Cheese and Biscuits on tour - The Best of the Rest of Bologna

As should be clear from my last couple of posts, we avoided any multiple Michelin-star high-end meals in Bologna. I'd like to tell you that was due to my uncompromising search for authenticity and deliberate rejection of the homogenised, ratings-chasing international dining scene, but in all honesty, the reasons we ended up in local Trattoria, good though they were, is largely due to one thing - that bloody exchange rate. The world economy has been tanking for the best part of a year, the unemployment rate has skyrocketed and the entire financial system is dangerously close to collapse, and yet I would have happily ignored the whole thing had my trips to Europe suddenly not become 30% more expensive. Very irritating, although I suppose there is one benefit - at a rate of £1 = €1, it's very easy to work out how much things cost.

Anyway, the reason I bang on about the exchange rate is that having imagined Emilia-Romagna as some kind of rustic gastronomic utopia where merry farmers' wives sold their unpasteurised homemade cheese for half a cent and a handful of buttons, and €5 would get you a meal for four and a cab ride home, the reality of eating and drinking out in Bologna, which is after all a wealthy, major European city with its Prada and Gucci stores and well-heeled residents in fur coats, came as a bit of a shock to the wallet. I didn't begrudge at all paying £35 a head in della Rosa because the food was excellent and the service a delight, but the next day we naïvely wandered into a café on the Piazza Galvini called Zanarini which charged - and I promise this is the menu price, without service - €7.50 for a cup of tea. They also did a milkshake for €10. Quentin Tarantino would not be impressed.

Having said all that, my philosophy when it comes to food and drink, repeated many times on this site, has always been "you get what you pay for". There are the odd exceptions to this rule, such as Tayyabs at one extreme and Zanarini at the other, but in the main, good food costs more than bad food, and the real issue is value. If I think I'm getting my money's worth then I will shell out quite happily, but if I think that an establishment is cynically attempting to fleece naive tourists who had been shown to a table in the only place in the entire city open on a Sunday before they'd really had a chance to check out the prices on the menu (I blame myself really), then that will leave a bad taste in my mouth. And I'm not just talking about the contents of their tortelloni.

Now I've got all that off my chest, I can show you this:


It's a whole, boned, roast pig stuffed with herbs and it is the best bit of pork I've ever eaten in my life. We bought about €15 of it and ate it on the flight home. Recommending this is completely pointless unless you happen to be in Bologna on the occasional Sunday where the farmers market appears in the Piazza XVIII Agosto, but there it is anyway.




Also at the farmers market was a number of cheese stalls with handily translated labels. Letting me loose in a cheese shop is a danger at the best of times, but here I just couldn't stop - each sample was better than the last, extraordinary aged-Gouda style hard cheeses and rich, farmy goats. Totally useless blog material as I haven't the foggiest where they came from or how to ever get hold of them again, but here's what they looked like once I got them home:


All in perfect condition, all made from milk from one farm and one small-batch producer and all completely delicious. And I'll probably never eat any of them ever again... sigh.



Roccati chocolate shop on a back alley near the Piazza Maggiore was a bit of a find as well. We watched the guy put together the chocolates with incredible precision at the preparation area towards the back of the store and we spent a good half hour cooing over the plates of intricate sweets and huge spheres of hazelnut nougat. Then we bought a timid amount of dark-covered almonds and a block of 100% chocolate and it cost about €30.




This Gelateria on the charming Via Castiglione apparently draws people from far and wide for its generous selection of ice creams and sorbets, and seems to have been doing so for a very long time, judging by the dates on the menu. My own choice was perfectly nice - caramel and custardy and fresh-tasting - but the real surprise was the price, just €1.50 for two decent-sized scoops of home-made ice cream.

Which just goes to show that there are bargains to be had anywhere, and anyway, being a Londoner I can hardly hold up my home city as an example of fair pricing and generosity to tourists. What I will take away from the Bologna trip is a renewed appreciation for Italian food, memories of a fantastic long weekend in one of the most beautiful cities on earth, and a cupboard full of the finest Italian produce my crappy Pound Sterling can buy. Now that's what I call value.

Cheese and Biscuits on tour - Drogheria della Rosa, Bologna, Italy

Saturday night, and another exhaustively researched Trattoria in a breathtakingly pretty part of Bologna. Drogheria Della Rosa is notable for two things, other than the food of course. Firstly, it's housed in an old shop, and the tables and chairs are crammed into the unlikeliest of nooks and crannies, some wildly unsuitable. We were shown to a table perched precariously close to the top of a flight of stairs in a hilariously narrow corridor to and from the busy kitchens, but we were by no means the worst off that night. One poor couple attempted to enjoy a meal in the tiny holding area where diners waited to be seated, the frigid Bologna winter air blowing in every few seconds and with excitable Italian staff arguing animatedly just above their heads. They looked thoroughly miserable. I half expected to find a table for four set up in the gents when I went for a pee.

Secondly, Della Rosa is more than a little renowned for the ebullient service, thanks to the larger-than-life character of Emanuele Addone. Being a repressed, up-tight Englishman who would run a thousand miles rather than have to put up with that in-your-face TGI Friday's style false bonhomie, I was a little unsure at first, but fortunately there's nothing in the least bit forced about Sign. Addone's style and he just came across as genuinely friendly and welcoming. He also gave us a free bottle of wine to send us on our way after the meal, and how can you dislike anyone who gives you free wine?


So to business. Antipasti was a plate of mortadella and Parma hams and a few fluffy little balls of buffalo mozzarella. All brilliant - especially the mozzarella which were sweeter and more creamy than any I'd had before.



My starter of fresh artichokes and cheese-stuffed tortelloni (tortellini/tortelloni being a speciality of Bologna it seems) were stunning, the artichokes blindingly fresh and sweet and the homemade pasta silky and deep in colour from good egg yolks. This is the kind of dish you dream about eating in Italy, and now that I have I will dream about it even more. Superb. Also of note amongst the starters was a cute little lasagne with veal mince, again a big hit.



My main course had a huge amount to live up to after that starter, and only just fell short. The beef jus was perfectly seasoned and the roast veg - endive I think? Or a similar bitter vegetable - were also cooked perfectly. But the meat itself wasn't of particularly high quality and despite being cooked rare was quite dry and tasteless, which was a shame. Still, another diner had the same dish and declared it the best steak he'd ever eaten, so maybe I just had the last of a poor batch.




Desserts of panacotta, a fruit cake and ice cream and chocolate sauce were comforting and unpretentious, classically Italian in as far as they were simple dishes made using good ingredients and not mucked about with too much. Along with these came a huge plate of fruits and nuts - a lovely way to show off seasonal ingredients with minimum fuss, and again typical of the pride and confidence Italians have in their own produce. And as if all these freebies (the plate of hams and the fruit & nuts were unbilled and unannounced) wasn't enough, we were given a free bottle of delicate, caramel-y dessert wine to wash the cakes and puddings down with.


The bill came to around €40 a head, and although not super cheap thanks to the bloody awful exchange rate, it felt like a bargain once we'd polished off the free bottle of dessert wine and considered all the antipasti and other freebies. And then of course another bottle of wine was forced into our hands on the way out by Sign. Addone and all things considered it's hard to come up with a bad word to say about the place. Perhaps if I'd been sat by the front door and eaten my dinner shivering under the armpits of the waiting staff I would have come away with a different impression. Then again, if I had been served the same food, maybe not.

8/10

Cheese and Biscuits on tour - Trattoria Meloncello, Bologna, Italy

If it sometimes seems that my life revolves around eating and eating out, and that every activity in every moment of every day is dedicated to the search for the next great meal, well that's because it is. Other people may choose their holidays based on climate, attractions or architecture, history or culture, but I have one simple rule when choosing where to spend my leisure time - is the food any good? Emilia-Romagna was chosen specifically as an area of Europe that could boast a world-famous gastronomic reputation, and Bologna in particular because it had an airport I could reach in one hop from Gatwick, thus allowing us to cram in as much good eating as possible over the long weekend. Leaving nothing to chance, I had researched two of the best trattoria in the city for our two evening meals, and through the freezing fog of Bologna last friday, made our way to Meloncello in the south-west of the city.

It was, as we'd been led to expect, a cosy and unpretentious room, and the staff were merrily unconcerned with our non-existent grasp of the language. You couldn't imagine that kind of welcome in France, for example. There was no printed menu, and instead the waiter did a fine job of explaining the dishes on offer, most of which sounded relatively familiar to English ears but then maybe the point of this visit wasn't to expand our culinary horizons but to see, after all these years, how Italians cooked their own cuisine in their own country. I began with sage and butter gnocci.




Fluffy, fresh gnocci and just the right amount of sage. There's not really any more to say - it was a lovely little plate of food, as tasty as it was straightforward. Another primo of genuine Bolognese ragù sat on a bed of perfectly al dente pasta and was even better. It was apparently veal mince that they used in the ragù, which gave the sauce an extra meaty silkiness. I should also mention at this point the house wine, a Sangiovese (the same grape they use to make Chianti) which, whether it was the situation or the anticipation, seemed to punch far above its €20 price tag. I have been scouring the internet for suppliers in London since.


My main was a couple of slices of tender pork loin dressed in a creamy herb sauce, and was also delicious. Again, a simple and unpretentious presentation and nice enough on their own, but they were served with an extraordinary side of rosemary potatoes roasted in some sort of rich animal fat that we couldn't quite place - perhaps goose fat. They didn't last long, and neither did the pork.



Desserts were varied but of the same home-made style. Cakes and puddings, a rich creamy home-made ice-cream dressed in chocolate sauce, nothing unusual but all prepared to a very high standard and all very tasty.


I tried bits of everything on the table (of course I did) but was so stuffed after two courses of carb-laden loveliness that in place of my own dessert I thought I'd risk asking the waiter what he suggested as a digestivo. Not understanding any of the names he rattled off, I just picked one at random that sounded something like Pedrus or Pegrus. What arrived was a shot glass full of what I can only describe as a cross between liquorish, pure ethanol and scotch bonnet chilli. The effect of drinking it, to quote Douglas Adams, was rather like having my "brains smashed out with a slice of lemon, wrapped around a large gold brick". It's the first time I've ever tasted any drink that made me want to scream out loud and then go for another sip. Quite remarkable stuff, and any Italians out there please feel free to chip in and tell me what it was, because I'm going to see if I can get hold of a bottle in London to break the ice at parties - literally and metaphorically.

And so, warmed by the Italian firewater (or more accurately, feeling as if I'd swallowed a Molotov Cocktail and been set on fire from the inside) we headed home. Meloncello was exactly what I was hoping for from a traditional Italian trattoria and more or less what I expected. That the cooking there perhaps verged on the side of "safe" is forgiven given the quality of the dishes they put out - after all, when safe is this good, who needs danger?

7/10