where to eat in italy

restaurants in cortona:
i was, for some reason, really surprised at all the excellent restaurants in cortona. maybe it's just because it's a town that hasn't fully succumbed to the temptations of tourism - despite the frances mayes phenomenon - but everywhere we went, we had a good-to-excellent meal. i suspect that some of this had to do with the fact that i exhaustively researched options on egullet, chowhound, and slowtrav.com. these sites, filled with regular tourists and locals' advice, are really the way to go - i got recommendations that were 10x better than any lame guidebook. also excellent is tania's blog - she's an american who just moved to cortona with her boyfriend, and seems to write about every meal she's had in drool-worthy detail. several of the restaurants we went to were because of a post she wrote.

trattoria dardano: tommy and i found this place last year, when we went on a day trip to cortona from florence. we pretty much just walked in, not expecting much, and then were blown away by plates of truffle pasta and butter-sage pasta. very reasonable, as well, and lots of locals eating there. this time around i had, as previously mentioned, pici alla contadina and rabbit - both excellently prepared, and the pasta was especially good. it's a very normal, family-run place - i'm pretty sure the son is the main host, and his mother and wife cook in the kitchen, and there's also a boy of about 14 who serves. tommy had the tagliatelle with wild boar (cinghiale, a classic area meat) and reports that it was yummy. web site is here.

trattoria la grotta: if i were forced to pick a favorite meal of the trip, this might have been it (though it's nearly impossible for me to pick an all out favorite as we ate so much good stuff). the house antipasti were amazing, my truffle-covered spinach and ricotta ravioli was good (though the truffle sauce was a tiny bit thin and watery) and my porkchop with a sauce of balsamic vinegar was perfection. service was not nearly as good, though when eating an italian meal it's not necessarily a terrible thing to have to wait a long time in between courses. another highlight of this meal: when our friend sara went into the tiny bathroom, we heard a female voice crying "help, help, i'm stuck!" julie valiantly went to the rescue, but turns out who was actually stuck was one of a table of female american socialites - you know, covered in newly-purchased italian leather, dripping with gold and perfectly frosted hightlights. haha, suck on that, rich lady who can't even figure out what is an extremely normal door lock. anyway. another plus of la grotta is that it's located in an extremely cute courtyard off the main piazza and is very adorable on the inside - stone walls, low arches, rustic furniture, white tablecloths, etc. no web site as far as i can find, but it's located in piazzetta baldelli.

random pizzeria that i can't for the life of me remember the name of: too bad, because it was truly awesome. brian, tommy and i took the train back from rome earlier than the rest of our group, and as it was a wednesday (lots of stuff in italy is closed on wednesdays, and i've never figured out why) we had difficulty finding a place to eat until we stumbled on this pizzeria, where our only company was a small italian family of four. i must be having a brain fart, because i also can't for the life of me remember what kind of pizza i had, except it was extremely yummy, and maybe involved some gorgonzola. but lo, through the magic of the internet, i have discovered the name of the pizzeria: trattoria pizzeria croce del travaglio, 1 via dardano. highly recommended, and pretty cheap.

osteria la bucaccia: this was our last meal in cortona before heading off to spend our last day of the trip in florence. it's a very beautiful restaurant - stone walls, low lighting, and apparently it used to be part of an old wine cellar - and the food was quite good, but something just seemed a little off about the whole experience. maybe it was that they were trying too hard, or something. the owner was really charming, and gave us free plates of delicious pecorino at the start of the meal and free biscotti and vin santo at the end, but overall i thought it was a little too expensive for what we got. i'm blanking on what i had for my pasta dish, but my secondi was wild boar carpaccio with rucola and parmesan. very good, but it highlighted another problem with the restaurant - i guess they give tourists an english only menu, which has some obvious problems in translation. for example, i had no idea that the cinghiale dish was carpaccio. i mean, it was super good, but i was not looking for that sort of thing. if i'd had the italian menu, it would have been clearer to me. anyway, still very good. web site here.

pizzeria fufluns: i have no idea why this pizzeria is named so ridiculously, but at the very least they serve excellent pizza. i had the contadina for lunch one day with tommy - gorgonzola, pear and walnut pizza. very delicious. but the whole atmosphere of fufluns is a little creepy - it's obviously very new, the friendly and cute waitstaff wear matching logo'd t-shirts, and everything is shiny and clean. i like my italian trattorias and pizzerias to have a bit of, you know, dinginess around them, dammit. a too-modern pizza place takes away any ancient and stereotpyical charm that the regular, old fogey places seem to have.

gelateria snoopy: right in the main piazza of cortona is this tiny gelateria that seems to be constantly frequented by screaming, annoying, italian high school students. how i hate italian high school students. but it's worth shoving your way through them for this gelato, which is seriously some of the best i've come across in italy.

a bit outside of cortona: hostaria la tufa: i had never heard of this place in all of my research until tania recommended it enthusiastically on her blog. it's about 4km outside of cortona is the TINY TINY hamlet of ossaia. seriously, ossaia seems to be about 10 feet long, but apparently is of pretty historical importance. it's near the site where hannibal slaughtered the romans, and has tons and tons of roman ruins. we drove there in the twilight, and maybe it's just because i am an anxious and weirdo person, but i seriously got a very weird vibe from the whole place. it just seemed SO OLD and freaky. i had this problem all the time all over cortona, as it is perhaps the oldest town in italy (etruscans founded in it the 7th or 8th century bc) and everything was just so creepily ancient. i have no idea why i found it all disturbing instead of merely interesting, but it probably has to do with ghosts. goddamn ghosts.
anyway! la tufa was great, though our waiter very obviously hated our big group of 10 american 20-somethings. my crostini, topped with mozzarella and anchovies, were delicious little bites of heaven; my pasta with cream and sausage was wonderful, although the pasta was cooked a little bit too al dente for my liking; and my grilled beef filet (filetto ai ferri) was literally the most amazing piece of cow i have ever ingested. SO GOOD. tommy and brian split a famous bistecca fiorentina, but i think they were a little disappointed by it as they weren't sure exactly what size to order and it ended up being a bit too small.
as we were leaving the restaurant and headed up to our cars, which were parked behind a very old-looking and tiny church, the church bells started clanging at about 2 billion decibels, right above our heads, in the total creepy darkness (street lights are apparently too modern for ossaia) and everybody freaked the fuck out. ossaia - good food, but scary ghosts of dead roman soldiers totally ALL OVER THE PLACE. la tufa's web site is here.

perugia:
we grabbed lunch on a day-trip to the towns of perugia and assisi. i had been in perugia a couple of years ago and luckily remembered the exact location of a very good pizzeria - pizzeria Mediterranea. it gets very crowded very quickly, but i like to think my oh-so-superb italian helped me ingratiate the group with the host, who seated us right away at a big table for 10.

florence:
we only spent one day in florence, which was okay by me, as i've been there so many times now. (oh, POOR CATHERINE who has been to florence 17 times and talks like a world-weary traveler now about the city. pity her!) but any trip to florence, no matter how short, must include a stop by trattoria da mario. i found out about da mario when i visited florence for the first time in february of 2003. my grandmother's good friend, nancy gordon, was living in florence at the time (her daugther and my mother went to boarding school together in rome, and her late husband was the consulate general of florence in the 60s). she took me to lunch at da mario, right around the corner from her apartment, and said her husband and she had come there since 40 years ago. unfortunately it seems da mario has been totally "discovered," or whatever you want to call it, and also unfortunately i cannot really speak disparagingly about any of the tourists who descend on it because i'm one of them, but i assure you that i am totally better than all of them. anyway the trattoria is about the size of my current living room, and you always have to share tables (this time around brian, tommy and i had to share a table with a little old italian man who was obviously trying to eat his lunch in peace), and there are only about 15 items on the menu, which rarely changes. i always get the rigatoni al ragu for 4 euro, and this time, since i was getting a little tired of the constant carbs, i also got the insalata verde - just crisp, fresh green lettuce with the perfect amount of oil and white vinegar. along with a liter of wine (split by only three people in under 25 minutes, about the length of a regular lunch at da mario), i was full and completely wasted. perfetto! i know there's a web site for it out there, but can't at the moment find it. instead you can read this account of another's lunch.

osteria vasari: i was afraid our last night's dinner in florence was going to be a disaster. it was a saturday night, there were nine of us, and i didn't feel like calling around to make reservations. fortunately, naomi chatted up alessio, the front desk guy at our hostel (whom i now adore because he told her he thought at first i was italian because i spoke well) and he made reservations for us at osteria vasari, far away from the touristy centro in oltrarno (the area of florence across the arno river, which appropriately translates as "beyond the arno"). it was a beautiful space, with high ceilings and arches and candles all over the place. surprisingly, i think we were the only americans in there. also surprisingly, the restaurant was not at all crowded despite it being a saturday night in florence. the food was a little more expensive than the range we'd been eating in, but i still thought it was pretty worth it - tommy and i split a classic plate of bruschetta, then i had what is literally some of the best pasta of my life: fiocchi di pere and (some kind of cheese which i cannot remember, which is apparently a running theme of this post, but i think it must have been ricotta or mascarpone). little pasta balls of pear and cheese. orgasmic. my pork was good, but not excellent, the bruschetta and the fiocchi more than made up for that. only bad thing about the restaurant: in the women's bathroom, there is a creepy stone sculpture of a nude roman dude placed DIRECTLY in front of the toilet so that it is staring at you while you pee. i cannot imagine what motivated the owners to situate the statue in such a disturbing manner, but as long as they keep serving that pear pasta, i guess i can forgive it. web site here.