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My Kind of Food

Sharing stories about the kind of food I like to eat

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Vinum Exhilarat Animum!

Free wine fountain in Abruzzo, Italy

When I started this blog, I was clear that it would be about food and not particularly about wine, beer or spirits. Now however I’m changing my mind a little and this is for two principal reasons.

The first is because of the inspiration I’ve received from a friend of mine in the UK, Peter, who has a series of posts on his Facebook page under the heading, Vino Friday. Reading his posts led me to realise something, and that is the second motivation for what I’m about to launch on this site.

Living in Italy gives access to some first rate and world class wines, on the door step. The great wines of Tuscany (Brunello di Moltalcino) and Piemonte (Barolo) hold their own in the world of classic and noble wines and the best examples of them command very high prices. Other Italian wines from the Sud-Tirol in the far north to Sicily in the South offer great variety in terms of style, price and quality. Even in the realm of sparking wines, the bollicine of Franciacorta, not to be confused with Prosecco because they are made according to the méthode champenoise, can hold their own against many French Champagnes, even if they are from the cisalpine slopes of Lombardy rather than the the vineyards surrounding Rheims. Italy is proud of its wine production and is the second biggest exporter of wine to the UK, after France, BUT the Italians in general are not very open to wines from other parts of the world. Reading Peter’s posts, referred to above, has awakened in me many happy wine memories and I realise that I very much miss the wines of the Loire, South America, Oceania, South Africa and many other regions across the world.

Trying to buy so-called new world wines in Italy, or even French wines is very difficult and often expensive. The Italian wine market is protected, by fair means or foul and one has to work very hard to source a decent bottle.

I enjoy wine but am too lazy to learn the technical stuff however I am going to try to write the occasional piece on this blog to share my experience of drinking the odd bottle of wine. To help with this, I’ve recruited the assistance of Adam Serdiuchenko who will tutor me through the tasting of each wine. Adam is a WSET qualified sommelier and I’m looking forward to him helping me to describe the wines we taste.

As always the preferences and final assessment of what I like or don’t like will be mine – this is a personal blog after all, albeit supplemented with Adam’s professional knowledge.

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An evening at the ranch

For years, in fact each time I’ve left town by car, I’ve driven past what I supposed to be a stables/riding school. It’s the Cascina Sesmones on the outskirts of Lodi. It’s a very tidy and pretty set up seen from the road, with well groomed healthy looking horses in the paddocks.

Recently a friend mentioned this same place in connection with a restaurant that he thought we might find interesting. How could it be, that after nearly 8 years of living here, there could be a restaurant I hadn’t even heard of and in any case I’d thought was simply a horsey place. Obviously a visit to explore it was necessary…

Sure enough the restaurant, Spazio Molino, is located within the Cascina Sesmones. Parking in the car park, the first sight was of the horses in their stalls. The complex also includes a conference centre and hotel. Anyone who has visited the winelands outside Cape Town, South Africa, will be familiar with the manicured beauty of their principal buildings and the inevitability of finding a nice place to eat. So it was with Cascina Sesmones. Everything is very well cared for and maintained, there isn’t a weed visible in the gravel, the paintwork is immaculate and the lighting superb.

The menu here is something quite innovative and even the reading of it gets the taste buds tingling. We sat and looked at the long list of dishes, any of which might be more than acceptable. We ordered water while we thought about food and wine. We chose the food and narrowed down the wine choice. Twenty minutes passed and still no water arrived, no order was taken and no-one checked as to whether or not we had any questions. By now we were thirsty – very thirsty! This was a dinner on a hot summer’s evening to celebrate the end of a working life of some 40 years. What promised to be a really good find was turning into an irritation.

When eventually we were given some water we ordered our food and an Argentinian Malbec wine. New world wines being a bit of a rarity here this was a real treat.

Starters were without doubt delicious, even if mine, seared beef with French oyster mayonnaise and gossamer thin shavings of Raspadura (the local grana cheese), appeared to all intents and purposes to be a main course.

Main courses didn’t quite live up to either the excitement promised by their menu descriptions or the excitement of the first courses. I had suckling pig which had a lovely crispy skin and a buttery jus contrasted with bitter spinach. It was nice but not special in the way the starter had been.

We decided to have puddings and waited to see the menu so as to order them. We waited and we waited and we waited. To this day no one ever came to take our order, so it was that we left, paying at the desk on the way out and giving our feedback. A reasonable discount was given for the lack of service.

Overall the menu here attracts me very much but the service puts me off to a very high degree. I will give it another go but am not hopeful that the service will be any better, having heard form others that they experienced something similar. If they sort this out, I’d be very happy to make Spazio Molina a regular haunt, not least because I’d love to visit Dafne and the other horses again.

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With a little help from my friends

Not the song by The Beatles, from the film, Yellow Submarine, but the title of the latest tasting menu at Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. The restaurant reopened in its Via Stella location in central Modena on 1 June, following the most recent lock-down restrictions with a menu which pays tribute, across 12 plates of food and 18 individual creations, to 16 Italian chefs.

The dishes are each inspired by the originals devised between 1963 and 2020, and have been reimagined, in homage to the original creator and presented in the most elegant and delicate way possible. In some cases chef Massimo Bottura plays with the mind as well as the eyes and the palate perhaps initially to confuse and then certainly excite the diner, but always in a way that makes sense, at least by the end of the particular course. One dish, Zuppa fredda di Carbonara, in homage to Gianfranco Vissani, translates as Cold Carbonara Soup. It is described as Crema Inglese (custard) with pepper, guanciale (cured pork cheek) banana, pecorino cheese ice cream and caviar! This was in fact the first of the deserts but perhaps is best described as a cross-over course! The sharp eyed among readers will notice the key ingredients for Carbonara sauce are mentioned (guanciale, pepper, pecorino and egg in the form of the custard) and clearly that classic Roman dish is the inspiration for this course. The salty tang of the fried guanciale, nestled under the custard and the cheese ice cream really set this dish alight with flavour. A-ma-zing!

I last mentioned Osteria Francescana in 2016. After my previous visit in 2014, I’d had a great desire to go again. Seven years of patience eventually paid off and I was very pleased to celebrate my birthday there just a few days ago with two friends, for one of whom it was his first experience of a Michelin 3* eatery.

My admiration for the chef is unbounded, not only for his undoubted skill in the kitchen, his limitless imagination and his kind personal welcome to every guest, but also because of his significant efforts in developing future talent in the hospitality industry, his interventions to help save the Parmsan Cheese production following an earthquake in 2012, his establishment of a ‘refectory’ during Milan Expo 2015, to feed the most vulnerable people of the city with the food from the various pavilions of the Expo and then the not-for-profit organisation he created with his wife, Food for the Soul, which grew out of that intitial enterprise.

This is a man who has a social conscience and one who, when you meet him, exudes a simplicity both in his love for food and hospitality. He has an open way of communicating and a gentle manner in treating his staff in what must be a very demanding working environment. Many of us are familiar with a style of running kitchens, espoused by the likes of that uncouth gorilla of a man, Gordon Ramsey. The foul language and aggressive way of treating staff, and sometimes customers, makes good TV but with Chef Bottura it’s completely different and consequently his accolades are higher and he remains first and foremost a cook. I wandered down a small road to the side of the restaurant shortly after Massimo had worked the dining room and spoken to each table. A small door into the kitchen was open and I was able to witness the man himself returning to the brigade full of smiles and friendly greetings. If massaging Wagyu cattle produces the finest beef in the world then being nice to the staff when you’re the boss produces quality too.

Osteria Francescana was ranked as number one in the world in 2016 and then again in 2018. It was the first Italian Restaurant to achieve this. It was second in the world in 2015 and third in 2013 and 2014. No one stays at the top of the league forever of course and now Mirazur has taken that first place but it’s clear that Bottura has stayed at the top of his game. His expansion with Franceschetta58, also in Modena and his kitchens in Istanbul, Dubai, Florence and Beverly Hills, often in conjunction with Gucci, make me worry that one day he will overstretch and that Osteria Francescana will consequently cease to be the unique experience it still is today.

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MoS – my mistake

Yesterday many of the major websites across the globe failed. This makes me feel good because I’d been struggling to understand why my latest post, MoS, wasn’t appearing on my blog home page. Knowing that others, even governments, experience tech failures makes me feel included. I still don’t really understand what I did wrong but for the sake of completeness, here is a link to the original article.

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