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.

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.