Prosecco in Venice

What a great way to pass one’s, ahem, 45th birthday – in Venice with lots of Prosecco, good food in good restaurants, and great company too.  Even the weather was kind and the great spirit kept the rain at bay too!  I like Venice an awful lot.

One of the great advantages of living in Italy is that spending a weekend in somewhere like Venice can be done easily and painlessly.  It takes just over two and a half hours to get from Milan, where I live, to the Venice by fast train.  The FrecciaRossa service was very efficient too.  On-line booking simplifies things a great deal.  With great thanks to my Italian other half for having kindly made all the Venice trip arrangements.

We stayed for one night in a very well appointed new four star hotel, called the Hotel Al Duca di Venezia, which sits just off the Grand Canal and is easy to walk to from Venice’s station, and this hotel is within striking distance of some good eateries too.

Enchanting Venice

On the subject of places to eat in Venice, we tried three, each of which was a little different, but we ate well in all of these Venice restaurants, and drank copious quantities of Prosecco!

I also took along my camera, but not the tripod, as ‘she who must be obeyed’ issued an oral legislative decree in which she stated that the tripod be left in Milan, or else.

Here are some notes on the three Venice restaurants we tried: the Osteria Al Nono Risorto, the Osteria Mocenigo, and the Trattoria Alla Madonna, as well as few Venice flavour photos too.

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Expensive Milan

My post on the sky high bill which a couple of Japanese tourists received after dining at  Rome’s Il Passetto restaurant has attracted some attention.  The Italian press has also been hunting for other similar stories too, and has found a couple of other supposedly extreme bills.

Dear Milan

This time though, the stratospheric bills were not, supposedly, rip offs, but simply higher than average prices.  The city concerned this time was not Rome, and those finding themselves at the sharp end of bills made to make your eyes water were not tourists either, they were Italians, even if one of them was a Miami resident.

Case number one concerns a rather high laundry bill, whereas the other knee wobbling bill which may have brought a quiet night out in Milan to a rather bitter-sweet end, concerns the La Malmaison restaurant .

Let’s kick off with just how much it can cost you to avail yourself of washing and ironing services in Milan.

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Coda di Rospo in Il Quadrifoglio

We’re pretty lucky really. There are quite a few interesting restaurants dotted around the area of Milan in which we live.

Indeed, there is an excellent little restaurant literally two minutes walk from our house.  We live in the Paolo Sarpi area of Milan, which is close to the Hotels Hermitage and Townhouse 12.

This little place, for it is not big, goes by the name of Il Quadrifoglio, and we’ve been there several times now.  In fact, it was my other half’s birthday on Saturday and we went there to celebrate. … Continue Reading

Eat like a God in the Aligia Restaurant, Vrasi

According to my Italy expert, Gaetano Salvo, ‘si mangia da Deo’ – ‘you eat like a God’ (rough translation from Italian), or rather ‘the food is wonderful’ in the Aligia Restaurant (map link), down in Vrasi. Vrasi, by the way, is about half way between Salerno and Catanzaro in south Italy, and a little inland from a place called Diamante, as you will see if you click on the link above.

When someone like Gaetano, who has excellent taste in food and wine I might add, praises a restaurant, then it’s worth checking out.

If you find yourself in that neck of the woods, try it, and do let me know how well you ate – especially if you come out feeling all powerful.

I’ve asked Gaetano for some more information on Aligia Restaurant’s menu, and when he sends it to me, I’ll post it here.

Celanto a settembre, Milan – a great little restaurant

We went out this evening with some friends, and they took us to an interesting restaurant which, it has to be said, is a little out on a limb. This is something of a shame because the place has a nice relaxed atmosphere, and more importantly, great food and wine. Our friends had already been there a couple of times, and on both previous occasions, the restaurant had been virtually empty. What a great shame.

This restaurant, which is modern in style and attractively decorated in white, as you will see from the photos on the site, is called ‘Celanto a settembre‘ and is located about 10 minutes by car from Piazza Loretto in Via Teodosio, 102, Milan. There is a map here – click on ‘Dove Siamo’. For some reason, I cannot see the photos when I access the site via Firefox, whereas by using IE7, I can see them in all their glory…

Although the food served in the Celanto a settembre is based on Italian cuisine, it is not traditional Italian cooking, but it is this touch of originality which made it so fascinating for me, plus the fact that the food was excellent, and the standard of presentation of the dishes being very high indeed. The service was good too, but seeing as we were almost the only people in the place, this was to be expected.

Now to the good part. After starting off with a couple of glasses of a very nice Portuguese white, I ordered a ‘Gelato di parmigiano con pere e uva’, which was parmesan ice cream (really!) with pear and grapes, and it was very good. My other half, Cristina, and friend, Sergio, had ‘Timballo di spada con crema di melanzane’ – a sort of mini-flan made with swordfish and served with cream of aubergine, again very tasty. Giorgia, our other friend, opted for the ‘Timballo di carciofi pecorino e bottarga’, which again was a type of flan, only this time with artichoke, pecorino cheese, and ‘bottarga’, which was thin slices of what I think is smoked tuna fish. It too tasted as good as it looked.

The starter was followed by a first course of Spaghetti with prawns, squid, and clams, served with dwarf tomatoes and spinach shoots, which Giorgia went for. My other half ordered Gnocchi stuffed with baccala, again with dwarf tomatoes and clams. The presentation was lovely and the taste did not disappoint either.

The guys, Sergio and myself, instead chose a main course of the intriguing squid stuffed with sea bass and artichoke, all on a bed of stir fried artichoke and served with scampi. Wonderful. The first and main courses where served together, so no waiting around while someone finishes the first course before the main course is served.

For pudding my other half went for the ‘Crema Catalana’, which is an oven cooked cream dish, whereas Giorgia got the hot chocolate tart which came with a pineapple and rosemary sauce. Instead I chose a more traditional chocolate mousse with strawberry sauce. The desserts where superb too.

Wine? Oddly enough we went for a red with all the fish, and the owner recommended a bottle of wine from the Alto Adige (Trento) area, and it was an excellent, quite light, red, a 2002 Sass Roà, Cabernet Sauvignon. In fact one of the other attractions of this restaurant is the very extensive selection of wines on offer. Over 400 of them in fact!

The price of all this goodness? Just over 200 Euros (about £30 a head) for the four of us, however we did have a bottle and a half of wine and the red we went for was not the cheapest the house had to offer.

The Celanto a settembre is open at lunchtimes and stays open until midnight during the week, although it is closed on Saturday lunchtimes and all day Sunday. They do, however, accept orders for private parties on Saturday lunchtimes and on Sundays at lunch and dinner time, if requested. I don’t know if English or other languages are spoken, but I’m going to ask them for some photos, so I’ll update this post when I find out.

Would I recommend this place? 100% yes. The food is fabulous and the menu is highly original. Everything is prepared by the owner, Carlo. It’s just a slight shame it is a little off the beaten track, although a tram does pass right in front of it. But, I think it is well worth, as is often the case, moving off the beaten track to check it out.

Good food, good wine and good company, which all added up to a lovely evening. What more can you ask?

Pizzeria Photo Gallery

It was pizza night tonight, although it was not the standard Italian type pizza, but the ‘pizza al trancio’, which is the ‘deep pan’ version of the traditionally thin pizza. There are two pizzerias near us that do this type of pizza. One is Da Giuliano which is located at the Corso Sempione end of Via Paolo Sarpi in Milan, and which has been there long enough to have become something of an institution in these parts.

Oddly enough, I’m not a great fan of the Da Giuliano deep pan pizzas. I find that they are just too heavy and I don’t like the texture of the pizza base. Luckily, there is another of these places, Da Mimmo, which is at 2 Via Alfredo Albertini. This street is a small side road that connects Paolo Sarpi with Via Canonica. Anyway, I prefer the deep pan pizza that is place does, even if, I have to say, I don’t really like the Italian deep pan pizza that much.

My other half does though, so we often find ourselves either eating there or bringing some of this substantial pizza home, as we did this evening.

The Da Mimmo pizzeria is a strange place. The thing that strikes you is that everything is very Spartan and functional. It is also a little dated and looks as though the place was last done up back in the sixties or seventies. As you walk in you see about three or four rows of long brown melamine tables, which are set up banquet style, and if you eat there, you may well find yourself sitting next to people you don’t know.

Actually, in general Italian restaurants are not intimate, and the tables are often set very close to one another. And if you are the only people in the restaurant and another group comes in, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will sit themselves down at a neighbouring table. OK, enough of the set up of Italian eateries.

What is interesting about the Da Mimmo pizzeria, and makes it worth a visit, if only for some pizza to take away, is the selection of stunning photos of desert landscapes, African people, and four by fours ascending and descending dunes which adorn the walls. This evening, as often happens, my curiosity got the better of me I asked about all the images.

It turns out that the owner of the pizzeria loves going on tours to Africa, and has been doing so for many years, hence all the photos. At the moment this gentleman is somewhere in the midst of Lybia on a ten day tour of the country apparently. The he take photos are not digital, but of the traditional film variety.

This pizzeria cum photo gallery, which is closed Sundays, is actually quite a fascinating place, and it is cheap, and popular with the locals. If you do try it out, do not forget to spend a few minutes looking at all the images.  They really are very good.