Italy Food Blog #7

I think I gotta catch up because I will lose my memory very soon, and I know many of you probably find this being so outdated too. However, good food is timeless and always inspiring and so I am posting the final bits of the Italian delicacies here

After the Venice trip we moved to Milan, the city of fashion and style. However, you may be able to guess that most of the food here is more modern and fusion type, due to extra international influences from other places in the world. As the city is much more modernized, you can expect some less classic menus in Milan.

Still, we cannot miss the famous Cafe Cova shop in Milan, which is the first shop of the restaurant. Located at Via Montenapoleone 8, this classic cafe is surrounded by name brand shops and it has been like this for over a hundred years! Going inside, you will feel time has gone back to the old days, and you are ready to enjoy one of the best coffee in Italy.

Alright, it sounds like it is not the best, but still it is good coffee, and with the beautiful and elegant ambience, I am sure that you don't mind to spend the whole afternoon here in a relaxing way.

This is a typical cappuccino, very delicious but I actually like the cup most. Then I ordered another cup of coffee, a cold caffe shakerato. Very nice too.

Milan is a big modern city and so you can find a lot of internation fast food restaurants. One night, we failed to find a decent classic Italian restaurant, and we just went into one small shop which was very new though not stylish. Here we finally found some traditional Italian food. This is gnocchi served with typical tomato sauce. It was not very special but chewy!

We got a very very non-special spaghetti...

And finally finished our meal with a big quatro formaggio. That was not bad at all!

However, on the other day, we tried a really great place where you can have some modernized Italian food, a little fusion type, but stil completely make you drool! It is located at the top floor of a department store, and there you can see the Duomo right next to you. (Check this Google Map and look at the roof terrace, that is the restaurant!)

This is the MAIO restaurant, and the prices here are quite a bit above anything around the area, but the view is spectacular. You can see the top structures of the Duomo, and with the beautiful sunshine, this is really the perfect place for a relaxing late lunch. Let's take a look at what we ordered. The drink came first, and my was a shakerato, yes, again!

Probably the first shakerato coffee I got in Italy which had such a big pile of cream on the top, but my girlfriend's drink was a bit more exaggerated. She ordered hot chocolate with cream, and see? It was really "with cream"!

My lady ordered creamy risotto with sea bass fillet, and it looked really creamy...

But then it was surprisingly light and good, not heavy at all! The portion was just enough to fill your stomach, meaning the cook got the size right. The fish was not oily after frying though it could be be some more fresh type of fish (probably because Milan is not a port city). Mine is a very healthy dish, a simple risotto with shrimps and vegetable.

It wasn't just rice, but a mix of brown rice and white rice. You would expect a very fresh dish, and it is actually fresher than I expected because when it was served, you could already smell something like grass! The leaves and brown rice made this dish look like a little planter, and I hesitated for a second before really picking up the fork. I felt like eating grass! However, when I had the first taste of it, I fell in love with it. Unlike Chinese rice, most of the risotto have a harder texture like uncooked rice. However, this rice mix was not very hard or dry at all, and the mix of dried grape and chopped carrots was a good idea to add little sweetness to the plate, or else the whole dish would be too dry like pure grass. If you add salty ingredients, the freshness of the dish probably would not be retained. The shrimps were fresh too without any fishy smell, and they were the undertone of the dish. The main role is the rice!

This is really unbelievably and I love it so much, and I am sure I am going to visit it again when I go to Milan again!

In the afternoon, we realized we had quite a lot of time to waste, so we went in the famous cafe shop Caffe Zucca. You won't miss this place, because it is right at the entrance of the shoppers-must-visit Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

I was just in love with both cappuccino and shakerato, and there you go!

I love the way the Italians prepare cold coffee. It is quite common to put ice cubes into coffee to make an iced one, but they mix espresso and ice and shake everything well with a shaker can (like bartenders always do). That will create a thoroughly cold drink called caffé shakerato that you can enjoy instantly, without the need to wait for the ice to melt. It also retains the little foam at the top, like a typical cappuccino, beautiful!

We were not sure if it was the hot weather or our stomach still had space, but we decided to go into one crowded ice-cream shop to have a taste of gelato. Oh, it appeared that it only had its shop front filled with people while the inside was quite empty. Perfect for us to enjoy a cup of ice-cream without disturbance.

Stay tuned!