Old post #1: Rome

This is the write-up from 2007's big trip, to Rome.

Friday (Day One)
It turns out Thanksgiving Day IS the perfect day to fly to Europe. While the train out to Newark was packed (unfortunately the Macy’s Day Parade had just ended), the international terminal at the airport was deserted. I was the only person at the Alitalia counter, and all the stores and restaurants were staffed with skeleton crews. I settled in at a café and ordered enough wine to ensure that I would be able to sleep on the flight. The flight itself was uneventful, despite all the horror stories I’d heard about Alitalia. The trick, obviously, is not to check luggage. I took one tiny duffel bag, two feet long by one foot tall, and my purse (which, admittedly, was bigger). What I packed: the bare minimum of toiletries, one pair of jeans, one pair of cords, three cashmere sweaters, one cashmere dress, one pair of heels, and one extra set of bra/underwear/socks. Undies and socks got washed in the sink every night, and including the sweater and pair of jeans I was wearing on the plane, ensured that I had plenty of clothes to swap around. Plus books, camera, etc., but you get the idea. And I only brought those same two bags back.

But enough about my packing prowess. The jet lag wasn’t as bad as I’d feared—with a couple of hours’ sleep on the plane, and a two-hour power nap Friday afternoon, I was golden. In fact, I stayed out until 2 am Friday night (more on that later). The customs official in Rome barely glanced at my passport; in fact, he didn’t even stamp it. He just waved me through. I found the train station and caught an express to Termini, the central Rome train station. Then I got my first lesson in Roman maps: namely, that Italians are very lassez-faire about signage. Only about half the streets were marked with signs, and those were marked with concrete blocks set into the side of a building—no “sign” per se at all. How people find their way around at night is beyond me. Exits off major highways aren’t marked (in fact, the highways usually aren’t marked), and subway/streetcar stops often didn’t have a sign, either. Even museums didn’t have signs or maps. So I’m sure I missed half the artistic glories of Rome. Grrr. (Side note: all the manhole covers are stamped with SPQR. Isn’t that cool?)

Nevertheless, armed with a shot of espresso, I found my way to the hotel (a ten-minute walk) no problem. The hotel was a steal, only €70 a night (about $100, maybe a little more) and was located on a quiet side street inside a normal residential apartment building. The room was tiny, and the bathroom plumbing had this annoying habit of going KER-CHUNK every two minutes when the hot water was on or the toilet tank was refilling, but I was only there to sleep, so I didn’t care. Plus I got free breakfast and free Internet usage via the guest laptop, and it was centrally located.

I had a hot shower, changed, and headed out into the world. I didn’t have a set itinerary for the day, because I wasn’t sure how the jet lag would affect me, so I started off near the hotel. My first stop was the Baths of Diocletian, followed by one of the Museums of Rome. Rome has no central museum—the city’s museum is split between four buildings, in four different collections. Another interesting factoid about Roman museums—often the building itself is just as impressive as the artwork within, as they are typically housed in renovated palaces. I had a long leisurely lunch at one of the city’s foremost wine bars, Trimani. (Roman restaurants are typically open until 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon, then they close until dinner, not reopening until 7:30 or 8. Italians don’t eat dinner til at least 8 or 9. If you get hungry between 3 and 8, you go to an enoteca, or wine bar, which serve snacky things and are open all afternoon and for dinner. Snacky things in Italy = plates of proscuitto and cheese, salads, olives, etc. Yum. It’s important to note that tap water and bread are not free in Italian restaurants; which is why most people order bottled or mineral water, since you pay for the water regardless. And if you don’t want to pay for the bread on the table, you don’t eat it.) At Trimani I had my first taste of an Italian classic, spaghetti with cheese and pepper, and another staple, chicory. Very simple but very good.

Then nap time. Then I re-girded my loins and set off in a different direction. This direction took me all over the touristy part of Rome, starting with the Trevi Fountain. Beautiful, but MOBBED. There was a sea of people thirty deep in front of it, all jockeying for prime photo-taking space. I have no idea how people survive in high tourist season, I really don’t. They must get trampled. I didn’t stay to contemplate its glories, I just snapped a picture and moved on. I did a walking tour of central Rome—I had no real itinerary, just wandered around. I saw Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” in the side niche of an unmarked church. I saw a crypt full of the bones of centuries of monks in another church—there were so many bones they had sculpted things out of them. A chandelier made from finger bones, altar frames made from shoulder blades, a room of nothing but skulls. I saw the Spanish Steps at night and walked down Via Condotti, ground zero for fashionable shopping in Rome. I saw the Pantheon, with a full moon shining through the hole at the top of the dome. (Yes, there’s a hole at the top of the dome—so when it rains, it rains all over the marble on the inside.) I walked through the ruins of Trajan’s Market and saw the full moon again, this time shining over the Colosseum in the distance, with some palm trees blowing in the breeze.

I moved on to dinner. I had a reservation at a little place in Trastavere, the formerly-gritty-but-now-gentrifying working-class section of Rome. Called Checchino dal 1887, it specialized in Roman cuisine—a.k.a., offal. Their specialty was pajata, calf intestines from an unweaned calf with mother’s milk still inside. Unfortunately, the only way to get it was to order the offal tasting menu. Confronted with eight courses of organ meat (brains, tripe, etc.), I chickened out and ordered “regular” food. Still very good, though. And I got a commemorative plate out of it.

I was going strong when I got back to the hotel, so I found an ex-pat bar nearby and settled in with a Guinness. I ended up meeting a guy from DC. Only I could go to Italy, pick up a random guy, and have him be from DC.

Saturday
Rome is not the ass-pinching heaven of macho guys I’d been led to believe. Maybe I’m now too old, or maybe I’ve just lived in NY too long and so naturally project that “don’t fuck with me” air when I’m moving through crowds, but I was not subjected to catcalls or crude attempts to pick me up. I did have several old guys ask me the time (all of whom were wearing watches) but no hot Italian studs roared up on their Vespas to whisk me away. Sigh.

Saturday was a busy day. I headed to the Vatican first thing, but when confronted with a line of 600 people waiting to get in (literally) I changed my mind. I walked over to St. Peter’s, but there was an equally long line to get inside the basilica, so I just took pictures from the outside and walked down to Castel Sant’Angelo, the old fortress of the Popes. It was beautiful, and strange. Walls twelve and fifteen feet thick, old catapults and weaponry laying around, luminous tapestries and paintings in the fortress interior. And fantastic views of Rome from the battlements.

I headed back into central Rome and covered a number of smaller museums, most attached to the Museum of Rome system (Museo di Roma, Palazzo Altemps, Galleria Pamphilj). In a couple, I was the only person there. A nice change from the Vatican. I passed through Piazza Navona, home of Bernini’s Four Rivers of the World fountain, but it was under a scaffolding. Boo. Lunch was some lovely homemade cannelloni and a bufalo mozzarella salad. I got caught in a thunderstorm on the way to the Capitoline Museums, but the museums were large enough to dry me off while I wandered around the pickings of Ancient Rome. (Otherwise the weather was gorgeous—65 degrees every day, maybe mid-50s at night, clear and sunny. Three days after I got back to NY, it was 23 degrees and snowing.)

Then I headed down into the ancient Roman Forum, which really is literally a big pile of crap. Ruins on top of ruins, all left where they fell, with the Capitoline Museums at one end and the Colosseum at the other. I couldn’t help thinking what Americans would have done with this big pile—pried it all up, put it behind glass in a museum (with maps and signage, of course), and added tour guides, audioguides, ADA-approved handicapped ramps and bathrooms every fifty feet for good measure. And that would have completely sucked all the joy out of it. Rome is a big jumble—a lot of old stuff, a lot of new stuff, a lot of old stuff repurposed as something else, and the city gets its charm and its energy from the fact that it is just a big pile of stuff.

I walked around the Forum and the Colosseum, then stopped off at my new favorite Roman enoteca, Cavour 313. A little dark place with wooden tables and thick wooden rafters reminiscent of a German beer hall, but with such yummy things to eat and a wine list miles long. I had a fantastic beef carpaccio with hot spices and oil, served with fresh anchovies (fresh; with the skin still on, a very different creature from the weird things we get in cans packed in oil), very large capers, and red onion. The waiter didn’t speak English; fortunately I’m fluent in pointing and in food Italian (carpaccio; proscuitto; formaggi; chianti).

Another side note: as I was getting ready for dinner at the hotel, I turned on the TV. It was all in Italian, of course, and I cannot tell you how trippy it is to watch Bugs Bunny overdubbed in Italian. Bugs Bunny has such a distinctive voice, and it was gone, replaced by some nasal Italian actor. It was the same thing with Men in Black: Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith have very distinctive voices. All gone, replaced with new voices in Italian. So you can imagine what Italian MTV is like.

La Pergola
Quite literally the best meal I’ve ever had. Of course, it should have been, given what I paid for it (also the most expensive meal I’ve ever had). But it was glorious. It was my first full meal in a three-Michelin-star joint, and now I see why three Michelin stars is such a big deal.

La Pergola is widely noted to be the best restaurant in Rome (run by a German, of all things) and one of the top in Europe. The whole evening was divine. The service was beyond exquisite, four hours of gustatory heaven. The restaurant is on the top floor of the Hilton Cavalieri, which is set a few kilometers outside of Rome on top of a big hill—so that you get a panoramic view of the city. The table was set for one when I got there, in a prime location. I got a little stool for my handbag I could pull up to the chair. The dishes and flatware were all gold, and were changed for each course. The candles were changed for each course. The stemware was all top-end Riedel crystal. The servers were all in full tuxedos. I got a personal escort to the restroom door every time I went (three or four times, it was a four-hour dinner—and let me tell you, after a tasting menu of five different wines, it’s handy to have someone to lean on when you go to the bathroom). If you forgot your reading glasses, they brought out a box with several different pairs, in different strengths, for you to select from and use. When I was seated, a guy wheeled over a special champagne cart, with several different kinds of champagne. He explained the selections and poured me one, so that I could enjoy a complementary glass of champagne while I perused the menu.

And it just went up from there. I got a water menu (a water menu!), with fifty different waters to choose from. (Most expensive: €30. My selection: Evian, €10, with its own gold ice bucket to keep it cold.) A waiter carefully explained and decanted the olive oil at my table, then offered me a selection of fifteen different breads to go with it. As soon as I selected the bread, another waiter came forward with a tray of salts (yes, there was a salt selection process) and explained the tastes and provenance of each salt. I picked three; the black salt was the best (more on that later). It really made the olive oil pop.

I chose the nine-course tasting menu, with accompanying five-course wine tasting menu. I figured I might as well go all out while I was there. For an additional €85, I could have added a white truffle course (white truffles were in season), but I was spending enough as it was. However, someone else in the restaurant ordered the truffle course and JESUS GOD did those truffles smell good. The waiter brought out a big wooden box full of white truffles (thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth) and made a big show of putting on gloves and carefully shaving the truffle for each guest. The smell wafted across the entire restaurant. I wanted to ask him to bring the box over so I could smell it, but that seemed gauche.

But I digress. First up was the amuse bouche, with eggplant four ways accompanied by a sweet pepper sorbet. Each variation of eggplant was light and delicate, not chewy or bitter at all as eggplant often is, and the sweet pepper sorbet was sweet enough to complement the eggplant but peppery enough to be spicy. Wine 1 was Were Dreams Jermann 2005, a chard/pinot mix that wasn’t sweet but had a lovely fruity finish.

Course 1 was scallop carpaccio on a gelled layer of amaranth grain and black corn, with a ginger oil finish, sprinkled with crunchy ginger dust (sweet only, not spicy). The scallops were raw but WARM, which was lovely with the sweetness of the ginger.

Course 2 was two cylinders of scampi with olive oil powder and tapioca vinaigrette, with a line of mixed greens down one side of the plate and very very delicately fried zucchini flowers down the other side. Powder is the new thing in haute cuisine (it used to be foam), but I was underwhelmed by the powders. The texture was interesting, but the flavors were largely lost. That didn’t affect the superior quality of the scampi, though.

Wine 2 was a Cervaro Castello della Sala 2002, a chard aged in oak but without any oaky flavor whatsoever—just this subtle depth that kept getting deeper. That may have been because of the ENORMOUS glass it was served in, it was practically a fish bowl (with a flared lip). I’ve never seen a white served in such a big glass. But the sommelier said, “Big wine, big glass,” and he’s the expert.

Course 3 was very fresh, very delicate artichoke ravioli with grey mullet roe. All the ravioli I had in Rome were obviously hand-made (irregular, lumpy) but oh so fresh and good. I’ve decided to teach myself how to make fresh pasta.

Course 4 was red mullet with tomato wrapped inside a very thin flash-fried parchment—the inside was not scorching hot like most fried things, it didn’t even taste fried. Just warm and crispy on the outside, cool and rare on the inside.

Wine 3 was a Gewürztraminer Sanct Valentin 2006, San Michele Appiano. Very aromatic, very fruity, but still not sweet. Just vibrant and fruity.

Course 5 was amberjack (a red Mediterranean fish) served in a warm tomato-cannellini bean bisque, with ice-cold salt cod snow on the side. Again with the powder—the ice-cold contrasted well with the warm bisque, but I didn’t pick up any salt cod flavor. But the fish, as always, was excellent, very fresh, and the tomato-bean bisque was a nice contrast.

Course 6 was the foie gras course. Yum. Seared foie gras in a wild strawberry sauce with an amaretto gelee, and just a hint of parmesan on top. All that was unnecessary—I’ll take plain unadorned foie gras any day.

Wine 5 was the first (and only) red, thanks to all the fish on the menu. It was a Foradori Granato 2003, and went very well with Course 7: pigeon breast. Pigeon breast is a nice deep red color, like ostrich steak, and tastes like a cross between chicken and rabbit. It was served with dried corn kernels (interesting) and perfectly spherical potatoes (I’d hate to be that guy in the kitchen).

Then came my favorite part—the cheese course. Yum. When the waiter wheeled out the special cheese cart, with thirty different kinds of unpasteurized cheese, I literally quivered. Oh my God did it smell good. Each cheese got its own fork and knife to cut and serve it with. I got five different kinds, including a perfectly magical tellegio, and a hunk of parmesan with true sweet balsamico poured over it.

The dessert wine, a Ben Rye Passito di Pantelleria Donnafugata 2005 (I actually knew this one) tasted like apricots. The dessert course was a nine-course tasting menu in and of itself. First came the amuse bouche: a passionfruit sorbet with onion and cream. Sounds weird but very yummy. Then came the “magic box,” a silver box with twelve drawers, each drawer with a different sort of petit fours. Then the desserts started coming. A piping hot cinnamon soufflé, a pineapple cream, a frothy chocolate shot, caramel ice cream, a solidified chocolate cappuccino in a martini glass…they were all small, maybe a couple of bites each, but still, at one point I had eight different desserts in front of me—counting the box of petit fours as one. And then, when all that was cleared away, they brought out a tray of four types of purely chocolate petit fours.

The dessert wine was actually the sweetest part—the great thing about European desserts is that they’re not obnoxiously sweet like most American desserts. Most American dessert menus are a study in thick, molten chocolate cakes, with maybe an artificial key lime pie thrown in for good measure—and if you’re lucky, maybe a fruit sorbet or bread pudding. Nothing light, nothing delicate, nothing that wouldn’t send you into diabetic shock or isn’t drenched in syrup. It was such a nice change of pace to have so many desserts and not feel like I’d eaten a five-pound bag of sugar at the end.

After that, I got a separate coffee and tea menu and ordered the mint tea. They actually offered a pearl tea—in which gilded pearls were infused in mineral water heated to precisely 95 degrees. Cost: €40. This must taste good, or people wouldn’t order it, but a) I couldn’t bring myself to pay $60 for a cup of tea, and b) pearls? The mint tea was lovely. The waiter brought out a big silver Russian samovar to heat the water, then decanted it into a special teapot filled with fresh mint (I got to smell the mint). After it steeped, he poured me a cup of almost completely colorless tea—that smelled so much like mint and was the perfect temperature.

And of course, I got a warm napkin at the end of the meal. As I was signing the check, I mentioned to the waiter that I had really liked the black salt—did he know where in Rome I could procure some? He said he thought it was only available in Florence, and so I was sad. But as I was leaving, he presented me with both a card (with everything I’d had to eat and drink written down on it) and a big plastic bag full of the black salt, sent out with the chef’s compliments.

I love Rome.

Sunday
Sunday was a day of rest; given that I’d walked a total of almost ten miles in the last two days, my feet were a study in foot pain, and I’d discovered new painful leg muscles I didn’t even know I had. I was wearing state-of-the-art walking shoes, but central Rome is composed mostly of uneven square black cobblestones—killer for your feet over extended periods of time, regardless of the shoes.

Fortunately there wasn’t much walking. My friend Jim has a cousin in Rome, Lia, and he set me up with her. Lia was a sweetie, she picked me up at the hotel Sunday morning and drove me all around the outskirts of Rome so that I could get some lovely views. We went to an old orange garden, and a special gate up on a hill with a tiny keyhole cut into it. If you look through the keyhole, it perfectly frames St. Peter’s dome off in the distance. Then we drove back into the city, passing through Piazza del Popolo, and had lunch at Gusto, a famous restaurant in Rome (one of the first to have multiple locations) with a cooking store attached to it. I had the most wonderful four-cheese pizza, just fresh cheese and oil and dough. Sublime. I went to the Palazzo Barberini, another of those small art museums, and wiled away the afternoon at Bottega Caffe, a tiny place near the hotel where I had fresh gnocchi dripping with cheese.

Then Lia and her husband picked me back up and took me out to dinner in the ‘burbs, in another gritty-but-gentrifying neighborhood, in a restaurant where no one spoke English. (Most people in Italy speak a varying degree of English; I knew enough Italian to translate the menus and get the conversation started, but usually relied on the other person to pick up in English at some point. Most people didn’t even let me speak Italian, apparently I look so American that they automatically launched into English.) The restaurant was small but full; I had some great proscuitto di parma, cut into thick chunks instead of the usual semi-transparent slices; more handmade ravioli; and the most interesting digestif. Lia recommended it, saying it was from the fruit of a bush that grew only in southern Italy and was popular amongst Italians. Southern Italy must do a booming business in cough medicine bushes, then, because the liquor tasted exactly like cherry Robitussin.

Monday
Monday was back to the Vatican, this time two hours before the opening so that I could get a decent place in line. The line was fine, but once they let everyone in at once, the place was jammed. I still don’t know how anyone survives in high tourist season, they must get trampled. The Vatican Museums are sprawling, with a lot of small rooms, AND NO SIGNS. Not even a map. The only signs all pointed back to the Sistine Chapel—which was small but perfect, and full of color, and amazing, but also bursting at the seams with Japanese tour groups. I could have walked on the heads from one end to the other, literally. But I kept getting led back around to the Sistine Chapel, and all the hallways were full of tour groups just standing still in the middle of everything, and finally I left because I hated humanity so much.

St. Peter’s was slightly better, no line to get into the basilica this time. It’s enormous, and everything is gilded, and all the Popes are buried in the basement, which is a little creepy. There were some fine gourmet shops near there, I bought some different kinds of salt, some wild boar proscuitto and tellegio.

It was about this point that I started taking cabs most places. I’d taken cabs to dinner Friday and Saturday nights, relying on my feet and the sadly inadequate subway system during the day, but the constant walking was beginning to break down my feet and joints. Roman cabs are odd; you don’t hail them in the street like in NY, you either get one at a designated taxi stand or call them ahead of time (which is very handy when the hotel concierge does it for you, but they start the meter running when you call, so that when they show up, you’re already a couple Euros in the hole). Also Roman drivers feel very much like home—like NY cabbies, Roman cabbies seem to be engaged in a very big and ongoing game of chicken. No lane divisions, no turn signals, certainly NO SIGNS—and there are no crosswalk lights. If you want to cross the street, you just step into the middle of it and trust that all the cars will slow down long enough to let you pass. Amazingly, they do.

For lunch, I went to a mozzarella bar; which is just like a sushi bar, complete with Japanese-themed décor and music, but with mozzarella. And really good mozzarella, at that, with really good fresh tomatoes that actually tasted and looked like tomatoes—fresh, irregularly shaped, with color variations. None of these perfectly round, perfectly red, perfectly tasteless American supermarket tomatoes. I bought some primo Italian chocolates as gifts (one for Lia) and bought some Italian bandaids for my feet—which are actually better as they are made with cloth and not with plastic adhesive.

I wandered around the Colosseum some more and saw more ruins in a park just near there, then went to San Pietro in Vinculi (St. Peter’s in Chains)—a little church which features the actual chains of St. Peter in a little gilded box, and the unfinished tomb of Lorenzo di Medici by Michelangelo (featuring his Moses).

Dinner was at a tiny cute place in Campo di Fiori called Ditirambo. Like a little country kitchen, it had rough-hewn rafters and red checked tablecloths (but also had Tears for Fears—in English—playing in the background, which was a weird dichotomy, to say the least). I had a stack of fried eggplant which had tiny whole baby squid scattered all over the plate. For a moment it looked my stack of fried eggplant had big white bugs crawling over it, but they were good bugs. The squid were cooked but tender—they must have been placed in the same frying pan as the eggplant for just a minute before being added.

The next course was two huge handmade pumpkin ravioli, each as big as my hand, and filled with nothing but fresh pumpkin and just a little cheese, in a sauce that was just butter, a little bit of cheese, and sage. Yum. There was a little cinnamon/nutmeg cookie thing crumbled over it. A cheese plate and a nice bottle of Valpolicella rounded off the evening.

Tuesday
Tuesday was the last day, and so a day filled with bits and pieces. I started at what’s left of the Circus Maximus, then went to the Keats-Shelley House right beside the Spanish Steps, where they both lived before Keats died. How 25-year-olds dying of consumption get such great real estate is beyond me. Then I headed to the Galleria Borghese, my favorite of all the museums I saw in Rome. Housed in the former Borgia estate, set in a large park (again part of the former Borgia estate), it’s filled with art but is just the right size. A lot of sculpture, a lot of Bernini, a lot of old masters. The zoo was just next door so I wandered around the zoo for a bit. Monkeys are the same in any language.

For lunch I went back to Cavour 313 and had the wild boar platter (proscuitto, two kinds of salami), bruschetta covered with thick warm slices of lard, and super-fresh bufalo mozzarella with bresaola (air-cured beef sliced very thin) and the smallest, most delicate, most yummy piece of ricotta, with three glasses of Valpolicella. Next to La Pergola, this was my favorite meal. Guess why.

I wrapped up my shopping, began the packing process, and then took the streetcar out to the ‘burbs for dinner with Lia and her family that evening. Again, super-nice. Lots of wine, lots of cheese, lots of home cooking. I produced chocolates for dessert, and Lia gave me the rest of the bufalo mozzarella to take home with me. Amazingly, despite having a half-gallon bag full of cheese swimming in liquid in my purse, no one at the airport stopped me.

The trip home was completely uneventful, and I’m now busily eating away at the proscuitto, cheese and salt I brought home with me. I got several Italian cookbooks as inspiration, and fortunately I live in the Little Italy of Brooklyn—it shouldn’t be difficult to track down more wild boar salami and (albeit pasteurized) bufalo mozzarella.

Rome was magnifica, perfetto. I love travel, I love traveling by myself, I love eating, I love drinking. Even with the gruesome exchange rate, it was worth every penny.

Admittedly, it was nice to come home and be able to speak English without apologizing.

You can see the pics here, after the Buenos Aires pics.

Friends

Christmas in Mississippi was largely uneventful, and was followed by a quick return home to check on my cats, with a flight out to Virginia the next day. This week will be spent with my family and friends there. Sunday my brother and sister and I took a family photo for my parents' Christmas present and had our (late) Christmas dinner. Monday I met Peg and Pockets, and will be spending the next few days with Peg, up through New Year's. Then I'll get to spend some time with the extended family at a ski resort.

Notable events so far: Received a Cuisinart ice cream maker for Christmas. Had hoppin' john for Christmas dinner. Made tuna carpaccio with white cherries for Peg and Pockets last night, and followed it with two lovely bottles of pinot noir (Argyle and La Crema, respectively). Got in some quality time in Peg's hot tub. We're attempting to make plans for next New Year's, which will obviously have to be a big blowout event (it'll be 2010, after all). So far we've decided it should be somewhere warm, with the hot tub as backup plan. Perhaps we can convince Pockets to get a bigger house before then...

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I'm really excited about spending Christmas Day watching crappy movies, drinking some wine, and enjoying the 73-degree breeze. I hope you're all having as much fun!

Christmas Travels

I'm spending the week of Christmas with my sister in Gulfport, MS, with the obligatory side trips to New Orleans. First, I just want to say that 75 degrees is an entirely civilized December temperature, and I'm very happy I'm not in New York right now (current temp: 23). I managed to fly out a day early on Friday and beat all the weekend snow. We spent Friday eating and drinking our way around New Orleans, and I even managed to get a taste of the 2005 Opus One. Unfortunately, it was way too young--it needed to age several more years. Boo. Betsy and I did pick out a nice Riesling for Christmas Day.

Saturday night we went out on the town. Sis gave me a tour of the representative south Mississippi nightclubs. Which, granted, are like any outside-of-New-York bars anywhere; I will say it was obvious that Mississippi is the fattest state in the country. I was completely thrown off by the medical waste drop boxes in the public bathrooms--for used insulin needles from all the diabetics. If a New York bathroom had a medical waste drop box, you can be sure it would be full of heroin needles instead. Nevertheless, I will not be deterred from the po'boys and fried catfish.

And a celebratory side note: I paid off my American Express today! Woo!

Welcome to my blog!

Now that I've gotten the Buenos Aires post out of the way, you can expect much more frequent updates on my life and travels. I'll post my theatre reviews here as well (those of you who know me can always find the old ones on www.curtainup.com and www.bestofoffbroadway.com). I'll also post last year's write-up on Rome and some other old writings. Eventually.

Buenos Aires, in its glorious entirety

Favorite. Vacation. Ever.

(And the perfect first blog post, I think. Forgive its length.)

Now you all know I’m quite the Europhile. And certainly all my European Vacations (insert National Lampoon theme music here) will always rank highly. But BA had two things Europe doesn’t: affordability and good weather. BA was boiling hot the whole time I was there; it was consistently in the 90s, with lows in the 70s, and the heat index one day got up to 106. Granted, that’s a little hot, even for me. I couldn’t really complain, though—after all, I was coming back to a winter in New York. Europe gets hot in the summer, but that’s when the prices skyrocket. I’ve only ever gone in the shoulder season, and we’re all aware of how much I spent last year in Rome. Which is why I chose BA this year—I needed to vacation somewhere where my crappy American dollar would go a lot further.

And oh, it did. My hotel was $18 a night. The most I ever paid for a meal—this was a nine-course tasting menu, with wine pairings—was $95. I could get across town on the subway for the equivalent of a quarter. It was so nice to be able to go to a place and divide rather than multiply to get the exchange rate. It’s nice to feel wealthy, especially when you aren’t. The amount in pesos of anything was about what I would pay in dollars in New York—except there I got to divide by 3.4.

BA was cheap, hot, and full of great food, great wine, and friendly people. My Spanish is, how you say, not so bueno, but I can say the essentials: Donde esta el baño? and Una tabla para una persona, por favor. Because of the favorable exchange rate, I could eat at fancy-pants restaurants twice a day, with drinks before and after, with cab rides, and still not feel like I was being extravagant. Warning, though: it is not advisable to eat oysters and drink three-quarters of a bottle of Viognier at lunch and then go walking around in 95-degree heat. Your stomach will not like you. Just sayin’.

The hotel I was staying in wasn’t really—it was a private apartment, in a residential neighborhood in the heart of the city. The lady who owns it (and sometimes also lives in it) rents out the bedrooms as a sort of bed-and-breakfast, in a very craigslist type of arrangement. It was a cute place, and for $18 a night per person (with breakfast) I could get around not having a private bathroom. Ana was very friendly and helpful, and even took us out one night. More on that later. The neighborhood, called Caballito (pronounced Cabashito, as Argentines pronounce the Spanish double-L as an S), was light-years removed from the trendier touristy neighborhoods, which was exactly what I wanted. I’d heard horror stories about the cab drivers ripping off English-speaking tourists, but I never had a problem, perhaps because I was returning to such a residential address.

When I arrived, I was too wired to sleep, so I headed out to meet up with a fellow LC alum. Andrew Miller (class of 2000) runs a wine export business in BA, and he and his girlfriend and brother accompanied me to Wine Tour Urbano. The wine tour met at a street corner in Palermo (the trendy touristy shopping district), and for 45 pesos ($15), you got a commemorative wineglass and unlimited tastings at the various stores that were participating. I must say, it’s very civilized to be able to wander the streets with a glass of wine. The wine was good, too. Highlights included the Cosecha Malbec 2004 and the Moscato Rosso 2007 (a dessert wine, made from half grapes and half raisins).

Afterwards, I went to my first fancy-pants restaurant, Thymus. Because I could, I ordered the foie gras ($10) and the Kobe beef ($45), with a bottle of Durigutti Bonarda 2006 ($15). Wine by the glass hasn’t caught on in Argentina yet—but that’s okay, because I could order a bottle there for the same price as a glass here, and if I didn’t finish it all, big deal. I suspect there was a translation issue with the foie gras, because I got goose liver (or possibly duck liver), not foie gras. It was still good, though, and the beef was as soft and buttery as the liver. The restaurant itself was cute, but a little lacking in atmosphere. Most of the other diners were far older than I was.

The next day, Saturday, I started off with a wander through the zoo. The zoo there is small, and doesn’t have the greatest variety of animals. American-style animal enclosures, which are big and mimic the animal’s natural environment, haven’t caught on there, either. It was sad seeing big animals in small spaces. But you can feed the animals there. They sell buckets of animal pellets, and the children are quite unabashed at hurling handfuls of them at every animal—usually to the animal’s delight. I didn’t buy a bucket, but that didn’t keep the animals from coming right up to the railing and begging. I had a giraffe smell my head, as if he couldn’t believe my audacity in withholding food.

Then I walked down to Don Julio, a traditional Argentine parilla, and had a lovely lunch of beer, empanadas, and grilled sweetbreads. I walked around, realized my shortsightedness in not visiting the baño before I left, and had a second (much smaller) lunch at La Cabrera in order to partake of their facilities. Another traditional parilla, I skipped the traditional stuff and just had a salad and a bottle of Torrontes, which was blessedly cold but too sweet. The banana flambé I had for dessert wasn’t nearly as sweet.

However, the find of the day was Lobby, a small restaurant and wine bar unfashionably far north in an otherwise fashionable neighborhood. I arrived at 8 pm, killing time before my 10 pm dinner reservation (dinner in Argentina is 10 or 11 pm, which is like 8 pm in New York, which is like 6 pm everywhere else—eating before that is just so, so uncool). I was the only person there, so I struck up a conversation with the owner. Lobby features all Argentine wines, and is one of the very few places to offer wines by the glass. The owner picked all the wines personally, and he made several suggestions. I selected a Viognier Dulce (sweet, but became much fruitier once it opened up) and the Las Maza Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon 2005.

Argentina is famous for its Malbec, but Bonarda is the next big grape coming out of there—the locals have become tired of Malbec, and they’re just beginning to discover Pinot Noir. Lobby’s owner recommended the Torrontes from Crios and Colomé, the Mora Negra Finca Las Moras 2006 (Malbec blended with Bonarda) and the Barda Pinot Noir 2007.

Dinner was at Maat, a members-only supper club. Fortunately, non-members like myself can eat there up to three times before having to join. It was a lovely place, very intimate and relaxed, so I helped myself to the tasting menu with wine tasting. I hope I guessed correctly as to what I was actually eating—the waiters only spoke Spanish, and my Spanish is of course not nearly advanced enough to figure out the elaborate food descriptions they rattled off. The amuse bouche was a Ferran Adria-inspired “olive” (olive juice molded into the shape of an olive with no skin, held together by Ferran Adria magic). The first course was a beef carpaccio wrapped around goat? cheese in the shape of ravioli, with capers and cheese shavings and some sort of mini crouton, with a Los Perdices Viognier 2007. This Viognier, unlike the previous ones, was perfectly balanced—fruity and luscious without being overly sweet. The second course, foie gras (it actually was foie gras this time) with cranberries?, pistachios, jamon and jellied Torrontes on a toast. (Wine Jello! Why don’t we have this in the States?) Next came langoustines with calamari and tiny grilled baby squid, on I’m assuming a squid ink risotto, since it was black. There was also some sort of cold seafood salsa on it. I liked the tiny baby squid the best. The aforementioned Barda Pinot Noir 2007 was up next, though it was a bit tannic for my taste. I got some sort of thick flaky white fish with chimichurri (traditionally served with beef) and roasted veggies and olives on top. Then a Monte Cinco Malbec—really tannic—with some sort of beef so rare it ran blood. Yum. Served with grilled sweetbreads and carrots. Dessert was two sorbets, possibly blood orange and mint, with no sugar added to either, and a Los Perdices ice wine Malbec, which was faintly reminiscent of cold cough syrup. There was also a cherry soup with some sort of ice cream, and the various obligatory petit fours.

A great meal, with good wines; the restaurant would go in my top three, although the atmosphere was a little…reserved for my taste. The Malbecs in BA as a whole were all a bit too sharp for me, in addition to being weirdly soft and clingy with a soap-like mouth residue. The fruit got lost. Plus it was entirely too hot for big, heavy red wines—I concentrated on the whites, and discovered Argentina makes some fine, fine Viogniers (which is good, Torrontes tended to be too sweet for me).

As a side note, almost all the music in BA was in English. The cab drivers were, to a one, enamored of 80s music, even though none of them spoke English. Speaking of cab drivers, Argentina is suffering from a new and pernicious economic disaster—a lack of change. (This is a great article about that.) Paying with cash is a fine art, because there is a shortage of coin and small bills, and because no one is able or willing to give you what little change they possess. Cab drivers expect exact change, or the closest equivalent possible. Paying for a 12-peso ride with a 20-peso bill will elicit much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and forget about paying for anything with a 50. Trying to use a 100-peso bill is like trying to pay for coffee and a bagel with a bar of platinum. Coins, like quarters on laundry day, are worth more than their face value. I mostly solved this problem by paying my restaurant tabs on my credit card and then asking them to break a 100—since I was eating in nice places, they didn’t mind. Especially since you have to leave a cash tip, they haven’t yet figured out the technology for leaving credit card tips.

I often mock the MTA—for good reason—but at least the NYC subways run 24/7. It was a nasty shock to head out for a day of shopping in BA on Sunday, only to be brought up short by a completely closed subway system. At 11 am. Now, who decided that Argentineans didn’t need to go anywhere before 1 pm on Sundays? Apparently the same person decided people didn’t need to buy anything on Sundays either, because a lot of the shops were closed (which, admittedly, makes more sense than closing the subways. Which also shut down at 10 pm. However, due to the raucous night life, they reopen at 6 am, just as most people are heading home from the clubs to get washed up and go to work.)

I did manage to buy a super-cute silver clutch and I had a lovely lunch at Cabernet with pate and sweetbreads and a bottle of Fond du Cave Reserva Bonarda 2004. That’s the way to spend an afternoon—with good food and good wine, in the warm sun, with a good book, and a bathroom within easy reach. The sweetbreads were in some sort of cream sauce, which was good, but too heavy for a 90-plus degree day. The palate cleanser was really the highlight of the meal—a little ginger sorbet, with a ginger liqueur poured over it. Then I had pears baked in Cabernet for dessert.

Afterwards I bumbled out into the heat and made it to the Evita Museum, MALBA (their Museum of Modern Art) and Museo des Bellas Artes (everything else). The Evita Museum was tiny, but in a great old house; fortunately Sundays were pay-what-you-wish for the museums. MALBA was very air-conditioned, which I highly appreciated, but was smaller than I anticipated (only a couple of floors, with some sort of new exhibit involving many tables full of differently-colored cabbages. Seriously.) Museo des Bellas Artes was exactly what you picture an art museum to be—large, full of paintings and sculpture, with many floors and a confusing layout. But free on Sundays.

For dinner I ended up at La Cabrera again. A lot of restaurants were closed, too, and my pick for the evening was among them. La Cabrera is best as a lunch restaurant—I got there in the middle of the dinner rush (about 10 pm) and it was mobbed. The wait line was 30 people deep, and we were all banished to the sidewalk outdoors as there was literally no room inside. Fortunately we got free champagne during the lengthy wait. The steak I got there (ojo de bife) was enormous. Easily 2 or 3 pounds. I wouldn’t buy that much meat if I were having a dinner party for 8 people, and that was considered a single serving. But it was tender, and so juicy, and rare enough to drip blood. Between the appetizer (also enormous) and the various sides that automatically come with the beef, I had enough food in front of me to choke a horse. And I got to watch Anthony Bourdain in Spanish on the bar TV. Too bad everyone around me spoke English—La Cabrera is apparently the hot restaurant for every British, American and Australian tourist in town, most of whom refused to speak Spanish to the waiters and were generally behaving like wankers.

On Monday I enjoyed lunch with the Buenos Aires office of my company (interesting note: they have bidets in the employee bathrooms. Makes you wonder what they’re doing at work). I explored Recoleta Cemetery (like Pere Lachaise in Paris) and bought some fancy teas at Tealosophy.

That night Ana, the woman running the B&B I was staying in, took everyone staying there to a drum show and then to a tango show. There were about 7 or 8 of us total—me and then a big group of people from California. The shows were literally across the tracks, in a neighborhood I would never have ventured into by myself. The drum show was just what it sounds like, and apparently an Argentine pop culture phenomenon—a “band” consisting solely of different kinds of drums, playing in a large open-air warehouse in a crappy neighborhood. There must have been over a thousand people there, mostly younger, all dancing and smoking pot and drinking really, really cheap beer (I paid 10 pesos for a liter of beer, which is about $2.50 or $3. For a liter of beer.) When the combined outdoor and body heat became too much, we all left and went to a milonga, or tango show, just down the street.

The milonga is a sort of interactive tango experience—you can dance, or watch, according to your preference, and there was a gentleman there giving lessons for those who wanted them. The show itself took place in another huge abandoned warehouse, with three-story ceilings and an air of general decrepitude that BAM paid a lot of money to imitate. It looked like something from Pirates of the Caribbean. It was hot, and dark, and we were starving, but eventually empanadas were procured, along with more 10-peso liter beer.

Tuesday was lunch at Chila, Second favorite meal there. I went for lunch, and it was spectacular—I wonder what dinner would have been like. It was even hotter on Tuesday (the heat index was up to 106), and I was determined to avoid as much of the heat as possible. I decided to have a long, luxurious, air-conditioned lunch overlooking the water. The nice thing about BA is that no place is frigidly over-air-conditioned like every place in NY. In July in NY, it’s necessary to carry a sweater because interiors are chilled down to below 70 degrees. Half the city employs portable heaters at their desks at work because of this. Air-conditioning in BA was a gentle 80 or 82 degrees; much more pleasant than outdoors, but not so cold you had to cover up and then sneeze the rest of the afternoon. No icy blasts, no freezing halfway through a meal, no having to carry a wrap everywhere. Much more civilized than a sudden 35-degree temperature drop. I really must move somewhere warm.

Anyway. I started with a bottle of Escorihuela Gascon Viognier 2008. My favorite bottle of the trip, and the top Viognier I’ve ever had. It was lovely—sweet without being sugary, very fruity but crisp and well-balanced. It opened up beautifully and I didn’t get that nasty sugar-withdrawal headache I usually get after a lot of white wine or champagne. The amuse bouche was smoked salmon strips with sour cream and chives and what I think was some sort of cucumber slaw. I then had four enormous half-shell oysters (each the size of my hand) on a bed of rock salt, with tiny bits of lemon flesh (not lemon juice) and a shot of champagne. The oysters were rich and creamy, not briny at all and the perfect accompaniment to the wine. The main course was black hake in a mussel broth, with mussels and some sort of mashed veg, possibly parsnip. I hadn’t had this before—it’s a sturdy, flaky white fish and it had a good char on it. The mussel broth really brought out some interesting complexities of taste and for a hot dish was surprising appropriate for the weather.

I then got a cheese plate—brie, morbier, and something else. My one complaint about Argentina is its lack of good stinky cheese. Various other dessert bits followed—a strawberry sorbet, an espresso crème brulee with a cookie, mango tea. The tea came with a silver tray of brown and white sugar and cocoa.

More walking ensued—along the waterfront, into San Telmo, into Walrus Books and various antique shops. The heat got to me and I ended up spending that night camped under the AC vent in my hotel room—only to be foiled by rolling blackouts at some point in the night. Even without arctic blasts, BA’s energy system is often overcome by all the AC usage in the summer. By the time I left, I’d wandered into several energy-free restaurants. There’s no place quite so stuffy as a airless restaurant.

I’d originally come to BA with the intention of getting protein poisoning—eating my way through a metric ton of fine grass-fed beef, with good red wine every night. Well, it was far too hot for either one; by mid-week, my stomach revolted at the thought of heavy red wines and charred steak when it was 95 degrees out. Instead, I concentrated on fine dining, the kind of nine-course tasting menus I could never afford in New York. And frankly, that was better than a lot of beef and red wine. The food was amazing, and cheap, and I was steered into some wonderful white wines that I might not have found if it hadn’t been so hot.

Which led me to a cooking class on Wednesday, one of my favorite experiences of the trip. Teresita is a little old Argentinean lady, living in a suburb of BA, and she runs English-language cooking classes for tourists and visitors. The class I signed up for was a half-day of learning how to make traditional beef empanadas and the asado, the traditional Argentine grill. We started at the butcher shop, selecting the various meats for the grill (skirt steak, short ribs, flank steak, pork loin, sausage, blood sausage, tripe, sweetbreads and beef kidney) and then made the empanadas. Everything was wonderful, of course, complemented by a Torrontes Trapiche Origen 2007 with the empanadas and a Malbec Trapiche Origen 2006 with the meats. It was a great group of people, about 10 or 12 total.

I attempted to recreate the empanadas when I got home. While they turned out fine, the dough I made was much more difficult to work with than I remembered. I attributed this to problems of translation—the recipe Teresita gave us was in grams (who can translate 500 grams of flour into cups?), and so I had to eyeball it at home. More experimentation is necessary.

That night I went to Club 647, a hip new restaurant in San Telmo, a slightly sketchy neighborhood. It was just like Buddakan in New York, with no air conditioning. Seriously. Another victim of the rolling blackouts. I bailed and went around the corner to La Vineria de Gaulterio Bolivar.

Other people have called this a meal worth traveling around the globe for (like here) and I have to rate this as the second greatest meal of my life (just after the first greatest, in Rome, at La Pergola, with Chila as number 3). La Vineria is new, just under a year old, and the chef studied with Ferran Adria in Spain. Since no one can get a reservation at Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli, (2 million annual requests for 8,000 dinner seats), having dinner at La Vineria is as close as you’re likely to come. At about 1/20th of the price. My dinner at La Vineria was a four-hour, nine-course molecular gastronomy delight, and total price (with wine pairings) came in at about $69. Compared to my $500 bill at La Pergola, that’s quite a deal. Frankly, anyone can have a great meal at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in a four-star hotel in Rome, that’s glamour dining at its finest. It’s much more rare and special to have a fantastic meal in a crappy, rundown neighborhood, in a restaurant that the guidebooks haven’t yet discovered.

La Vineria is a tiny, unassuming place, with perhaps 20 seats in a storefront. The tasting menu is the only option, based on whatever the chef can get fresh at the markets. There’s only one seating a night, meaning everyone was getting the same course at about the same time. All the tables were talking to each other, comparing notes, and most people were taking notes and pictures—it’s quite the foodie destination.

I started with two wines; a Colome Torrontes 2007, and a Los Perdices Pinot Grigio 2008. The Torrontes was, surprisingly, a little spicy; both were very light and fruity, not heavy or sweet at all. The first course was a series of four bites. There was a “bread viniagrette,” a little pocket of bread with vinegar and oil inside; a sort of fried cheese bite; a “pepper ravioli,” a tiny globe of roasted red pepper juice; and a slice of apple with a chip of paprika—like taffy, sweet but with a spicy kick.

Next came an octopus and salmon ceviche, served in shot glass, and a bowl of curried almonds. Then came the infamous hot and cold pea soup, a glass of pea soup cold on one side and hot on the other. Be careful how you drink this—I managed to get the hot side going into my mouth first, instead of both at the same time, and scalded my tongue in the process. The salad of 30 vegetables followed (I didn’t count) in a warm dill reduction, with a Diaz Pionero Roble Chardonnay 2006.

The next course was one of the most inventive. This was a slow-cooked poached egg (slow-cooked for 50 minutes at 63 degrees, though they failed to specify whether that was Celsius or Fahrenheit) served with a sheep’s cheese foam with a sort of lime juice thing at the bottom and truffle oil drizzled all over the top. The egg and the foam made a great flavor combination, and of course the textures were intriguing. Next came a “surf and turf” variation, lamb and scallops with mashed artichokes. The lamb was tender to the point of flaking apart, but it was too well-done for me (Argentines do like their meat very well-done).

With a Tempus Malbec Rose 2007 came a dish of octopus topped with a tomato foam, served with tiny cubes of solidified balsamic vinegar, an olive oil powder, and smoked paprika. The octopus was a little chewy, and it was hard to taste the tomato in the foam. It was the most interesting-sounding dish, but the flavors didn’t quite meld. Then I got a salmon filet served in a warm fish broth with ginger and lime. The salmon was lovely, but I think it would have been even more interesting served as a carpaccio or a tartare with the hot broth cooking just a little.

Next came a Tapiz Merlot Reserva 2005, with more lamb and fava beans, then a beef filet with a chimichurri foam and an interesting twist on french fries. There was a tall crispy potato tube, filled with liquid potato inside. The beef was very rare (refreshingly). Dessert was a fortified late harvest Malbec, a tiny scoop of chocolate ice cream with a reduction of goat cheese, an almond cookie, and a smear of orange. To finish off the evening, we all got a cotton candy stick of pepper foam. Imagine eating a pepper-flavored cotton candy, with no sugar, and just the faintest hint of green tea.

It’s a good thing I had this amazing meal, because the next day was largely a disappointment in terms of food. Juana M was super cute but not a lunch place—I would have enjoyed it far more at dinner. I suddenly remembered it was Thanksgiving Day, and stopped off at an American ex-pat bar, El Alamo. They were serving a traditional turkey dinner, with Budweiser and NFL. It was quite a culture shock seeing American NFL, in English, after a week of speaking Spanish. I was looking forward to dinner at Oviedo, but they didn’t have power when I showed up. I gamely attempted to soldier through, but after an afternoon in a smoky bar, sitting in an airless, lightless, un-air-conditioned restaurant wasn’t working for me. Fortunately their seafood risotto made an excellent breakfast the next morning. The baby fried squid appetizer, served with sweet potato cubes and a green swirl with hidden roasted peppers and onions, was delicious.

Friday’s lunch was sushi at Osaka. While I’ve had better sushi in New York, the seafood salad there was outstanding—made from real seaweed, with real ginger on the side, not that pickled stuff from a jar you usually get. And cold sake is an excellent substitute for chilled white wine on a hot day. There was lots more shopping that afternoon; BA has a lot of great little funky jewelry shops, where I concentrated my shopping dollars. There are of course great handbags and leather accessories to be had, but I’m not much of a handbag collector and my big American feet were too big for their cute little South American shoes. The clothing there, with the obvious exception of the leather, is not very well-made, and the largest size most stores carry is an 8. Even though I am an 8, I still wasn’t willing to be considered “extra-large.”

My last dinner was at Casa SaltShaker, another trip highlight. Casa SaltShaker is an underground restaurant run by an ex-pat American, Dan Perlman, recently transplanted from New York. He used to be the wine buyer for Heights Chateau in Brooklyn. Now he runs dinner parties out of his Recoleta apartment; two or three times a week, he creates a different menu, and he hosts twelve people at 90 pesos a pop (35 extra with wine pairing). This is a great experience; relaxed, congenial, with great food and wine, and a really interesting mix of people. The night I was there was an homage to Central African cooking. Most of the people there were fellow foodies; we all had great fun sharing restaurant tips and stories, and I made sure to chat up La Vineria and Chila. I also had great fun making the acquaintance of an extremely good-looking 24-year-old law student from UT Austin, who apparently was a regular at Casa SaltShaker during his semester abroad. He was, shall we say, the perfect ending to a wonderful vacation.

So, to sum up.
Top Restaurant Recommendations:
La Vineria de Gualterio Bolivar
Chila
Lobby
Cabernet
Don Julio
Maat

Top Wines Tasted:
Escorihuela Gascon Viognier 2008
Los Perdices Viognier 2007
Colome Torrontes 2007
Los Perdices Pinot Grigio 2008
Diaz Pionero Roble Chardonnay 2006
Cosecha Malbec 2004 and Moscato Rosso 2007
Justin Isosceles Reserve 2004 Paso Robles

Highly Recommended Places I Didn’t Get A Chance to Go To:
Pura Tierra
Sucre
Casa Cruz
Happening
Aramburu
Tomo Uno
El Gran Danzon

More pics here (along with pics from Rome!).