I love the food in Italy. I love the food in Rome. I love the pizza. I love the simple pasta dishes: amatriciana, carbonara, cacio e pepe. I love the salami and the prosciutto and the cheeses. But, I'll be honest with you. I do not love restaurants in Rome.
Now, much like the nightlife, I suspect strongly that Rome is designed to keep tourists away from good restaurants. But I also think that the combination of tourists, a strong traditionalist bias, and the fact that the best cooking in Italy happens in people's houses (or people's grandmother's houses) means that the bar has been set pretty low for most Roman restaurants. Serve the three staple pasta dishes, and a couple of small, equally hide-bound secondi, and that's a menu. The pasta is likely to be really, really good, but is it worth the price of a restaurant meal?
Take tonight as a case in point. Jeremy and I spent the day scooting, which meant we saw many cool sights, like the completely bizarre EUR, a neighborhood? business park? fascist fantasy? in southern Rome. Initially commissioned by Mussolini, this neighborhood is a modernist palate cleanser after classical and baroque central Rome. We also went to the lido (seaside), which was all closed up for the season, and hence a tad dreary. Still, the scooting was fun, and got my adrenaline up (see the facebook video). But, because we were out all day, I didn't go to the market in the morning, so we had nothing for dinner.
That is why, tonight, we headed out to the upscale and highly rated restaurant, Enoteca Ferrara. Zagat used expressions like "one of the best, most innovative restaurants in Italy, not just Rome." The menu looked promising, and the wine list was encyclopedic (and included labels. I love a wine list that includes labels. So much easier to remember wines you have had or seen when you have a visual reminder). It started off well. We had a superb, terrific, stupendous cheese plate, and our bottle of wine was equally top notch, especially for a 25 E bottle. I also appreciated the decor: the walls were hung with cured meat instead of art.
Things started to head south with the salads. Jeremy and I both ordered interesting sounding salads, only to get staunchly mediocre fare. Mine was a Piedmontese salad of pickled vegetables and diced veal tongue. How could that be bland? It wasn't bland, exactly, but the vinegar in the vegetables killed any other flavors, and the whole salad was strictly one note. Jeremy's Sicilian couscous was similarly unimpressive. Fine, but no stand out flavors. Our main courses (perhaps we should have been concerned when the menu wasn't split into the standard primi and secondi offerings) were both suggested by the waitress. My ox-tail was fine. Just fine. Well-braised and tender, with a bright tomato sauce. But did it have anything special? No. Jeremy's lamb chops were also fine. Tender and well seasoned and perfectly fine. All in all, a fine dinner, and if we hadn't paid so damn much for it, I would be perfectly content.
So, the question of the evening is, why go out to eat? It is much more expensive than staying at home, and most of the time I'm pretty sure I can cook whatever they have on the menu at least as well as they can. I have a lot of reasons why I go out: sometimes I'm too tired or busy or lazy to cook, and I am willing to pay a premium -- both in cost and taste -- to have someone else take that chore off my hands. Sometimes I go out for the experience. It is romantic to have someone else cater to me, so that I can spend all of my time and energy looking deeply into Jeremy's eyes. But for a meal to be really great, I want it to show me something I can't do at home, or (even better) wouldn't have thought of doing. Not many restaurants can give me that. Sometimes Santes does, and certainly the food I had in Portland recently did -- I wouldn't even begin to try to recreate the bacon foie gras from Le Pigeon!
Here in Rome, I think the answer to the "why go out to eat?" question is always either a) because I have to, because I'm a tourist locked in a hotel and can't cook for myself or b) to get a well-made amatriciana, carbonara, or cacio e pepe while having a good time with friends. I don't think they are looking for innovation. Rather, they are looking for comfort food done comfortably. And that is fine -- but I am going to reset my expectations, and I probably won't be spending 100E on any more Italian dinners.
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