I love cooking the whole fish. Alli bought this beautiful rainbow trout from the Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley for dinner, and I thought about it all day. But I also thought about a time that I wasn’t so into the whole fish, namely my entire childhood.

I grew up in a small town northwest of Kansas City, Missouri. We lived in “town”, but my grandparents lived on a farm a few miles east. The farm had bison, cows, a few pigs, beefalo (offspring of cow and bison), and a pond. I spent countless weekends on the farm as a kid, and long swaths of every summer, and a lot of that time sitting on the dock or standing on the banks of the pond fishing. The pond had crappie, some perch, was rumored to contain bass, but was mostly the home to catfish. I loved to fish; it was a great way to spend time with my grandfather, who would wake me up in the middle of the night so we could crawl down with our flashlights to see if the reels twitched. I could spend part of the morning hunting worms in the soil around the house, and the rest of the day dodging dragonflies and cowpies and hoping for a bite.

The problem was, ironically, getting the bite. My grandfather had a strict policy of you-catch-it you-clean-it, and so the fun ended at the precise moment it was supposed to come to its fruition, when the fish was on the hook. I could reel it in, but once the fish started flopping and suffocating in the dirt, I didn’t know what to do. I hated the feel of its skin, I hated having to pull the hook out of its cheek while it looked at me with its bulging, help-me eyes. And I really hated having to slice its belly open so its guts came out. The last time I did it, I found I had a mother cat with its eggs, and that was the end of my young fishing career.

Prior to that, though, once the fish was finally dead and cleaned, my grandmother would take over. She didn’t vary too much in her approach. Two inches of hot vegetable oil in a pan, the catfish filleted and those fillets covered in bread crumbs, and fried to oblivion.

That’s not how we cooked this rainbow trout last night. Just as one illustration (of many possible, don’t get me started on the vegetable [lack thereof] situation or the now-horrible reflections on the torture enacted upon perfectly beautiful steaks) of the difference between my gastronomical upbringing and my adult life. For this little (big) guy, I rinsed and dried the cavity well. After seasoning it, I put two very generous swabs of butter in the cavity and half a bunch of leftover tarragon. I cut our penultimate Meyer lemon into thin slices and covered the fish with them, then wrapped it en (tinfoil) papillote and baked it for 25 minutes at 375 degrees. With a little bit off braised red chard (to complement the pink flesh with a deep red and green), it was a perfect Spring dinner.

It came with its guts already out of the picture, thanks very much!

I love this short recipe and narrative by Thomas Keller, "My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken." Thanks to Carol for the link.

And here's Mariquita Farm's Andy on Agretti.

It’s part of my personality to take failure hard, so I am happy to say that I’m mostly free of that when it comes to failures in the kitchen. That’s assisted by the fact that most of the failures end up not only edible but, you know, pretty decent. The homemade pasta’s a little too dente? It’s still good! The gnocchi alla Romana that turned out like cheesy mush? I don’t hold anything against cheesy mush!!

But when there’s guests coming, I obsess a little. I have a really hard time with the very-good-idea-of-a-rule that you should make those dishes for guests that are tried and true, that are good and get better every time you make them, dishes you could make half asleep. Whenever I have the chance to cook for a group, that’s when I want to make exactly the opposite: what I’ve never made, have no idea how to make, are way beyond my comfort zone, dishes that will probably fall flat, and inevitably involve me approaching my fish and poultry person asking for something that nobody’s bought for two years. But anyway, this way I get to practice them.

In preparation for a dinner in a couple weeks, to my credit, I did come up with a seemingly simple idea for dessert: a bay leaf panna cotta with kumquats. (The dish belongs to Incanto, I’m just trying to rent it.) I’ve been really happy with desserts of the herbaceous or floral families lately, and think it will be a fairly light and different ending to the menu. But there’s a catch, and that is (guilty!) I don’t really know how to infuse cream with herbs. Last summer I tried at least three times to replicate the basil zabaglione we had with fresh strawberries at Delfina. Mariquita farms kept us in strawberries and basil, and I kept producing adequate-tasting but not-very-basil-ly zabagliones.

Time for a test run. I put together the most basic recipe for a panna cotta I could assemble from the cookbooks. I placed 2 ¼ tsp. gelatin in a small bowl and covered it with 1/8 c. cold water, and set the bowl aside.

Then, in a saucepan, I brought 1 ½ c. heavy cream, 3/8 c. sugar, 2 sections of zest from Mariquita Meyer Lemons, and bay leaves, to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Here’s the first crisis—how many bay leaves? Dried bay leaves, will they cut it?, or should I use finely ground bay leaf? Once the mixture had been brought to a simmer, I removed the pan from the heat and let it sit. But how long would it take? How long did it need to steep? I gave it half an hour, whisked in the gelatin and whisked vigorously to incorporate the gelatin smoothly. I removed the herb and zest, stirred in 2 ½ c. buttermilk, and strained the whole mixture through a sieve, filled small ramekins, and chilled them to set.

And the result? Good panna cotta! It was very smooth, creamy, delicious. It jiggled on the plate when I walked it from the refrigerator to the table just the way I wanted it to jiggle. But it was, alas, just, you know, not a bay leaf panna cotta. The buttermilk shone, but it did not have even the subtle herbaceous notes I was going for. Clearly there is some technique that I don’t have done—which is why I turn to you, six readers, to wonder if you have any feedback or suggestions?

I went to Delfina restaurant in the Mission for the first time because person after person raved about it. But I went to Da Delfina ristorante in Tuscany because of a blog post. This one, to be specific.

Solociccia and Da Delfina were the only two places we made reservations for our whole trip, and our first night in Tuscany we drove to Artimino. The adventure began as soon as the journey there. Being technologically-dependent Americans, we MapQuested the route from the villa we were staying in (poor us) to the village of Artimino, apparently very near Firenze. The MapQuest promised us a thirty minute drive. The hosts at our villa said it would be at least an hour. We got dressed.

It was a disaster. Traffic circle after cursed traffic circle. And when we saw signs indicating that we were about to drive all the way into Firenze proper, panic. But as the sun started to go down, by a combination of cartological prowess and sheer luck, we found signs for Artimino. And promptly passed the lone road up the hill and went into some kind of forest where the road went from two lanes to one lane to no lanes. We persevered, and finally (finally!) made it to the top of the hill where the beautiful restaurant sat.

I had made reservations online for 7:00, using a sort of fake pieced-together Italian derived half from Babelfish and half from my Latin studies. Uh huh. So at 6:58 we walked from the car (the only one in the lot) up toward the restaurant. Inside, the staff of Da Delfina sat around a table eating dinner and talking and drinking wine. Okay, so we were early. We walked around the parking lot a little bit, looked at the stars, debated whether or not we should go in now or in five minutes or in ten minutes, and were both exhausted from the traffic-circle purgatory we had just been through.

At 7:15 I thought, okay, we can go in. We trepidly walked back to the door, and in. Forks froze, conversation stopped, and they all looked at us like, wtf? A young woman came up to us and I tried to stammer that I had a prenotazione in Itanglish. She asked what time, and I said 7:00. She said, impossible. This is bad. I gave her my name, and she looked on the roster of reservations, on which my name emphatically did not appear. This is the part where my stomach really sank—not only had we intruded upon a family dinner in this beautiful restaurant, not only had we driven for 90 minutes through insane traffic circles and into boar-laden (right?) woods, but now we were not even going to be able to eat at the restaurant for which we had gone to all the trouble.

But my stomach could rise again—she said I could make a reservation right then, and asked what time. 7:30? Sure thing. So we grazied her and went back out and sat in the car for 13 minutes and then gave it a couple extra minutes and then went back in at 7:33 for dinner. We were still the only ones there. She led us into the back dining room and we sat down at the table with a tiny scrap of paper that read “Brown, 19:30” on it. And then she gave us menus and left. And then we sat there.

The menu was terrific. My cockiness about being able to understand Italian food words took a blow, but hey, even that was terrific. The only weird thing was that we discussed the menu together at length, trying to decide what to order, and nobody came to check on us. Later, in hindsight, the only reason this seemed weird is that once again we were the dumb Americans barging in on their party. In the United States, if a server sits you and leaves you alone for 20 minutes, one automatically assumes that the server is out to get us and for which we must exact revenge in the form of depreciated gratuity. At Da Delfina, they were probably just having dessert and giving us time to figure it out. Or more likely, actually, they were doing something totally, beautifully logical: they were waiting for more people to arrive. Another couple came in and were seated next to us, and then a bigger party. And then it was like the gun went off and it was okay to go! Carlo came over and asked for our order.

We knew we were ordering too much food, but couldn’t stop ourselves. We had to order the Sformato di ceci con bottarga because it was at Delfina in the Mission that I had fallen in love with sformati. We had to order the Ribollita because if you have “Ribolitta Da Delfina” at Delfina in the Mission, then you have to order Ribolitta at Da Delfina in Artimino.

I wondered if Carlo knew the English word for cerva, the tempting ingredient in Pappardelle con ragu di cerva. He didn’t. But thankfully a deer’s head jutted out of the wall above our heads, so he could just gesture, and kindly smile: “cerva.” Uh huh. We ordered Fegatelli spiedo because it was at Delfina in the Mission that I had eaten a chicken liver spiedini that, still, is the only thing I’ve ever eaten which has brought tears to my eyes (the difference being that Da Delfina’s spiedo used pork liver, and was gigantic and amazing, but gigantic). And to add insult to injury, we ordered Contrafilleto in vino.

The sformato was made of chick peas, and had all of the creamy texture and savory depth I was hoping for. The bottarga was interesting—I didn’t know what it was—a strange pinkish, soft chip topping the sformato. (It’s grey mullet roe). Dish after dish came out, and it was all tremendous. We were all done after the pappardelle and the delicious, deep venison ragu. And then a huge piece of meat and gigantic pig livers came out. Which is why we smartly declined dessert, and stuck with a piccolo grappa and caffe. Our server (in sharp red tux) brought us some anyway, slices of a rosemary-walnut torta, with the texture of a pancake.

After we had done as much as we could do, we paid and steeled ourselves for what we knew could be a journey of many hours and traffic circles in the dark Tuscan night. It seemed altogether more conceivable, though, after that meal. On the way out, I tried to tell Carlo that we lived near Delfina in the Mission—capito, he said, capito. He communicated to me, and I don’t know how I can be so sure of this but I am sure, that normally Da Delfina is bustling with people (it was, in fact, pretty bustling by the time we left). Capito, I said (yeah right), capito.

As Alli came out the door Carlo followed her. He handed her an ashtray, it looked handmade and painted and read Da Delfina. Artimino. He said, “Signora, signora….don’t smoke.” We took our treasure and made it home in record time.

post script--I didn't take photos inside Da Delfina for the same reason I didn't at Solociccia the next night--part of me wishes I had them, sure, but in the moment, it would have seemed totally inappropriate to pull the camera out and photograph this stuff. I hope you and I will both forgive me and understand. Thank you.

A few months ago I went with a couple friends on a cocktail tour. We started the night (okay, who am I kidding, more like the late afternoon) at Nopa, whose cocktails are tremendous in their own right. We had ambition, but our itinerary was vague and open to spontaneous revision, as any properly executed cocktail tour should be. So when the bartender at Nopa heard we were on a cocktail tour, he used persuasive speech to convince us that we had to try Alembic, on Haight Street.

Haight Street. Ugh. For the first four years I lived in San Francisco, I lived blocks away from it, and in the sleepy panhandle where my apartment was, Haight St. was pretty much it for staples. I had my first legal drink (Old Granddad) at a bar on Haight St., 75% of my dinners out, and certainly I had to trudge behind gawking tourists every single time I wanted to do any of it. And not just any tourists. Whatever sort of actual counterculture may have dwelt in the vicinity is beyond long gone—there’s not even a memory. It’s like Disneyland for middle class wannabe gutter punk / hippies and Kansans with a fantasy. Anyway, I was dubious.

In a way, though, despite the fact that Alembic is an amazing place, it doesn’t feel like it should be on Haight St. Alli and I say this to each other every time we go. I don’t know where it should be, except that I would continually lobby for a Mission branch out of selfish desire.

There’s a lot I could say about it: the bar snacks and actual dinner menu are exciting, the décor is charming, etc. But the real draw? The drinks. That first night I had a cocktail (no longer on the menu, sadly!) with whiskey and pine needle liqueur. Pine needle liqueur. It started with earth and oak and ended up literally with forest floor. Fantastic.

We went Saturday night and split two drinks. The first was a special, again, not on the regular menu. It featured an aged tequila, bitters, and smoked maple syrup. A terrific thing about Alembic is that by paying attention to their menu and combinations you can really learn a lot about complementary flavors with spirits. A standard on their menu combines a smoky element with tequila, and it really shone again here. For our second drink, we were pressed for time and decided to try one of the 15-20 gins they have on their menu. I told the bartender that I enjoyed floral, aromatic gins like Hendrick’s. He suggested we try Miller’s. A revelation! Impeccably smooth, with a bouquet of pure cucumber. Wonderful.

But after several visits, there is one drink that tops them all, and that is the Southern Exposure. The first time Alli and I had one, all other cocktails crumbled. It touched all the taste zones, and the savoriness and weirdness of the celery makes it 1) eminently drinkable (dangerous)! but 2) probably the most hunger-inducing cocktail possible. The recipe was printed in the newspaper, so I feel okay reproducing it here. We’ve tried it a couple of times with imperfect results—but even the imperfect version of this cocktail is a thing of beauty.

Southern Exposure

Makes 1 drink

• 1 1/2 ounces Junipero gin
• -- Juice of half lime
• 3/4 ounce simple syrup
• 3/4 ounce fresh celery juice
• 7 or 8 mint leaves

Instructions: Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, shake vigorously for 20 seconds in sixteenth-note triplets. Double strain into chilled cocktail glass, wash your shaker and glass, garnish with single mint leaf, wipe sweaty brow, smile.

The Scene At Boccalone

Even before eating at Incanto, I admired chef Chris Cosentino’s website and blog for his its demonstration of passion for meat, which includes the respectful raising, treatment, and slaughter of animals and using as much of them as possible. Eating there is really terrific. The menu, consisting of “rustic Italian cooking”, does highlight offal and “unusual” cuts of meat, but is truly diverse and can accommodate any diet. We’ve only been once, and we had a long and tremendous meal that included a flight of Toscana wines, stuffed peppers (it was late summer), a pig trotter cake, sublime chicken liver ravioli with aged balsamic, and a roasted goat leg with, if I remember, a sort of salsa verde, and finally a bay leaf panna cotta (which was also delicious, and testament to the range of Incanto’s staff).

So with this experience in mind, I’ve wanted to join the Salumi Society at Boccalone for months, the salumi company founded by Cosentino and Mark Pastore, the owners of Incanto. I mean, “tasty salted pig parts.” Uh huh. I don’t know what took me so long! But finally I signed up, and Saturday hopped the bus up to Noe Valley to pick up my first box.

While in the neighborhood, I visited the N.V. Farmer’s Market for some greens. The Market is kind of, what do you expect in Noe Valley?, cute, I guess. More strollers than vendors. I will confess that I was a little over-served of Franziskaner and bourbon the night before, and it was freaking hot on Saturday, and I was grouchy about the strollers and the dogs. I had to remind myself, though, that I was the visitor and should smile. So I smiled.

When I finally made it to Incanto, everything got better. First of all, as pictured below, the first thing you encounter is a table full of meat! That brightens anyone-not-vegetarian’s day. Three meats were out for sample, Ciccioli, or braised scraps of lean pork meat and skin, seasoned with garlic and rosemary; a delicious salami of “three peppers”, and prosciutto cotto, a treat I have a hard time passing up in any context. Terry, the staff on hand, gave me my box and went through it with me, describing all of the products and the best ways to use them. He was really affable, and maybe it was the weather but everybody seemed really happy to be in a room surrounded by tasty salted pig parts at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

There weren’t a lot of people there so early, but I imagine it becomes a little bit of a scene on “salumi Saturdays”. I really recommend checking it out! The box, by the way, came with a fennel-brown sugar salami (amazing), coppa di testa (head cheese, my first ever, so still waiting for sandwich time), capocollo (cured meat from the pig’s neck), and Italian sausages, which I roasted last night and served with cassoulet-style cannellini beans and Happy Boy farms rainbow chard, purchased from the Noe Valley Farmer’s market while dodging three strollers and a pack of dogs.

Ribollita means “re-cooked.” Essentially a soup consisting of stale bread, vegetables, and beans, it fits into the category of classic “peasant” dishes. That’s the conventional story about ribollita anyway. The first real version I had was at Delfina, and “Ribollita ‘Da Delfina’” was not what one might expect if one expects soup. Ribollita ‘Da Delfina’ is a dense, dark brown cake; the bread, vegetables, and beans had virtually melted into one another, and left only their traces in color and texture: a sliver of orange carrot, a patch of cakiness from the bread. It was delicious, and also, I thought, an amazing vehicle for battuti, or mirepoix, or aromatics, however you want to say it.

Reading around recipes for ribollita mostly seem to refer to something more like a conventional soup. However, the two or three times I had ribollita in Tuscany, it was always in the dense, cakey style that Delfina used. When I decided to make ribollita for supper this weekend, I consulted recipes that I had in my library, but was so excited to find that Davina Cucina had printed Romeo Colzi’s Ribollita recipe, the “signature dish” and Trattoria Mario. I should say only briefly here that Trattoria Mario is one of my favorite places on this earth, and I not only begged Alli to go there for lunch every single day we were in Firenze, but likely weakened my case by never shutting up about Trattoria Mario. And we had had the ribollita at Trattoria Mario, and it was tremendous.

Ribollita takes at least two days to make. And part of the foundation is, of course, the bread. I decided that I wanted to try and use Tuscan-style bread for my ribollita. That might be against better judgment, because Tuscan bread is, uh, horrible (every place, even Tuscany, ought to be allowed one serious gastronomical disaster, no?). Again, this is not the moment to explore the myth and reality behind Tuscan bakers’ decision to make saltless bread. This is just the moment to reiterate that I enjoy bread with flavor, thanks, and Tuscan bread doesn’t have it.

But for ribollita, I thought it would be a fun experiment, so Friday night after work I made the dough for saltless bread. I combined 1 package active dry yeast with a little bit of lukewarm water until it looked foamy and smelled ready. To that I added 2 cups of warm water, mixed well, and added 5 cups of all purpose flour. I kneaded this dough by hand, and it only needed a little bit of extra flour for dusting, less than ¼ cup. I put this dough in a large bowl, covered with plastic wrap, in the refrigerator. Within an hour it had swelled, and by the next morning, despite my punching it down before bed, it was gigantic! It was as if salt had been a restraining force in all previous breads. I let the dough return to room temperature, and kneaded it a second time; then formed a (gigantic) loaf, put it on a sheet covered in parchment paper, and let it rise one last time, for an hour. I baked the loaf in a 395 degree oven for 30 minutes. It came out beautiful, and as it cooled on the rack it made a lot of noise!

The idea of the bread in ribollita is that it’s leftover and thus stale. So obviously it is a little weird to make fresh bread that one has no intention of eating at all; in that spirit I figured I must try at least one tiny slice of the inevitably disgusting flavorless loaf cooling in front of me. And, honestly? It was pretty good. It was way more flavorful than any bread I had in Tuscany. It was kind of an honest white sandwich bread, and hot out of the oven? No complaints. Anyway, it was doomed.

The second part of ribollita is to make the soup, also done the day before it’s reboiled. The soup is made by cooking 1 lb. of white beans until soft and saving the liquid. Then, sauté 2 finely chopped red onions in olive oil in a heavy-bottomed, large pot. When the onions are soft, after about 20 minutes, add a ladle of cooking water from the beans and let it stew for a minute or a two. Then add 1 thinly sliced head of cabbage (the recipe suggests whatever is seasonal—I went for a dark purple cabbage in homage to the hue at least of cavolo nero), 4 thinly sliced celery stalks, 4 thinly sliced carrots, ½ a cup of chopped parsley, and a bunch of basil, its leaves torn. This cooks for 20 minutes, covered. Then add half of the beans, and puree the other half. Add the puree, and leftover liquid from the beans. Stir. Add 2 tbsp. tomato paste, pinches of oregano, and season to taste with salt, pepper, and red pepper. At this point, the recipe calls for “water”. Since I knew I wanted my ribollita to end up very thick and dense, I added only enough water to cover the vegetables by ½ inch. I brought this to a boil and let it simmer for 90 minutes. Once it cooled, it too went into the refrigerator overnight.

Finally, yesterday, with the soup’s flavors mingled and the saltless bread stale, it was time to make ribollita. I reheated the soup very slowly over low-medium heat until periodic bubbles rose to the surface, and then added the bread, torn into chunks and placed in layers. I used almost that whole gigantic loaf of bread, and then as I brought the soup to a boil, stirred constantly until the bread broke apart and became what the recipe called a “cream.” The recipe also suggested that one could add more water or bean broth at this point, but I wanted this soup to cook down into the cakey texture I had loved so much at Delfina and Trattoria Mario.

After the soup had simmered for an hour or so, I poured it into a glass roasting pan, drizzled olive oil on the top, and browned it in a very hot oven for 10 minutes. The result? It was really, really good. The vegetables had disintegrated, except for, as I remembered, traces of orange carrot and black specks which were remnants of the cabbage. The texture was thick, and the flavor very deep.

Really the only downside to the entire experience was that it turned into summer for a weekend in San Francisco and, at 80 degrees outside and what felt like 120 inside, it was just far too hot to eat ribollita. But as a dish that’s entirely forgiving of variation and instincts on the part of whoever cooks it, it was totally pleasurable to make and eat. Which we’ll be doing for, you know, at least four days, so we’re lucky for that! And we do live in San Francisco, after all, so it could easily be wintry enough any minute, and the re-reboiled ribollita a perfect comforting accompaniment to a freezing day.

(I want to occasionally write about local and non-local food places that I love on the blog. They're not paying me.)

I am really fortunate to have an outstanding resource for fish and poultry right in my own neighborhood (Bob’s fish market at the Mission Market on 22^nd street and Mission), but one thing that I’ve always found lacking in the Mission is a great butcher.

When I visited the Antica Macelleria in Panzano, I totally had a fleeting fantasy of being the one to open that shop, part-butcher shop, part-meat library, part social gathering place. The fantasy buzz faded, though, and gave way to images of hipsters getting wasted on the house wine, a line of homeless people forming to eat free arista rather than the plates at Glide, and, you know, abject failure stemming from a faulty business plan.

Avedano's Holly Park Meat Market isn’t the Antica Macelleria, nor is it truly in the Mission, but it is a really remarkable place, and I am glad for its existence. I first read about the shop in Meatpaper, an SF-based magazine devoted to “meat culture”, which included an interview with the three women who founded and operate Avedano's.

In addition to a few baskets of really beautiful produce and jars of interesting condiments and jams, as well as a couple small refrigerators with cheese, cured meats (some from Boccalone), and pates, the long case always has something exciting. Very fresh fish, whole and filleted; sustainably sourced beef, lamb, pork, poultry, and usually something like fresh duck breasts or fresh quail. But what’s even better is the flexibility and service. I called a couple weeks ago needing a bone-in pork loin chop, and even though they had one in the store they could cut for me, the counter person told me I could always call with a couple days notice and they could set me up. I noticed when I went in to pick up the pork a grass-fed veal liver in the case. If I hadn’t already done a lot of prep for the pork, it would have been really fun to work with that!

I’m really already close to living the dream. Maybe I’ll move to Bernal Heights or Avedano's will open Avedano's 2 on South Van Ness, and I can start having my paychecks direct deposited there. Meanwhile, hurrah for women-owned butcher shops within (kind of long) walking distance, and hurrah for Avedano's!

Without much provocation, you might find me singing the praises of Two Small Farms CSA, a box brought about by a collaboration between High Ground Organics and Mariquita Farms, both near Santa Cruz. We subscribed to the TSF box for most of last summer and fall, and suffered through the winter, when the CSA goes dark for a couple of months. One of the many terrific things about TSF is the dedication the farmers have to exploring new crops, heirloom varietals of seeds, and vegetables popular in European and Latin American markets but widely unknown, and used by American home cooks. For example, last week we got cardoons, which Alli and I saw in markets in Italy but had never eaten, much less cooked.

But the real prize of the infant spring season for me was the greens called agretti that showed up two weeks ago. Agretti, also known as barba di frate (“the friar’s beard”) looked like chives but even grassier, and when cooked were utterly delicious and interesting: a little sour, as the name implies, but a perfect vehicle for scant salt, red pepper, and olive oil. Our farmer claims that agretti are the edible, baby form of tumbleweeds. Far out!

Another, more predictable (hippie) aspect of the farm service is that at the pick-up spot near our house there’s a box for trades. Inevitably there’s going to be somebody who, whatever, hates fennel or something, so they can drop their fennel in the box and pick up arugula, which somebody else hated. We don’t really hate anything, but how stoked was I when, yesterday, I found two bags of agretti in the trade box!! Ciao, delicious but omnipresent salad greens.

Since becoming seriously interested in cooking and food over the last couple of years, I have been lucky and/or financially reckless enough to eat at some pretty amazing restaurants. So it’s with some hesitation but not really reservation that I say that the best restaurant experience I have ever had was at a restaurant called Solociccia, in Panzano in Chianti last month.

I found it almost by accident. I knew that I wanted to visit Panzano, and the butcher shop owned by Dario Cecchini, made famous by Bill Buford’s book Heat. Buford presents a portrait, or possibly a caricature, of Cecchini as a madman who was possibly the most knowledgeable butcher in the world. The “mad” part, by the way, had a lot to do with Cecchini’s obsession with Dante, and his ability to recite from the Commedia at length. But the description of the shop, and the butcher, and the town, was intriguing. When I was doing research about how to find the shop and Panzano in Chianti, I found that Dario had opened a restaurant, called Solociccia, or “only meat.” The website had one link, called “RULES” in English. The rules:

“This is not a restaurant. It is the home of a butcher. All that you will eat is the fruit of my work and that of my family. You will not choose from a menu, though you will be treated well, and with great respect, if you return the favor. You will eat at a communal table, together in “convivio.” There will be six meat courses, chosen at my discretion, with seasonal vegetables, white beans with olive oil, foccacia bread, wine cake, coffee, and after dinner liquors. All of the above is to be had for 30 euro, with nearly two hours at our table, at the end of which you will turn over your seat to the next guests. We do not serve steak. We are open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings with seatings at 7:00 and 9:00 pm, on Sunday we sit down for lunch at 1:00 pm. In closing, please be aware that everything: the food, the wine the space and we ourselves are for better or worse…thoroughly Tuscan. P.S. Please feel free to bring your own wine without corkage fee. Welcome. (If you dare!).”

Uh huh.

So I made reservations.

We planned on visiting Panzano and the shop a little before our dinner but as we were driving towards where we were staying I saw a sign for Panzano, 6 kilometers away! And I persuaded Alli to go. The shop was amazing. It was small. Walking in, to the left was the butcher’s case which had several cuts of meat, olives, and a huge bowl full of lardo (Alli’s favorite). On the other side, a long table, with huge serving platters, holding meatballs and spicy jam, tons of lardo and baguette, finocchiona, and huge decanters of wine and glasses. Next to that was a stool with the massive arista pictured here. Dario himself was having his picture taken by some Brits, and when they left he grumbled a little and then went over to slice the arista. I asked him if they were porchetta, and he explained in fair English that porchetta is the whole pig, but this was arista (I would learn how utterly delicious arista is later, at other places). The other person working was a young woman, and I think she noticed that Alli and I were a little hesitant, so she came over and poured us glasses of wine, and said, Eat! So we did. And it was superlative, all of it.

So I had a feeling that Solociccia was not going to be disappointing.

We went the next night, driving on a dirt road (that in the States would have no name, but was called Santa Maria Macerata), and got to Panzano early. We hung out at a bar across the street and had a couple aperitifs, and then went over. One thing the RULES didn’t state is that there are only two tables, in two separate rooms. And also that the meal doesn’t begin until everyone is there. We walked in behind a group of four young Americans, and for one second I wondered if we hadn’t ended up at a fake restaurant, you know, a tourist trap for blithering foodies who thought they had found Disneyland Toscana. It wasn’t to be. We were seated at a table with eight Italians, two couples, a pair of women (aunt, niece or something), and a pair of older men.

On the table already were a couple of courses: pinzimonio di verdure dell’orto, or I guess seasonal vegetables. This was thinly sliced fennel, carrots, ack, I’m forgetting, other things. Also the pane di Panzano, or typically saltless Tuscan bread. We were the only ones who had taken Dario up on the wine-with-no-corkage, so the waiter handed me a corkscrew and two glasses. I opened up a very delicious bottle of Classico. Quickly, once everyone at our table was seated, a bell rang and the waiter walked over to a stainless steel dumbwaiter on the wall. This bell would come to mean only good things: rumblings from the meat basement. He brought us the first course, crostini di sugo all’uso di Natale. I can’t find an adequate translation, but essentially they were fluffy pieces of bread completely covered in a meat sauce. The crostini were served on two large platters, and the waiter handed them to people at the table to take as much as they wanted, and then pass. Everyone did. The crostini were far from subtle, and they were terrific. And maybe that’s the first time I really realized that something we were in for something different at Solociccia. Not only the take-some-and-pass-it-down thing, though I can hardly see that working out too well at the Cracker Barrel or any other all-you-can-and-by-can-we-mean-can-eat hovel. It was the presentation. Or the lack of presentation. It’s bread and meat sauce. That’s it. Eat it.

Our waiter when he brought the courses announced the name of the course and then came over to Alli and I and tried to provide a translation, which was very appreciated if sometimes misleading. The people at the table, who had started by pretty much chatting with their dinner partner, started to all talk to each other. They laughed a lot. One of the couples had a dog with them. Now and then Alli caught them feeding the dog from the table. Luckiest dog, uh, ever.

Ring ring went the dumbwaiter and the next course was brought out, fritto del macellaio, which I think I can translate as “Fried stuff a butcher makes.” Amazing, totally not greasy but altogether fried onion, whole sage leaves (a revelation), chicken fried pork cutlets, and small breaded meatballs that burst with lemon when you bit into them. When the waiter came with the third course and announced the name, ramerino in culo, everyone laughed. We laughed too but didn’t know why. The waiter told us, “it means, uh, um, rosemary…rosemary in the behind.” So the third dish, Rosemary In The Ass, was a small ball of ground beef, with a rosemary sprig stuck in one end, and the other end seared, for what was obviously a very brief amount of time; enough to make one side slightly gray. The ass end, with the rosemary sprig, was raw. And awesome.

Another thing to point out, we weren’t too full already, like we would be in an American restaurant. The genius of take-what-you-want-pass-it-down is that you really can just take what you want. I only needed a few bites of fried things a butcher makes, and I really only needed one raw beef ball. Don’t get me wrong—they were perfect, but it was also perfect to have a little bite (I’m reminded by way of a negative example of a really nice lunch place I went to one time in Healdsburg at which I ordered chicken livers, because, you know, I’m all about them. The owner himself brought them to me and said, “And here’s the best thing on the menu” and I’m all about them except it was a gigantic plate full of chicken livers in a thick balsamic sauce which, again, were awesome, but I could eat about ¼ of it.)

It did already feel, though, like a bit of a marathon by the time muscolini alla salvia came out, a braised pork butt (Alli pointed out that it reminded her of carnitas) with tons of sage. And then possibly my favorite course, tenerumi in insalata, which the waiter said was “Boiled beef with salsa,” but deserves a better explanation. Tenerumi are tendons, and the beef parts were cartilaginous but not squishy, and seasoned lightly, so the flavor of the tendons came out and provided a foil to the salsa verde-ish insalata of fennel, celery, carrots, and onions. Finally, we were served braciole rifatte, which unlike the American braciole (braJOL), consisted of thin slices of breaded beef in a spicy tomato sauce full of capers.

Okay.

So we ate all the courses and they were all terrific, and all the plates were still on the table in case anybody wanted to revisit anything, which people did as they pleased. When everything was done, a basket of olive oil cake was brought over and everyone had a slice. The hostess asked us if wanted caffe. Half of us did. Then she brought three liters of liquor and put them on the table and gave everybody a clean glass.

All right. Imagine this happening, uh, anywhere in the United States. Having trouble? Right. The bottles were three different kinds of liqueur, one was grappa, another slightly sweet but unidentifiable, another totally unidentifiable but our favorite. Everybody tried all three, and while I definitely sensed at the end of this round of drinks that everybody was a little bit tipsy, nobody, like, had a chugging contest or asked their friend to turn them upside down for a keg stand. It was moderately consumed. It was consumed in the way it was meant to be consumed: take what you want, pass it down. You didn’t pay for it, necessarily, so there wasn’t an anxiety to finish. It was the perfect ending.

I think the best way to illustrate how profoundly unique this was, though, is to say that when I walked out of the little room with our table in it, I was completely shocked to find that we had to pay for our meal. I don’t mean that I didn’t know beforehand that the meal cost 30 euro, after all, that was in the rules. But at some point in the almost two hours we spent at the butcher’s table, Alli and I both forgot that we were even at a restaurant.

At some point, Dario charged into our room to ask everyone tutti bene? Bene bene bene, that was the chorus. He smiled tipsily, acknowledged that all was indeed good, and left. And it was good, all of it.