I ducked out of the office a little early on Friday to catch a flight to Bologna. Got in Friday night and took a bus to central Bologna from the airport.
I stayed the first night at the Albergo delle Drapperie, which is a 7 or 8 room hotel off a tiny, quintessentially-Italian street with foot traffic only. Fish and fruit mongers next to cafes and trattorias, etc. My hotel room was not much larger than what you might find on a cruise boat, but it sufficed perfectly for my needs and still had beautiful furnishings, marble floors and all the trimmings. As cool as my area was, this trip was about food and wine and it was time to get to business.
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The host/receptionist/concierge/bellman (all same guy who would end up working 24+ hours straight) recommended a local trattoria for me to gorge myself at. I took his recommendation and found the place in a small piazza just a few miutes south of my hotel. Started (and ended) with a bottle of local Sangiovesse and the courses from there went: Carpaccio and figs for the antipasti, Wild mushroom rissotto for the pasta and fried veal meatballs with zucchini for the meat. Awesome. Topped off with some of the darkest chocolate gelatto I've ever seen.
After a run, light breakfast (espresso!) and aimless sightseeing, it was time to meet Mom and Sonny at the Bologna train station. I hadn't seen them since leaving Dallas in May, so I was pumped. Scarfed down some really good pizza (and more espresso) and we caught a 45 minute train to Parma. Mom and I just kept talking about how the Italian countryside looked exactly like it is supposed to: old barn-houses with Terracotta rooves surrounded by massive amounts of farmland and usually a vineyard.
After a few free hours (some gorgeous churches with pink marble and amazing murals), it was time for our arrival shin-dig. Mom and Sonny will be in Italy all week with a group of people from Dallas that all shop at a really cool Italian wine-and-cheese shop in Highland Park Village (Molto Formaggio) owned by our longtime family friend Michael Perlmeter. Mike spends several months a year in Italy for business and pleasure and has done some cooking school in Italy (as well as having several vendors throught), so he is the perfect guide. Our welcome dinner started with hors d'oeuvres and Prosecco under a setting sun in Parma. Beyond that, we were served various things whose names I could only butcher so suffice it to say it was amazing pasta, meat and wine (see a theme here?). Some very good company supplemented by copious amounts of vino and great grub.
Breakfast the next morning was great, but not necessarily exotic, just extremely well executed. Good (real, not Kraft) parmesan cheese, for example, will absolutely transform scrambled eggs and they know how to cook some meat! And of course, the espresso. There's always more espresso.
We were then driven out to the country outside of Parma and toured both a large-scale and a traditional manufacturer of balslmic vinegar. That stuff will never taste the same to me. The traditional stuff is hand-crafted, aged either 12 or 25 years in wood barrels and has these amazingly complex flavors. We had some drizzled on authentic Parma cheese and the results were amazing.
We then went to some local eatery that is run out of someone's house. With a chicken coop outside and the owner being hardest working guy there (spoke zero English), this was the real deal. We had five courses over three hours of truly authentic, rustic Italian food. Legitimately one of the best meals ever. Depending on how much wine you drank, it was somewhere around EUR 25 per person. Truly memorable.
On our way to drop me off at the airport, we also stopped at the Ferrari museum in Modena. Nothing incredible, just a huge collection of very cool cars and F1 models. Back to The Big Smoke last night for another week in the office. I will figure out how to get some pictures of food added to this post soon.
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