The world’s greatest lunch is in Syracuse.

October 27, 2014October 27, 2014 / Eric Brown / 7 Comments

You need to go to Syracuse. No not that Syracuse, the other Syracuse (sorry, Syracuse). Siracusa. The one in Sicily. The Greeks liked it, the Romans liked it, and now I like it.

Embarrassingly beautiful Siracusa.

After the deep meditation that was Forza d’Agro, we shook things up by heading down to a comparatively riotous town, which is to say that it has more than two restaurants that are open at any given time.

(We were regularly mystified by the whimsy that was the restaurant schedule in Forza d’Agro. Some places would be shuttered for days on end, but without a sign in the window or information on a website, it was impossible to know when they’d be willing to receive visitors. We went into a few places that were OPEN – the lights were on and the door was open – but they’d shoo us out. Crazy.)

We’re staying on the island of Ortigia – a little appendix of land at the tip of Syracuse sticking out into the Ionian Sea. It’s the old part of an old city, and the architectural clichés keep rolling in, folks. It’s got the winding alleys with crumbly walls and clotheslines full of t-shirts.

I think everyone probably has washers and dryers and the chamber of commerce gives people money to go to the Goodwill to buy old t-shirts to hang from the line for the old school charm of it all. The Piazza Duomo is said to be one of the most picturesque squares in Italy, and that’s saying something. It was redone in what is called the Sicilian Baroque style after an earthquake in 1693 destroyed much of southeast Sicily. The whole area, including the buildings, sidewalks, and plaza are made from a pale yellow limestone that make everything glow at dusk.

We had drinks at a cafe right across from the Duomo when the sunset lit it up. I knew this was a special moment when the hostess pulled out her camera a took a picture.

This new-fangled Duomo was built on top of the foundation of a Greek temple that dates back to the 6^th century BCE, so they’ve been praying in this spot for a long, long time.

In cute little towns with picturesque windy streets, sometimes the best thing to do is to just wander and see what happens. The other night we spotted a hip looking restaurant, but we were seated as the other half of a four-top. This can be quite awkward, in which you try not to bother the people who have just been hustled over to one side of their table so you can horn in on their real estate. On the other hand, Janine had just been mentioning that notwithstanding my winning personality, she was a little starved for human interaction in English with someone who isn’t me. I was unoffended, although I hoped that the human interaction she was starved for wasn’t a dashing fellow in his late twenties or somesuch. As it turns out our table mates were a retired couple from Scotland who had spent the past three weeks in Syracuse. By the time our evening was over four hours later, we had exchanged numbers, moved on to a bar down the street for round two (or three), and pledged undying devotion to Jim and Geraldine, two of the most charming and lovely people we’ve met in a long, long time. They will doubtless read this entry, and thus I use this forum to reiterate our pledge to take you up on your kind offer to visit you in Edinburgh in the spring. If the other night is any indication, we are going to have a hell of a time there.

Next year in Edinburgh!

And talk about history. When you wander around the set of the Odyssey, you are talking about some old stuff. We continued our tour of old theatres, which included this gem, the Greek Theatre.

Tell the Nederlanders to top THIS!

I entered the hallowed grounds, muttered “I got your Marquis Theatre RIGHT HERE” and spit five times. (Thus continues my tedious complaint about how they tore down five – count ‘em five – theatres to build a crappy hotel with a crappy theater in it in 1982.)

We ambled about the archeological park that includes the theatre, which dates to the 5^th century BCE (before wireless microphones, I think), a limestone quarry, another theatre, and a cave prison that was constructed to produce perfect acoustics so that Dionysius could listen in on his prisoners. We learned all this after the fact, of course, since there was no information about any of it on the site. In fact, just like at Mt. Etna, the ticket office was hiding at the back of a parking lot past all the souvenir stands. Someday they’ll hire some consultant who will tell them to put the ticket office in the front and print a few brochures.

I end this installment with a few words about the best lunch I’ve ever had, and I don’t think I’m kidding. We braved the rain this morning in order to check out the food market, at which we bought six of the most beautiful jumbo prawns I’ve ever seen. We then made our way to a salumeria at the end of the road, where they put together the craziest spread of meats and cheeses that you or I or anyone you know will ever eat.

The greatest deli on the planet.

There were two kinds of pecorino; ricotta rectangles with some kind of jam; and a fresh mozzarella ball splashed with fresh cream and dusted with ground pistachio. We had prosciutto crudo and cotto (cured and cooked); a salumi from Ragusa; an insanely good caponata of roasted peppers, eggplant, celery and tomato; marinated sun-dried tomatoes; a little panino of potato and bitter greens; and other stuff that my mind, which has been turned to slush from the food, just can’t recall, even after looking at the picture. We chased it with local Sicilian whites. The whole shebang came to about twenty bucks.

Janine with all the crazy lunch stuff.

We’ll be back tomorrow and if it’s half and good and twice as expensive, I’ll still be happy.

The people under the stairs – Part Three!!

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 / Eric Brown / 3 Comments

So there we were the other night, watching Gigli dubbed into Italian, when Janine turned to me. “Do you hear that?” It was voices, coming from below us. I went to investigate. Sure enough. We have people living under the stairs.

I kid you not. The place we’re renting has a bedroom and a kitchen upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. In the vestibule at the bottom of the stairs is a pair of strangely arranged rugs.

Hey, what are those rugs doing there?

I pulled back the rugs to reveal a trapdoor that leads to an apartment downstairs.

Hiding the bizarre trap door, that’s what!

There was a party going on, at which half the cigarettes in Italy were presently being smoked. Seriously? I did some reconnaissance and discovered that there is an apartment down there. It has a separate entrance at the front of the building, but our apartments connect. In addition to the trap door downstairs, there is a flimsy melamine board that can separate the top floor of our place with our two bedrooms downstairs. Janine could lock me in the basement if she wanted to – kind of a low-rent Cask of Amontillado. To their credit, apart from that one little party and the smoking, which we mitigate by tucking in the rug, closing our melamine board and keeping the door to the rest of our place closed, the people downstairs are just fine – nothing like that other downstairs neighbor you might remember.

Our next door neighbors are another interesting case. Every day, sometime between 9:30 and noon, they start their engine by cranking up Enrique Iglesias’s song Bailando. When the song is over, they make it a bit louder, and play it again. And again. The other day I think they got through it four times, at which point the stucco was flaking off the side of the buildings. And then, just like that, the music stops and Forza d’Agro becomes a sleepy medieval village again.

Our other regular musical treat occurs daily at 12:05, when the main church broadcasts Ave Maria from its speakers. Perhaps that’s when mass begins, or perhaps the parish priest is attempting to cleanse the air of Enrique Iglesias.

I take this moment to digress slightly to respond to the very thoughtful comment from my friend Hubert, who noted after my entry about the many churches in this small village that Catholics usually have lots of churches, including a church for baptisms, a church for Sunday mass, and a church for funerals, which sounds like a lot of church-building for sixteenth century peasants, but perhaps they have extra time on their hands. I should point out that there are at least two more churches in Forza that are not in use at the moment, which seems to support Hubert’s analysis. My mind immediately began to apply this approach to other religions. I hope these places have good signage. Imagine walking mistakenly into the synagogue that just does the circumcisions, especially if you’ve been drinking.

Forza d’Agro doesn’t just have churches. It also has Giuseppe Carullo, the most cheerful, hardest-working man in the pizza business. Peppe (as his father calls him), looks to be in his mid-forties, and wears a short-billed cyclist’s hat at a jaunty angle on his head and a sunny, earnest expression on his face. I admit I wasn’t crazy about his pizza the first time I tried it, but we went in the other day searching for a sandwich to take with us to Mt. Etna and he whipped out a pizza dough, baked the bread in his wood burning pizza oven, stuffed it with prosciutto, mozzarella, and fresh tomato, packed it up, and sent us on our way with a great big smile. It was crazy good.

We then headed off to Mt. Etna, the tallest active volcano in Europe at 10,000 feet. The mountain had its last big eruption just three months ago, spewing lava and otherwise putting on a show.

To get up to the top of Etna, you arrive at what looks like a truck stop with a hodgepodge of souvenir stands and schlocky restaurants, and have to trace the tram to the building where you can buy tickets to the top. Do you have to pay for parking or is it free? Who knows! It’s all just a bit haphazard, but perhaps that a bit of its charm. On the other hand, it can be a pain in the butt.

(We’ve often had to guess about how things are done. One day, we snuck through a hole in a fence by the side of the road to get down to the beach. (Until yesterday it was sunny and warm, with temperatures regularly hitting the eighties. Today, not so much.) We reached another absolutely fabulous beach area only after having driven past the entrance a half dozen times and concluding that there must be something down there. Indeed, there was parking, as well as beach chairs, umbrellas, bathrooms, a restaurant, and a bar that served a very nice Sicilian white in stemware that you could bring to your cozy little spot in the sand. Who knew?)

At Mt. Etna, if you’re cheap or crazy, or both, you get to the top by doing a 5 kilometer hike with a 3,000 foot elevation gain, which takes about four hours. The rest of us take a very comfortable cable car and then a four-wheel drive bus that looks like something out of Star Wars.

Kooky Etna Bus

We made it up to the top too late to be able to hike close to the rim (as if!), but being up that high and wandering about was a treat in itself.

The tippy top of Mt. Etna.

Yes, it’s cold up there.

As kitschy as it can be (although it’s quite charming later in the evening when the tourists are back on the boat), we found ourselves back in Taormina for one more really fantastic meal, at Osteria Nero d’Avola. We knew we were in for a treat when we arrived to the restaurant to find the chef owner, a very gracious and passionate fellow named Turi Siligato, working the room, introducing himself to the various tables, and showing off the scrapes on his arms that he acquired foraging for mushrooms that day. We started with fried zucchini blossoms stuffed with anchovies and caciocavallo cheese, those lovely mushrooms sautéed with a little bit of butter, and amazing mussels that are topped with pine nuts, fennel fronds, and bread crumbs and browned under the broiler.

For our mains, we had dorado that was topped with more bread crumbs, crumbled pistachio, and lemon zest, and we had a simply grilled red snapper that walked through the door shortly after we did (well, it was carried by the fisherman). However it arrived, our server paraded the fish around the room and we just couldn’t pass it up.

Parading the fish.

It’s a real pleasure to have a meal that trusts the ingredients. I think I heard it from Mario Batali, but I’ve been telling my daughter all her life that the key to good cooking is perfect ingredients simply prepared. She rolls her eyes, but gosh darn it, I’m right! Chef Siligato delivered on this promise, for sure. I could eat like this every day.

With Turi Siligato at Osteria Nero D’Avola

Back in Forza yesterday, we wandered into Giuseppi’s place for a salad and another sandwich when the skies opened up and began dumping rain. A busful of tourists sought shelter and Giuseppe managed the room with astonishing aplomb all by his lonesome and with unmanufactured good cheer. He was host, waiter, busboy, and cook. He answered every question with a jaunty “Si!” that was a combination of “of course!” “you betcha!” and “thanks for asking!” At one point, he got on the phone to call for reinforcements, and an older fellow who was clearly his dad (a comparison of their memorable noses proved this) appeared. By the look of it, it was more for moral support than anything else. His dad, who was probably in his seventies, took a few orders, but Giuseppe seemed to have things well under control.

It rained and rained, and Janine and I, who had nothing better to do, sat there for most of the day and had drinks, then lunch, then more drinks, then coffee, then cannoli, then some more drinks. By the time we were ready to leave it was still pouring, so Giuseppi sent us away with his umbrella. Once we got back to our place (where we had conveniently left our own umbrellas) I tromped back to return the one we had been lent. When I arrived, Giuseppi seemed a little annoyed. His response sounded something like, “Now what did you go and do that for?”

Tomorrow, we push off for Siracusa, which rivaled Athens in size and importance when it was part of the Greek empire. I have a feeling that we’ll see some old stuff.

Mandolins, an Ancient Theater, and more Cannoli – Now We’re Talking!

October 20, 2014October 20, 2014 / Eric Brown / 5 Comments

We found all the people in Sicily. They were rounded up by the authorities and forced to march up and down the main drag of Taormina, a popular tourist town about a half hour from here. There they are, with their fanny packs and square eyeglasses, their very European loafers (without socks – natch!), and funky headwear. They begin at one end of Corso Umberto I and methodically work their way to the other, a scrum of opportunistic shoppers and 5-minute portrait models.

Tourists! Oodles of them!

There are two guys entertaining the masses in the Piazza IX Aprile. One is strumming on his guitar and yes, the other one is picking away on his mandolin! What’s that song? I know I’ve heard it somewhere…of course! The theme from The Godfather! Get it? We’re in Sicily! I hope Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are getting a cut.

As it turns out, every day the cruise ships hork up a couple of thousand seasick passengers and loose them on the shopkeepers and musicians of Taormina, who have adapted to the invasion by giving the people what they seem to want – designer jeans and pizzicato mandolin-ery.

On the other hand, there’s a perfectly good reason that the tourists have been flocking to Taormina since Roman senators started hanging out here a couple thousand years ago. It’s a lovely little medieval village with a cliché epic view of the sea. It also has a very old theatre. I thought the (late lamented) Morosco was old, but Taormina’s Greek theatre dates back to the 3^rd century BCE.

A theater older than the Morosco.

The highlight of our visit to Taormina, by far, was the crazy good lunch we had. Whereas our dinner in Forza felt like it was conceived by the bastard child of Fred Flintstone and Mamma Leone (the Buca di Beppo of my youth) our meal at Al Duomo in Taormina was sublime. We started with anchovies that had been marinated in orange juice, white vinegar, and a little sugar. This is the essence of some of the best Sicilian dishes we’ve had – a little sweet, a little sour, and a little fish. We had what they called “meatballs” but which were really seared patties of raw meat served on fried lemon leaves. They were delicious, but you had to be in the mood. Luckily, we were. We had cavatelli with sardines, grapes, fennel, and bread crumbs, and perfect cannoli. When we were in southern Italy five years ago, we had grilled anchovies at every restaurant as part of a comparison study. Here, we always have cannoli, the Sicilian dessert of a tube of fried pastry stuffed with a sweet ricotta filling, for those of you who have never seen The Sopranos or Jersey Shore. Al Duomo’s were dusted with pistachio powder on one side and powdered chocolate on the other. They were great, although they are still a strong second to the ridiculously good ones we had on the plaza on our first night in Forza. Oh, and we had a white wine made from Grillo, a local white grape that I’d never heard of. It was everything I love in a white – flinty and fruity, but it slapped you in the face with acid like an old Skin Bracer commercial (good heavens, nobody born out of the U.S. or after 1964 will understand anything from this post). Sorry.

The energy was contagious. On Sunday, our catatonic little village came roaring to life. It was like Brigadoon. Restaurants were packed with actual Sicilians, sitting at long tables with huge families and having a dandy old time. On Saturday night, half the places were shuttered, but by Sunday at noon they were rocking. Apparently, Sunday is the day to eat, and it was nice to see. There’s nothing sadder than an empty restaurant, and we should know, having worked at a few. There’s one place, ‘O Dammuseddu Ristorante, which sits just outside the main part of town. On most nights the proprietor stands in the doorway, forlorn, waiting for someone, anyone, to feed. We’d go in, but I worry that it would be just too weird. On Sunday, I scampered over there to see if he was joining in the good fortune. Alas, the place was a morgue.

In addition to some great food we’ve had out, (including a crazy good deep fried rice ball with eggplant we had the other day) I have to say that I’ve really been enjoying our meals at home. For one thing, if we eat out at every meal we’ll run out of money by November. But the other fun thing is poking through the markets and finding great ingredients and figuring out what to do with them. We also like the routine of cooking. We start each day on the terrace with coffee, which we make in that iconic Italian coffee pot you all know. There may be better ways to make coffee, but here in Sicily, on this terrace, you’d get a knock on the door from the carabinieri if you tried.

For breakfast yesterday, we ambled down to the bakery off the main square and scored a very lovely sweet brioche, which I took home and topped with some prosciutto and a poached egg and I moaned and groaned at the perfect marriage of sweet roll and salty ham and I wanted to eat this for the rest of my life. Is it ridiculous that food can make me this happy?

A simple breakfast for a simple man.

Next time – believe it or not, we have MORE WEIRDNESS UNDER THE STAIRS!

Ooh, one more thing. If any of you have been to Mt. Etna, should we go through the north entrance or the south? Thanks!

Eat, Bicker, Love

A loving couple travels the world

Italy

The world’s greatest lunch is in Syracuse.

The people under the stairs – Part Three!!

Mandolins, an Ancient Theater, and more Cannoli – Now We’re Talking!