Cinghiale, Chianina, Chianti

A Tuscan Dining Diary

by Brian K. Mahoney and photographs by Robin Dana, October 27, 2008

Perhaps we didn’t eat enough pasta. Most days, we had it twice daily as the primo, our first course: fettuccine or cavatelli for lunch, bucatini or strozzapretti—literally, choke the priest—for dinner. How do Italians create pasta—I mean the noodles themselves, sauce excluded—that tastes so much better than what we make here? (I bet they hold back on their exports to stimulate tourism.)

We planned on trying more bottles of Brunello di Montalcino, that noble—and pricy— epitome of the Sangiovese grape, than we did. (We drank the vino della casa on the cheap, instead; the house wine served in Italy rarely disappoints.) And Lee Anne had gelato only two or three times. (There was little room for dessert after multi-course carb-and-protein loads worthy of a prize fighter trying to jump weight classes.) We never did find a trippaio—a mobile stand, like a hot dog vendor, serving tripe on a bun, billed in our guidebook as the ultimate Florentine street food. And we kept meaning to order more dishes with truffles. (Tuscany is known for its tartufi, yet we sampled only bland shavings that left us wondering what the fuss was about.)

Even though we ate in almost two dozen restaurants during our 10-day trip, we hardly scratched the surface of Tuscan cuisine. There is a Tuscan proverb: “To cook like your mother is good, to cook like your grandmother is better.” As consistently good as the food was, at times transportive—a simple panini with mozzarella, tomato, and artichoke hearts slathered with pesto that, by its very existence, offered a stinging indictment of the American sandwich—we were eating mom’s cooking most of the time, not grandma’s. This was mostly due to the fact that our intel was spotty and we never quite synched with the rhythm of Italian life. (Whaddya mean I can’t get lunch in this town at 3pm because all the restaurants are closed?) We’ll know better next time. Some field notes.