eataly ... the real thing

so, from sf, we went to new york, to taipei, to sapporo, to osaka, to frankfurt ... and then to milan and venice and a day trip to sarmeola.

we decided to include venice because aj hadn't been there since high school and it's a generally romantic city. we included milan because i wanted to go shopping in the motherland of fashion.

well, venice turned out to be only ok. our first hotel was sub-par. if you're going to stay in venice, i would highly recommend staying in a hotel out in venice mestre (first city on the mainland, not on the island). a 1EUR train ticket will get you to venice in only 10 minutes and the hotels seem much nicer (refer to my previous post for a visual comparison of the rooms).

i thought we might check out some murano glass or burano lace while we were out there, but i knew i wasn't going to buy any of it, so we skipped that part. our hunt for good snacks ended up being the highlight of venice.





milan actually ended up being more fun than venice. our hotel was awesome. gelato was excellent. super tasty breakfast self-catered from local delis. and the window-shopping could not be beat. i would have come out with so many new pairs of shoes, if only they had my size! perhaps next time we go, it will have to be before the stores get raided by models and editors in town for milan fashion week.







our side trip to sarmeola (small village in Padova/Padua) was planned entirely around the first "destination meal" of our trip. by "destination meal," i mean i wore a dress, aj wore his sport coat, and we used a credit card. it's the kind of meal reserved typically for celebrations like birthdays or anniversaries. but in our case, it's career research. and this research session left me overstuffed. i'll let aj do the recap, since that's his thing, but i will tell you, my dessert was accompanied by a small video projector.

Picchu

Chef Carlo from Roberta's suggested that we check out this place in Sapporo...so of course, off we went! It's a tiny Italian place tucked away in an area right in front of the Nijo Fish Market. Couldn't have been more than 12 seats or so, and it was just the chef and his assistant. Chef pretty much did all the cooking, while the assistant mostly ran and cleaned dishes and handled all of the front of the house biz. So yeah, pretty much a one man show kitchen-wise.

The fun part of Piccho though was that instead of being a generic "Italian" joint, or even recreating a specific region of italy, instead the food seemed more like what would happen if you took italian methods of cooking, but applied it strictly to local foodstuffs. This being Sapporo's spring, there were no tomatoes or basil to be found on the menu.... But there was crab!



This was a pure crab sausage, with crab broth. And somewhat like Carlo's cooking, its simple structure puts a spotlight on the quality of the (very few) ingredients. No meat glue, no fancy techniques, just crab meat stuffed into a casing, delicately cooked, and sauced with itself.

Another interesting dish was our first one:

Shirako, lightly burned and served with a bit of dashi and olive oil. People at home seem to freak out about shirako (cod milt), and I even read one blog supposing that it was some kind of trick that the Japanese like to play on American tourists...After Corey Lee served it at Benu, suddenly it became some sort of symbol of bourgeois excess and foodie trophy. Never mind the fact that great Japanese restaurants in SF like Koo had been serving it to their regulars for years before places like Benu even opened. Ah yes, it's not a news story unless the 7x7/SF Chron crowd "discovers" it. (Hi Ed!). Anyway, ridiculousness aside, in Japan, it's food, plain and simple...a seasonal treat amongst many delicious seasonal treats. Having it torched was a new preparation for me, and the dashi and olive oil definitely put it into a different context.



Again, this being Hokkaido...chef served us an uni risotto. Given that uni pasta has been around at home, and even in (nicer) western kitchens for a little while now, you'd think that the leap to uni risotto would be an easy one. However, Picchu's uni risotto definitely had something to say. Instead of just being a creamy, savory, and rich flavor to give weight to the rice, here, it becomes a delicate balance of textures. At Picchu, the rice is more al dente than is typical, and it gives you the opportunity to contrast the texture of the uni versus that of the rice. It was a nice way to maintain all of what makes good uni good uni...

Quite a few more dishes came, and all of them delicious and interesting. *clicky* Best part about the meal is that it was really reasonably priced at 4,000Y per person. A good deal in any country for a chef's tasting menu. Foreign methods applied to local ingredients and sensibilities...tastes good to me!

5 hours in flavor country

Okay, so yes, by design this trip will contain some pretty serious culinary material...I expected that. But even by day two, my senses had been seriously dilated. So much so, that I'm going to have to skip what I was hoping to be a regular recap of the day's events and just focus on one part of our day.

I was told about Roberta's Pizza by my boss. Oddly enough, he didn't even tell me about the food...all he said was that the place looked like a gas station from the outside and that there was this crazy chef there that I should go check it out. What I found was...a pizza joint. No really, it's a pizza joint. 2 for $5 buds, or pitchers of nicer stuff, pizza, calzones, and some other italian specialties, NASCAR on the TV, bench seating. They throw bbqs when it's nice out. Grow veggies on their roof, oh and they also have a radio station?

In the midst of all this is Chef Carlo Mirarchi...and this is what *he* does: *clicky*