Tag: italy

Trolling Italians

And so, with all this Italian dining going around, why not visit the most famous Italian restaurant in the country. Since Italians have a proclivity for dining on their own cuisine while abroad, I thought I’d snatch a couple of them and take them with me to the Olive Garden. When the food arrived, we took turns staring at each others’ plates. The “muffuletta olives” (not their real name—on the menu they’re called “Parmesan Olive Fritta”) were olive ascolane, stuffed fried olives, and they were quite good, actually. I had the carbonara, which at $26.99 is priced about the same, or higher, as the pasta dishes at some of the city’s best Italian restaurants. It didn’t taste like it, though. In fact, miraculously, despite the presence of parmesan cream, chicken and shrimp, it managed to be utterly tasteless. (Just for the sake of authenticity – not that authenticity is the Olive Garden’s M.O. – you’d never, ever find carbonara served with chicken and/or shrimp and the presence of cream is a culinary war crime.) Marco took a few bites of his “Tour of Italy” dish and said, “I’m ready to turn in my passport and stay home for a while.” Giovanna didn’t hate her salmon which was paired with bright green stalks of steamed broccoli, saying only that it would never have pesto spread over the top. And Sloane’s garlic-rosemary roasted chicken was rubbery.

Robot Sculptors

Carving with pinpoint precision, and at least some of the artistic flair of its more celebrated (and human) predecessors, ABB2, a 4m, zinc-alloy robotic arm, extended its spinning wrist and diamond-coated finger toward a gleaming piece of white marble. “Artists want to perpetuate this idea that they are still chiseling with a hammer,. It makes me laugh.”

Rome in 3D

a good amount of progress since we last looked at this

History in 3D lives up to its name. The virtual recreations of ancient temples, cities, palaces and fortresses are vividly rendered in granular detail with realistic lighting effects and animated fly-ins. They’ve built models of everything from Sevastopol in 1914 to the flooding of Titanic’s grand staircase to Corinth in the 2nd century.

4 years ago, their most ambitious project, a reconstruction of Rome’s city center as it was in 320 Rome in 3D, made its debut on their YouTube channel. They had already been working on it for years and had enough of it ready to make a riveting trailer, a few tantalizing minutes of what promised to be the most comprehensive virtual recreation of ancient Rome ever made. The aim was to integrate it into a game engine, building a fully realized city based on the latest, most accurate information to provide an immersive experience of walking its streets.

Last month, History in 3D released their latest Rome in 3D video. They assured followers that the project was still ongoing, that they had encountered challenges and obstacles but were surmounting them and coming back better than ever, deploying new technological tools to redesign buildings and objects. The new trailer showcases the Forum, the beating heart of Roman society, and it is a huge leap forward in quality.

Bucatini Shortage

Around World War II, Carl explained, the established noodle industry (henceforth referred to as Big Pasta) was “upset” by the introduction of Nissin’s ramen noodles into the country, which were “completely out of spec” with what the United States then recognized as noodles — specifically because the ramen was being sold for a lower price and with what Carl called “lower standards” of nutrition. “They were really pressed”. That’s when the “standards of identity” were created: Big Pasta made sure that all noodles had to meet certain specifications to be considered “enriched macaroni products” and sold in the United States. As time went on, it would seem, the petty beef spun out into a juicier beef, with the main agitators of Big Pasta turning on each other. Nearly 120 years after the Macaroni and Noodle Manufacturers’s inception, that beef finally came for De Cecco. Weeks after we were first in touch, Courtney replied to tell me that De Cecco’s products were “collected as routine surveillance of imported products,” but Carl had a more intriguing theory: “It sounds as if someone was not happy with De Cecco’s product coming in and looked at it and saw that it was out of spec”. The FDA doesn’t typically go around looking. They’ve got plenty of other things to do.”

another example of the FDA being completely useless, here in the service of protectionism.

Cheese-Oozing Flatbread

But now we have an actual accurate rendition of crescia and the sandwiches made from them at Cremini’s, a new Italian restaurant in the southern reaches of Carroll Gardens. The crescia sandwich ($10) is really quite amazing. The flatbread is dappled with brown spots and tastes of wheat, and the selection of fillings (pick one meat and one cheese) is identical to the list of cheese and charcuterie listed earlier in the menu

Caffé Panna

It was in that city, on a sojourn cooking at the American Academy, that Meyer first fell in love with Italian gelato culture — how the product was churned daily and not allowed to harden overnight, the fruit-forwardness of the flavors, the way it was ingrained into the whole of society’s daily life. But especially with panna, or whipped cream, the topping that inspired the name of her new shop, Caffè Panna. There, the high-fat cream of Piemontese cows will be whipped fresh and dolloped freely, as it is in Italy. It will also be used to crown Meyer’s signature dessert, composed affogato sundaes that combine their Italian roots with Meyer’s all-American love of mix-ins, crunch, and swirls. “I just have so much fun pairing coffee and ice cream, and figuring out all the different things that go really well in an affogato. And it tastes like Rome to me. It makes me really happy.”

Fiaschetteria Pistoia

Bugiani serves a traditional 3-course Tuscan meal in the cozy 11th street location. Among the antipasti, the pappa col pomodoro—a bread and tomato “soup” with the pleasingly spongy consistency of porridge or haggis—is decidedly not photogenic but still worth ordering. Also enticing: sformatino di zucchine (a buttery, slightly nutty zucchini flan). The house-made pasta fresca, though, is the star attraction. Diners can watch the restorative sight of dough unfurling from the pasta machine at the back of the restaurant. There’s a smaller selection of third course secondi options, rounded off a dessert menu of Italian classics (tiramisu, mousse al cioccolato, etc.), and, of course, espresso.

Very Italian NYC

New York has never had a shortage of old-school red-sauce spots or exuberantly expensive odes to Italian cooking, but the last few months have seen a serious uptick in restaurants and cafés from Italians eager to introduce New Yorkers to the way Italy eats now, whether that’s sandwiches served on the Florentine answer to focaccia, strong cocktails poured in a bar bedecked in dark wood and Carrara marble, or regional cooking from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Emilia-Romagna. Here are the new molto Italian restaurants that demand your immediate attention.

Peak Pasta

To test out new shapes, chefs only need a few ingredients: flour, eggs, water, and an internet connection. “I think the advent of YouTube is when everything changed. You can just look up different shapes. Before then, you had to actually head to Italy to see the shapes, find the book, or work with someone who had actually worked there.”