I somewhat recently included Lobster Fra Diavolo on a list of the best Italian-American dishes of all time.  Most popular in the northeast, especially the New York area and Boston – near where lobsters are caught – the dish takes the southern Italian tradition of shellfish with factory-made pasta to feature sumptuous lobsters.  It’s been found on Italian-themed restaurant menus since the 1930s, at least in New York where it is probably the most popular.  Featuring tomato sauce seasoned with plenty of chopped garlic, oregano and red pepper flakes, it’s another exuberant of Italian-American cooking.  “Fra diavolo” means “brother devil” in Italian and might suggest the heat of the red pepper flakes and also the red of the tomato sauce and cooked lobster.  The name might also reference the nickname of a legendary and vicious bandit in southern Italy who was the subject of a nineteenth century opera.
 
Lobster Fra Diavolo can be a rich and fun dish.  It might also have had a practical, or devious, reason for its creation.  On a gastronomic trip to Italy nearly a decade ago sponsored by the Gruppo Ristoranti Italiani, a restaurateur from Massachusetts mentioned to me that he believed Lobster Fra Diavolo likely was created many years earlier because restaurants had to cover the taste of seafood going bad.  If so, that gives an additional layer – maybe more substance, too – to the name of the dish, a slightly devilish one at that. 

A version of Lobster Fra Diavolo from Tagliata restaurant in Baltimore

That might seem to be an odd question, especially so if you are not as into that kind of food as am I.  If you ask an American what is Italian food, there is a good chance that you’ll get an answer that names dishes featuring a long-simmered tomato sauce like spaghetti and meatballs and chicken Parmesan along with garlic bread.  If you ask an Italian, someone from Italy, the response won’t include any preparations remotely like those, which they certainly don’t regard as being Italian.  They consider those American creations, rightly so.  Their answer might include some of the dishes from their town or region, and those items will likely depend on where the person comes from in Italy.  But, food served under the banner of Italian food here, at restaurants on supermarket shelves, will be seen as Italian food no matter the veracity.
 
I believe that Italian-themed restaurants in this country can be placed as under one of broadly three banners: Italian-American, Americanized Italian, and Italian.
 
Italian-American easily claims the largest number of restaurants and also dishes in the popular mind.  These restaurants serves items that come largely from the Italian-American tradition like those spaghetti and meatballs.  The preparations in the Italian-American tradition are rooted in the big wave of Italian immigration from the 1880s until 1924.  The vast majority of these people came from the Italian south where the tomato has a prominent place, and about half the dishes in the Italian-American canon originate in the Naples area like long-simmered tomato sauce, pasta and clams, and lasagna made with tomato-sauce and ricotta.  These dishes might have had roots in Italy, but were adapted and grew with American tastes, abundance, industrialization and pace of life.  The people who were eating these dishes were Americans, as the immigrants’ offspring and descendants were plus the generations of restaurant patrons.  The preparations at these restaurants, regardless of the provenance of the recipes, are generally much heartier, and meatier and cheesier than in Italy and frequently sporting some red color.  And, if a restaurant's menu touts its sauce, it's Italian-American.
 
But restaurants need to serve what people want, and the menus are not static.  These might often have pasta carbonara, fettuccine Alfredo and penne alla vodka, dishes born in Italy after the big emigration to America, but have become very American in interpretation here.  Steaks, too.  Americans love steak.
 
Similar to the Italian-American restaurant is the newest type, the Americanized Italian.  These do not hew to the Italian-American traditions for the most part, and use more contemporary ideas and products from Italy, but the food is generally different than it is in Italy.  These are often from a skilled chef who puts their spin on Italian dishes, or their notion of Italian dishes, and might use the Italian cooking philosophy as an inspiration.  The quality of ingredients is usually high, and sometimes expensive.  Italian descriptions are often used to portray a greater sense of authenticity or understanding, at least, even if the Italian is often mangled.
 
Restaurants that might be called Italian try to mimic how food is prepared in Italy, or in very capable and knowing hands, express the ethos of Italy and with Italian products when necessary.  The chef is almost always from Italy or has cooked there.  They know Italy.  Italian can be in one its regional or local variations, and from rustic to high cuisine to creative.  In the U.S., traditional and mostly authentic Italian usually features several dishes that are popular outside of Italy or popular in across a lot of Italy, especially the touristed cities and towns (e.g. cacio e pepe).  Truly Italian food can be tough to do, and its appearance in America is actually somewhat recent.  Tony May of the landmark San Domenico in New York was quoted in 2008 saying that "twenty years ago it was very difficult to reproduce regional Italian cuisine…..A chef couldn't get imported Parmigiano-Reggiano or buffalo milk mozzarella, virgin olive oil, prosciutto di Parma, or balsamic vinegar. Now, everybody can buy the finest of such ingredients, and it's made a tremendous difference in the taste of the food."  But, even so, the way we eat in this country is different than in Italy, what customers want is not the same, and restaurants need to make money.  "There's no point in being strictly authentic with an empty dining room," as Lidia Bastianich was quipped a few decades ago.  That’s one reason why authentic Italian restaurants can be hard to find here.
 
In Italy, Italian food means many different things.  In this country, it can mean even more, and often items that are really more American than Italian.

The meat ravioli at the original Carrabba's in Houston

The Post Market has been opened for a scant few months now.  It’s actually still opening as many of the announced businesses have yet to start operations, including several of the restaurants, but what’s already there is worthy of a trip to the northwest corner of downtown for those in search of interesting and fun food offered in a dizzyingly diverse array, with a few places serving extremely high quality food.
 
The Post Market is the transformation of the former central post office, certainly looking a far cry from what it did when I had a postal box there.  A 5,000-seat music venue is at its eastern edge, with the food hall to the north of that and not-ready retail and work spaces to be located somewhere not so apparent, plus the Skylawn atop the building.  A dramatic staircase extends from the food hall up to that, the landscaped roof, which I haven’t yet traversed, being just focused on the food during my dozen or so visits thus far.
 
Just that has been fun.  Both the Post Market and the other food hall to open in 2021, Railway Heights, have been very pleasantly surprising in terms of the array of what is offered and the quality of the food.  The Post Market is the larger and more ambitious of the two.  When all are opened, there will be two dozen food and drink options in the Post Market with cuisines extending from Middle Eastern, Thai, Filipino, Japanese street food, pizza, Nigerian, hamburgers, seafood, contemporary Tex-Mex, hot chicken, pho, crepes, Pakistani, and Indian plus ice cream and gelato options – for partisans of each frozen treat – along with beer, wine and cocktails.  
 
All of the food is dispensed via counter service with fairly limited menus, and those menus often might only be viewed via a Q code, dishing preparations that are generally on the small side.  There are some hiccups in these early days: the steamed rice might often be overcooked; the usually young staff at these new places isn’t always well-served with the food they are pushing across the counter; and the dishes are not necessarily that value-laden.  No matter.  My food has mostly been good, sometimes excellent, in a dozen trips, and it has been enjoyable to explore a range of cuisines all in one setting.
 
Paul Qui, the acclaimed Austin-based chef, who had the excellent Qui on lower Westheimer in 2018 and has a James Beard Award and some baggage, is part of four operations, which shows in the cooking at these.  His three solo efforts are Soy Pinoy, highlighting his Filipino heritage, Thai Kun, and East Side King, Japanese-influenced that has been maddeningly out of what I’ve wanted in a couple of trips.  At
Golfstrømmen Seafood Market he partners with Norwegian chef, Christopher Haatuft, for an enticing seafood outpost that highlights the high quality of their sourcing with mostly straightforward creations in ways usually familiar to locals that can be absolutely delicious.  It’s the best restaurant at Post Market and, I thought, one of the best to open in Houston in 2021.  Two other stars are across the aisle, The Butcher’s Burger and its sibling Salt & Time Butcher Shop, Austin imports like Qui.  The messy hamburgers at The Butcher’s Burger are terrific, employing meat from the butcher shop that are directly from ranchers in central Texas.  It is one of the top burger joints in town.  The attractive case filled mostly with cuts of beef at Salt & Time has already tempted me.
 
Among the other top spots so far is Hawker Street Food from Spain-based, chef Laila Bazahm, who had a well-regarded restaurant in Barcelona and currently operates one in Ibiza. She has been on site at her place that serves a really eclectic set of influences often in a single preparation: Korean, Indian, Peruvian, Balinese, Malaysian, Italian, and more on a short menu.  It has worked out quite well for me in a couple of visits.  I was told by her staff that she is looking for another restaurant in Houston.
 
Though still a work in progress, with construction still underway, the dining area of the Post Market gives the impression of mall food court, if a cool, kind of funky food court.  It has a high ceiling, bustling crowds and a breezeway in back, the former loading dock, set with plenty of tables for safer open-air dining.  It is now open daily for lunch and dinner.  At the Post Market, you’ll visit for the food not the atmosphere, and you likely should visit.

An open-faced crab sandwich with house-made potato chips during a recent visit to Golfstrømmen Seafood Market.

I’ve long joked that one of the things that I would definitely do if I won the lottery would be to drink Burgundy daily.  Given the prices of it, from the most sought-after wine region in the world, it would have to be a big lottery payout.  It’s not just because of the preciousness of fine Burgundy.  These are some of my favorite wines, both the Pinot Noir- and Chardonnay-based bottlings.  The former, usually medium-bodied, with tastes of ripe cherries and maybe raspberries balanced featuring a backbone of acidity and with tannins well in the background.  The latter, I found to be the best expression of Chardonnay – as does most everyone world over – often the flavors of apple, apricot and lemon, usually full-bodied with some welcome acidity – and some more of that with Chablis – providing a liveliness and almost always an equilibrium even when aged in the new, small oak barrels that seems too often to get overplayed in the results of the varietal elsewhere.
 
It’s also the great utility of red Burgundy that I appreciate.  I’ve come to accept something I heard at a wine class, seminar, or maybe just from a wine salesman: that red Burgundy, because of its of medium heft, its acidity and light tannins, is the most versatile food wine around.  It can make food and wine pairing much easier.  And, these are quite easy to drink on their own.
 
Over the years, it hasn’t been just the expense causing my hesitation with exploring more of the region, though that is the certainly the primary consideration, but there is also the amount to know to really know Burgundy.  As noted wine educator Kevin Zraly opined, “Burgundy is one of the most difficult subjects in the study of wines….here are a lot of vineyards and villages, and they are all important.”  There is so much to try to grasp. There is Burgundy, the wines labeled “Bourgogne,” and then in increasing selectivity, and expense, comes the seven regions – like Côtes de Nuits and Côtes Chalonnaise – the many villages, then the premier crus and the grand crus at the pinnacle.  Then white-centric Mâcon region itself has three levels of regional levels, too.  There is a lot to know with Burgundy.  I used to know more, though far from anything approaching expertise, and I am usually fairly befuddled in the Burgundy aisle these days and have been for a while.
 
Before attending a trade luncheon before Christmas about Burgundy’s best kept secrets, it was my thought that its theme might be the promotion its secondary white varietal, Aligoté, that has gotten space on wine lists in recent years, or maybe the base Bourgonge classification, the most affordable, or that it might take a broader view of Burgundy, to include Beaujolais, also.  The mass of Burgundy – Côtes de Beaune, Côtes de Nuits, and the grand and premier crus scattered among them, Chablis – does not need promoting, I thought.  Burgundy “has become the most coveted wine in the world,” to quote Eric Asimov, the New York Times wine writer.  But, it seems that it does, and least some parts of it.
 
At the luncheon, a group of local wine professionals was lead in a blind tasting of nine wines, six white and three red.  We were asked to assess the level of each of the wines after each three-wine flight.  Village was the most common retort, though premier and even grand cru were heard.  It turned out that every one of the wines were from one of the regional appellations, though.  And all were Chardonnay or Pinot Noir, the core of Burgundy.
 
My favorites were  Maison Ambroise Hautes Côtes de Nuits 2018, which is white; Château de Messey Mâcon Cruzille, Clos des Avoueries, 2018, white; and Domaine Fournier, Côtes d`Or, 2018, red. The retail prices for these are $30, $34, and $25, not inexpensive and more than what I typically pay for a bottle of wine.  But, I thought that these prices were quite fair, probably lower than the quality would indicate, in fact.  These three were about the most expensive of the nine.  What struck me was the value throughout.  These were obviously very well-made wine, often delicious, sometimes offer a decent amount of complexity, all for very fair prices.  Some were excellent values, including Domaine Marc Mâcon Pierreclos, a white for just $11. 
 
The producers above might be somewhat obscure, at least to me.  I didn’t see any of these at Total Wines this morning.  We were told that there are good values in the Mâcon, and that might be a short-hand two-syllable name to remember when a white wine is in order.  And I did happen to pick up a couple of bottles with Mâcon on lable today, both definitely under $20.  Some of the other values we sampled were the result of a warming planet.  Also values are to be found in Hautes Côtes de Nuits and Hautes Côtes de Beaune, two areas just outside those two famed areas that long produced wines that were once thin and consumed mostly locally and quite cheaply, but recently, because of much higher temperatures, the grapes are much more fully ripened and the wines are fuller and more flavorful.  Some good out of the bad.
 
There is still a lot to understand – a lot of names to learn, and ones that can be tough for many of us to pronounce – when it comes to affordable Burgundy, but I found it heartening to learn that there is fairly affordable wines from there that are actually a fine value for the quality.