Italy Food Blog #8

We have stayed in Milan for more than 4 days, and I must say that it should have been shortened a little bit. We thought that four days would be enough for us to shop more, but it appeared that most of the things were not cheaper in Hong Kong. So yeah, we decided to spend more time in the restaurant.

One night we were too tired and we just went into one random restaurant close to our hotel. However, we realized that it was a place where you could choose your own combo for your lunch, like a little buffet but confined with sets. The portions were quite big too, and the food was not bad.

We ordered the assorted seafood with spaghetti and another spaghetti with lobster. Then we added one more dish, veal with mushroom and potato.

The food was just okay or maybe we should jump to the next day with some more remarkable dishes.

We were looking for the famous Gusto restaurant, but just failed to find it, no idea. However, we went into another one with the same name. We believed this was not the one we were looking for, but seeing new interior and modern design inside, we decided to sit down and had a quick lunch here (Google Map).

During the lunch time, we served a little buffet-like menu. You could choose 6 out of the 14 little dishes, and among the choices you could find pasta, vegetable, meat and dessert.

I also ordered a squid-inked bread with salmon inside, and also an iced coffee.

The little dishes were quite okay, but all of them were cool dishes. I didn't much prefer that when there was meat inside but the taste were average still. The sandwich was rather disappointing though. The salmon was not fresh enough and the salad dressing inside overwhelmed the entire sandwich, and you couldn't taste anything at all except that dressing. The bread was dry and the taste was a little bitter too, which completely ruined the salmon inside.

However, the coffee was very well prepared. It is so smooth and the smell of coffee was strong, something you may not expect from a cold coffee. It was so good that I was tempted to have another glass. Nice one.

Talking about good coffee, one probably won't miss the famous Caffe Greco in Rome. Oh yeah, we now just flew back to Rome, our last stop in Italy. Founded in 1760, this little old shop was located in Via Condotti, one of the streets stuffed with name brands. The waiters inside were all dressed up in suit, holding onto the traditions for hundreds of years.

We sat down and ordered some coffee. Iced coffee, then shakerato and cappuccino.

And I am not going to lie. The taste of the coffee was okay but unremarkable, and it was not cheap at all. However, the overall ambiance was miraculously kept from the old days till today, and it was really a relaxing place for coffee and chatting.

Our finally meal happened to be in a famous pizza place where you can always find a queue outside its door. Pizzaeria da Baffetto is in some alleys, and it is like the "dai pai dong" in Hong Kong. We queued for 20 minutes and finally got a seat, sharing a long table with a pair of lovers (I think they were from France). In order to see how good the pizzas were, we ordered the simplest ones, because the simple ones were actually the hardest to make good.

The first one was a typical quatro formaggio, and the second was a pizza with mushroom and tomato sauce.

I am not sure if I need to be a complete Italian to enjoy the pizzas, but they were not as good as the one I tried in other restaurants. The thickness was okay but a little bit too thin for me. The texture was not amazingly good, while the smell of charcoal kind of overwhelmed the pizza, giving a slightly choking unpleasant feeling. The tomato sauce was nice, but the mushroom was too dry, or perhaps that was the intention to make some contrasting feel in the mouth using a lot of tomato sauce and dry ingredients.

The service was a major problem, and I suspect the owner and the staff were blown away by the popularity and overrated comments from books. We were not well treated and actually rushed to complete the meal. That is a big taboo for a good restaurant, unless they don't care at all. To conclude, one must have a quick visit of this place because eating pizzas in a back alley is surely something that you never tried in other restaurants in the town, but do come early, otherwise you will need to spend quite some time watching people enjoying their meals before you can do the same.

Alright, that's all for my food trip in Italy, and I hope you enjoy all these photos and my comments on them. As you can see, I have linked some of the restaurants on Google Map, and so if you have a chance to visit these cities, you can try to go to these restaurants and enjoy great food. Have fun!