast, and the day’s special, a hearty, rustic Toulouse-style cassoulet. It’s solid all the way through. The crowd is very upscale and very well-dressed, which that makes me regret momentarily my choice to wear my New Balances to dinner.

On the cheap side we are also completely pleased. We take advantage of the local Asian cuisine scene. Wandering around Footscray in the late morning, we spot a Vietnamese restaurant, Hung Vuong Saigon, packed at noon. We decided on the spot to eat an early lunch. The clientele is mostly Vietnamese. The offerings (vermicelli noodles for me and pho for Matt) are amazing.

We also visit Victoria Street in Richmond, a strip packed with Asian restaurants, and have a decidedly mediocre Thai meal. We have better luck in search of laksa, which has become a major local food favorite in Melbourne. We have ours at Chinta Blues in St. Kilda. It is delicious, though I note with a mixture of excitement and disappointment that some of Melbourne’s top laksa lists exclude it. Check out the entertaining delaksa for reviews of laksa at restaurants in Victoria, elsewhere in Australia, and beyond.

Tourism Victoria provided media support in the form of three meals in Melbourne. All opinions expressed are my own.

Check out other posts in the round-the-world Capricorn Route series here.

Treme and the “Magic” Food of New Orleans

by David Farley on

The new HBO show Treme is getting a lot of attention. Not just because it is produced by David Simon, who brought us The Wire, which some TV critics (both professional and aspirants) have deemed the best TV show, ever; not just because America has a fascination with New Orleans, the closest city in the country that feels like the amusement parks we have come to confuse with reality; and not just because Americans like funny fat guys (John Goodman is one of the stars). But to a lesser extent because of the food references and food controversies that have snuck into the show.

In the first episode, which takes place in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a chef runs out of dessert to serve and pulls out from her purse a pre-packaged Hubig’s pie. She hands it to her colleague and says to “dress it up.”

Of course, locals were quick to point out that Hubig’s pies weren’t available at that point in the city’s deluged post-apocalyptic environment. David Simon wrote an open letter to the city’s “fact-grounded literalists” that the pie was, in fact, a “Magic Pie,” a metaphor, likening it to the hocus pocus of materializing bread and fish in the New Testament.

It all got me thinking about the last time I was in New Orleans. It was Spring 2005, just a few months before the hurricane would hit, and my first (and only) time in the Big Easy. I didn’t want to stumble through the French Quarter holding a toxic, barely-drinkable concoction inside a plastic toy-like cup; I didn’t want any colorful beads; I didn’t even want anyone to show me their breasts. That is, unless they were chicken breasts. I came to eat. And in Biblical proportions. New Orleans, of course, is as famous for its debauchery, both in drink, merriment and in food. In fact, the cuisine here is so rich and artery hardening, restaurants should start replacing the after-dinner mint with a Lipitor.

Since it was our first time, my wife and I hit all the famous places: we split a catcher’s-mitt-sized meat-crammed muffuletta (olive salad, capicola, salami, mortadella, emmenntaler, and provolone all stuffed between two pieces of bread) at Central Grocery; we dined on staggeringly heart-stalling fare like Huitres a la Foch (fried oysters on toast buttered with foie gras and smothered in a rich Colbert sauce) at Antoine’s; we even trekked way out to Uptown to a place called Cooter Brown’s Tavern where we consumed dozens of raw oysters and tried to use the word “shuck” as frequently as possible.

And while I generally liked what I was eating, I hadn’t had a mouth-watering religious experience I’d hoped for. Maybe we hadn’t been going to the right places, I wondered. So on the morning of our final day, I read an article in the newspaper that the legendary restaurant Uglesich’s was finally going to turn off its burners for good. And despite balking a couple times at shuttering in the past, this time was for real.

Opened in 1924 by Croatian émigré Sam Uglesich, the Garden District restaurant soon built up a reputation for holier-than-though local fare like fried soft shell crab, fresh shrimp, plump oysters, and po’ boy sandwiches. Locals favored it for the fresh ingredients, not frozen seafood like some of the more famous guidebook-friendly restaurants had started using. Lines snaking around the corner were customary.

So, I wasn’t surprised when we walked up and saw the line going out the door. But when I walked around the corner, I was disheartened to see it went around another corner, deep into the parking lot. Jessie and I had four hours to get a bus to the airport so we figured we’d just spend our last remaining time waiting to eat. We got in line and after a few minutes, drinks began arriving. Strong, boozy cocktails. I met Steve, in line behind us, a computer programmer from San Jose. And Jerry, a local who had been coming here for years. Soon enough we were toasting. It didn’t even matter that the minute hand on my watch was moving much faster than the line.

A few hours later, we’d moved up in line, but barely enough to even see the door. It was a decisive moment. It was the time we would have to leave to catch the bus to the airport. But as I watched pot-bellied diners stumble out of the restaurant, deeply satisfying post-prandial looks on their faces, I decided we should take the chance. When we finally got inside, it was pure havoc: kitchen workers scrambling around, orders being screamed out, and diners furiously consuming saucy dishes at the formica-topped tables. And then suddenly ancient Anthony Uglesich, the patriarch of the family restaurant, who’s grey and balding and built like a beer can, was staring at me, pen and paper in hand, awaiting our order.

By the time our food came, we had minutes to jump in a cab and plead with the driver to break speeding laws. Sitting with our new friends, Bob and Jerry, the tabletop was crammed with something that looked like a shrimp version of Monty Python’s famous Spam skit: There was the Asian-inspired Volcano Shrimp, Shrimp Uggie, the Asian-Creole voodoo shrimp, spicy Angry Shrimp, crab meat-stuffed shrimp, something called Paul’s Fantasy (trout topped with, you guessed it, shrimp) and, finally, crawfish-laced etouffee. Jessie and I, with an eye on the clock, piled the food in our mouth.

We did make our flight. Barely. The last passengers to board. On the plane I had a few hours of idle time to think about what I’d just eaten-each dish had a bold, rich flavor and was clearly the best meal of the long weekend-I wondered why the food was so satisfying. Was it really that good? Or was it the “magic” of travel-to borrow the food phrase form David Simon-that made the food taste better? Was it enhanced by the experience of travel, which tends to allows us to exoticise and fetishize even the most mundane things, activities, and experiences in the place we’re visiting?

I’ll never know. Uglesich’s really did close for good after that weekend. And, four months later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, which would have certainly inspired the Uglesich family it was time to hang up the apron and move on to more idle, less magical things.

David Farley is author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.

Avoid eating cold dishes (especially in developing nations) – Dining out tip

by Gadling Staff on

Having visited India several times in my life, I can confidently say that eating a cold dish is a one-way trip to the hospital. It’s because food handling standards in some countries are not quite the same as in developed nations.

Foods to avoid include chilled sauces and desserts. It’s actually a pretty easy tip to follow because most food is made hot and fresh. However, chilled foods are a problem because bacteria is permitted to develop and the food may be several days old.

Seven ways to explore the world without leaving home

by Katie Hammel on

Travel can be an escape – a chance to get away from the stress of our daily lives – but it can also be much more. Travel is about exploring a destination (new or familiar), understanding and connecting with the local culture, and seeing how people in a different place live.

Even more than the physical act of moving to a new place, traveling is about discovery, and just because you can’t get away from home at a particular time doesn’t mean you can’t still embrace that philosophy of adventure. Here are seven ways to “travel” without leaving your hometown.
Movies
Movies can take us to other worlds – real or imagined, of this Earth or not. Next time you are suffering from serious wanderlust, pick up a movie set in a foreign land. Explore the sweeping grasslands of Kenya with Out of Africa, ride the back roads of South America with Che in The Motorcycle Diaries, wander the chaotic streets of Tokyo through Lost in Translation, or explore India by train on The Darjeeling Limited.
Public transportation roulette
Travel is all about exploring a foreign place. For most of us, that doesn’t mean we need to venture far to discover a place that is new to us. I’ve lived in Chicago for three years, but there are still pockets of the city I’ve yet to step foot on. It’s easy to fall into a routine and only visit the same reliable places in your hometown, but this can lead to a feeling of boredom. Spice up your daily life by seeking out new places in your own city.

If you live somewhere with a good train or bus system, pick a weekend to play what I like to call “public transportation roulette.” In Chicago, I hop on one of the El lines and get off at a stop I’ve never visited before. Then I spend the afternoon checking out the area’s restaurants and shops. If your city has an ethnic enclave, like a Chinatown or Greektown, spending an evening wandering the streets there can also feel like a mini cultural journey.

Books
Just like movies, books can take us places (see, that poster in the Library didn’t lie!). Whether you prefer to read creative nonfiction set in a specific place or places – explore the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese with J. Maarten Troust in Lost on Planet China, ride the rails through Asia with Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar, or return to the Paris of the 1920’s in Earnest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast – or to read more about the idea of wandering (try The Little Price by Antoine de Saint Exupery), books can help keep us in a traveling state of mind.

For a whirlwind tour of the world, try an anthology like the Best American Travel Writing series. Or for a mini shot of travel inspiration, I keep a copy of Make the Most of Your Time on Earth: A Rough Guide to the World on my coffee table and flip through it often.


TV
When I start to get itchy feet but know that I don’t have a trip scheduled for a few weeks, I start renting all my favorite travel shows. I explore the world through food with Anthony Bourdain on No Reservations, or laugh along with Ian Wright and the Globe Trekker crew as I learn about destinations I plan on visiting in the future.

Food and drink
Traveling through my taste buds is one of my favorite ways to “virtually” experience a destination. In most countries I visit, I try to schedule a cooking class to learn to make at least one local dish. When I get home, I can then make that meal any time I am feeling nostalgic for the country. I can’t make fresh pasta without being transported to my honeymoon in Tuscany. Empanadas and some Malbec wine take me back to Buenos Aires, and fresh paella recalls my days in Barcelona.

Even if you didn’t learn to make a special dish while you were in a country, you can try to recreate memorable meals at home, or just pick a local specialty from a country you’d like to visit, and make it with the help of a recipe found online. If you can’t cook more than a piece of toast, no worries – just head to your local ethnic restaurant. You might not be fooled into thinking you are really in Ethiopia as you spoon up stewed meats with spongy injera bread, but a little taste of a foreign country might satiate you until your next trip.

Theme nights
Remember that episode of the Gilmore Girls when, after Rory’s big trip to Asia was cancelled, Lorelei turned the living room into a tour of the continent with food and decorations from various Asian countries? Just like that, you can host a theme night to celebrate a destination you’ve been to or are planning a trip to. Heading to Japan? Host a Japanese night, complete with sake, anime movies, sushi and geisha costumes. If you have friends of various ethnicities, take turns hosting and ask each person to tell a story about their culture’s traditions.

Cultural centers and events
A large part of traveling is learning about another culture, and while nothing can really substitute for the experience of being there, a trip to a local cultural center can help you explore the history and traditions of a culture in your local area. Fore example, in Chicago, the Irish American Heritage Center hosts traditional Irish music at the onsite pub. When I sit there and drink a Guinness, I know I’m still in the US, but if I close my eyes and listen to the the proliferation of Irish accents around me, I almost feel like I’m back in Dublin.

Cultural festivals, which often feature food, music, and art from the home country, are another festive way to immerse yourself in a foreign culture.