Something I did a dozen years ago and thought to revisit after reading a New York Times piece earlier in the month highlighting Ken Auletta’s new biography of the horrific Harvey Weinstein (one of whose lawyers I oddly happen to know).  It seems that the longtime New Yorker writer has had an obsession in finding excellent Chicken Parmesan preparations, and part of a group of guys who have been foraging the Italian-American eateries of the New York area for it.  For him, a “test of a good Southern Italian restaurant is whether their chicken or veal parmigiana had a good sauce, the breading is crisp and has not been drowned in sauce, and the chicken or veal is not so thin it tastes like cardboard.”
 
Chicken Parmesan is an American creation that grew from the eggplant parmigiana preparation from southern Italy and Sicily, with the meatier chicken substituting for the less caloric eggplant at its core.  Veal Parmesan came first, at least by the 1930s while Chicken Parmesan debuted on restaurant menus at least a couple of decades later.  Veal Parmesan is certainly a much better dish, and my favorite dish as a kid, but Chicken Parmesan is ubiquitous throughout the country, the veal version much less so.  Industrially produced, widely distributed and easily affordable, gigantic, if typically tasteless, chicken breasts are the key reason for the popularity of Chicken Parmesan along with the ease of preparation.  But, even practiced Italian-Americans like Ken Auletta might like it if done well.
 
There are at least a dozen Italian-American restaurant chains ranging from the retrenching Zio’s with a just a handful of spots to Olive Garden with 887 (!), with most have at least forty outlets.  People like Italian-American food, in even the most minor key.  Chicken Parm at these restaurants is a slice or more of chicken breast, breaded and pan-fried – if rarely pounded thin – and topped with melted mozzarella and maybe some other white-colored, Italian-inspired cheeses and served in a lot of tomato sauce with a side of pasta, usually spaghetti, also in that tomato sauce.  You know what it is.  The portion sizes for an order can range widely, though, from just 750 calories to over 1600.
 
Given the highest rate of inflation in forty years, I thought I would reprise a survey of chain Italian-American restaurants that I did some years ago, the Chicken Parm Index.  Here are the current prices at dinner: 

• Bertucci’s – $21.99, 1330 calories
  
• Biaggi’s – $18.99, 1500 calories
• Bravo! Italian Kitchen – $21.99, 1450 calories
• Bucca di Beppo – $30.00 for a portion that feeds three, 870 calories for an individual serving
• Johnny Carino’s – $19.99, 1010 calories
• Carrabba’s – $20.49, 760 calories
• Fazoli’s – $10.29, 840 calories
• Maggiano’s Little Italy – $20.50, 1290 calories
• Romano’s Macaroni Grill – $20.00, 1610 calories
• Old Spaghetti Factory – $17.75, 750 calories
• Olive Garden – $17.79, 1020 calories
• Spaghetti Warehouse – $16, 750 calories
• Zio’s – Chicken Parmigiana – $14.99, 1370 calories

 
In 2010, the Chicken Parm preparations at the chain Italian-American restaurants for dinner ranged from $12.99 to $18.95 and averaged $15.  Now these go from $10.29 to $21.99, averaging $18.10.  The cost for a Chicken Parm dinner has risen just a shade over 20% in the intervening dozen years. 
 
Chicken Parm remains a price performer at these chain Italian-American restaurants.  I don’t recommend ordering it at one of these places nor even visiting any of these, though.

The Chicken Parmesan at Maggiano's.

The highly anticipated annual “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list was just released.  Even if these are not really the best fifty restaurants in the world, it’s always fun for dedicated diners like me to peruse.  And in the top fifteen on this year’s list is a place I had dinner some years ago, Uliassi in Senagallia on the Adriatic in the Marche region of Italy.  It hadn’t been proclaimed as one of the very best restaurants in the world back then, but one of the best in Italy by the Italian guide Le Soste and had two Michelin stars – it’s garnered three in recent years – and it remains the place where I’ve had the very best meal I’ve ever had in Italy in a quarter of century traveling there.  Clearly so.
 
Since it was so accolated, I thought I would recount my meal there.  And just returning from a couple of weeks visiting restaurants in Italy, I’ve been thinking a lot about Italian dining.  Even more so than usual.
 
Dinner as part of a Gruppo Ristoranti Italiani gastronomic trip in 2011, there were about three dozen of us, the only diners in what seemed to have been a typically shuttered day for the restaurant.  With such a large group, it was a set menu.  Six courses.  All terrific.  Delicious, beautifully presented, creative, ambitious and often unusual, all with evidently superb ingredients, the plates were served with perfect pacing and skill.  This was even more impressive to me given the size of the group.  A similar-sized meal at the similarly praised Del Posto in Manhattan the next year, which was good, but paled in comparison to this one at Uliassi.
 
It all began with the table set with an array of breads that I described at the time as “fancy” and were easily the tastiest of the trip, which included some top restaurants.  Excellent restaurants will have excellent breads.  That analog might be more true in Italy where the cheap trattoria or osteria likely have cheap, and maybe stale I found, bread as part of its coperto, cover charge.  White wine, the region’s pride, Verdicchio, provided the necessary complement.
 
The first dish was triglie, the flavorful red mullet, that was lightly breadcrumb-encrusted, pan-fried, and served on a bed of parsley-centric sauce.  It was wonderful, nicely crisp with slightly zesty taste, a great combination of contrasting textures.  The second was roasted red shrimp – featuring the Italian favorite gambero rosso – oddly served with mashed potatoes, also bits of fresh black truffles, pieces of hazelnuts and colored black with squid ink in aspic.  Served in a wide-lipped white bowl that further highlighted the predominance of the black-colored food, it looked rather foreboding.  Delicious, though. The shrimp were cooked with anchovies that provided a subtle bite to an eccentrically composed, but very tasty dish that I ate very quickly.
 
Then came the smoked spaghetti with small clams and roasted peeled cherry tomatoes, a fun take on the Neapolitan classic spaghetti alle vongole.  The smokiness came from eel broth.  The commercial dried pasta was cooked for eight minutes I learned later, not al dente, but perfect with the dish.  The taste was thankfully not overly smoky, just flavorful.  The fourth preparation was sauteed spigola – sea bass that seems to be the same thing as branzino, though this was wild-caught – in a somewhat rich and just slightly earthy pigeon-based sauce, featuring mushrooms and evident rosemary.  Fantastic.  Like most diners and also chefs, I wouldn’t have thought to pair a saltwater fish filet, or any fish, with the sauce based on a smallish bird, though it was certainly inspired.
 
The savory courses had ended and the first of the desserts was a yogurt ice cream with arugula and passion fruit featuring pink peppercorns, with the ice cream was covered in a tasty sugar-based coating.  I found it elaborate, predictably chef-y, and excellent, even with the leafy greens.  The finale was an espresso crème brulee with bombolini, a donut-like sandwich, and chocolate pop rock.  The crème brulee was terrific, the doughnuts good, and the pop rocks tasted like pop rocks.  It was only item that did not impress.  Of course, I haven’t been impressed with pop rocks since my days in single digits.
 
I think that we were all ecstatic following the menu, as good as it was.  Lunch earlier in the day was at a place with a single Michelin star.  We got to tour the amazingly spacious and spotless kitchen afterwards.  I got to ask chef and proprietor Mauro Uliassi about the brand of pasta he used in the smoked spaghetti dish.  It was a small brand from Gragnano, which is celebrated for its pasta, which he generously gave me a box.  That pasta didn’t make into something involving smoked spaghetti but it was an additional reminder of a what became a long-memorable meal.   

From Uliassi

A fast-casual, contemporary Vietnamese restaurant in Montrose that my occasional, but always charming, dining companion likes has bottles of seemingly fancier and pricier brand of the sriracha hot sauce on its tables.  Not quite as fancy nor nearly as attractively packaged, at times with take-out from Vietnamese or Chinese restaurants, little packets of sriracha are to be found in the bag amidst the utensils and napkins.  I’ve found all these versions much less interesting and complex, much less enjoyable than what comes in the ubiquitous, rooster-emblazoned bottles of Huy Fong sriracha that I use almost daily.  
 
Made with piquant red chile peppers, garlic, vinegar, salt and sugar, at least, it is “not heavily fermented, it’s not acidic,” which is how top local chef Bryan Caswell was quoted about it a while ago in a very informative piece by John T. Edge in the New York Times and why he used it so readily at Reef.  The Huy Fong is sufficiently spicy, and I’d add that it is also balanced and has a depth of flavor that the other versions don’t have.  It livens up my frozen foods, adds spice to soups, and it the best accompaniment to scrambled eggs, better than freshly shaved truffles – though the latter can be incredible, too.  Some of my disappointment with the rooster-less version is certainly due to my long familiarity with the Huy Fong brand and expectation for a certain flavor profile, but it’s also that Huy Fong is just so tasty compared to other similar condiments for my palate.  And most palates, it seems.
 
There is now a shortage of Huy Fong sriracha due to a drought in Mexico, where Huy Fong’s peppers are grown.  The shelves at my local Kroger have been bare of it for a while now.  This could be tough for me if this predicament continues.  Thankfully, I purchased a big bottle last time.  We are not alone.
Climate change has also caused something similarly distressing: a Dijon mustard shortage in France.  I use that, but more sparingly, though.

Where Huy Fong sriracha needs to be at Kroger recently.

Somewhat surprising to me, I had terrific pizzas at three different places on a trip last month to Veneto and Friuli, two regions in northeastern Italy, far from pizza’s heartland.  I had never been much impressed with pizzas north of Rome over the years, though there have been well-turned ones here and there like from a Neapolitan-run pizzerias in Pesaro on the Adriatic about a decade ago and another one, from the lauded Sorbillo, in Milan before travel stopped. 
 
Maybe it was the pandemic that helped spur the increase in quality in pizzerias, with dining in restaurants prohibited for a long stretch of time in Italy and delivery pizzas became much more popular, and customers more demanding.  For the point, at more than one pizzeria, I saw boxes and delivery pouches in action, something that I had hardly noticed in the past.  And 50 Top Pizza, Guide to the Best Pizzerias in the World, a source I have used to some success on recent-years trips to Italy now has a section entitled, “Le 50 Migliori Pizze in Viaggio in Italia da taglio e asporto,” the fifty best pizzas for a trip for the Roman pizza al taglio and also take-out in Italy.
 
The reason for my past relative indifference with pizzas in northern Italy is that pizza is specifically Neapolitan in origin.  It’s from Naples, that ancient port city near where many Italian-American can trace their origins.  Because of these transplants, pizza became more readily available in U.S. than it did elsewhere in Italy.  “Pizza, which was unknown in north Italy before the war” recounted cookbook author Marcella Hazan in her memoir Amacord.  Pizzas was difficult to find anywhere outside of the Naples region through the 1950s.  It came to those other cities with transplanted Neapolitans who traveled north to find work in the industrial boom after the war.  Though pizza spread throughout the country, it’s quality rarely matched that of the pizzerias in the Naples area and Rome, where it took hold by 1960 or so, as Italy’s cooking is generally fiercely local.  But pizza now seems to be a source of pride for many of the pizzerias I encountered had signs like “artigianale” and “lievito madre” – artisanal and sourdough yeast – stenciled on their windows along with detailed and often impressive sourcing of ingredients on their menus.   
 
The crusts and the toppings, which are all what pizzas are, but those crusts, especially, can be tough to master and corners might be cut there and elsewhere.  The crusts on the trip were generally excellent, fresh, flavorful and providing a sufficient base for whatever toppings, and those ranged from the Neapolitan style with a soft crust and raised crown, if not the near-soupiness in the center to bready, chef-driven sturdier version but with also a raised crown to a crispy, crusty nearly Roman pizza tonda in execution.  Then the quality of toppings was first-rate, with impeccable burrata, tangy, rich buffalo mozzarella, fresh seasonal truffles, Spanish anchovies from the Atlantic, and 24-month aged prosciutto di Parma were a few of the ones I had along the way.
 
Though we didn’t make it to I Tigli in San Bonafacio, across the autostrada from Soave where we spent an early day touring and tasting at wineries, that is listed as the fourth best pizza in all of Italy by The 50 Top Pizza site, we had very good pizzas a couple times from place very near the villa we rented overlooking Verona, San Mattia Osteria, Pizzeria and Lounge Bar in San Mattia.  So enjoyable, in fact, we picked up pizzas from there twice and one couple even ate there a third time.  Its crusts were light and Neapolitan-like, and the pizzas were similarly light, fresh-tasting with excellent judiciously used ingredients, and this from just a local spot with ones like: fuori dal forno filetti di acciughe del Mar Cantabrico, mozzarella di bufala, and capperi di Lipari; baked anchovy fillets from the Cantabrian Sea off Spain, buffalo mozzarella, and capers from the island of Lipari in Sicily.  We didn’t order enough pizzas each time, as ravenously as we devoured them.
 
The best I had was in Il Melograno in Trieste the next week, a entry in the Top 50 Pizza site, where endured exceedingly slow service – restaurant staffing shortages have affected Italy, too – but the food was so good. So good.  The thin crust with a raised crown were delicious as were the toppings: mozzarella, a designated production of burrata, prosciutto from a named local producer and orange-infused olive oil.  The entire meal was wonderful, even the different beet and baccala preparations we had to start, all helped by high-quality German beer then nearly local wine – Korsic Ribolla Gialla from the Collio that seemed to go well with everything – and finally the hometown Illy espresso at the end of a too-long stay.
 
Nearly as good was Al Cantonet in Conegliano, the town chosen to close out our trip because of its easy access to the airport in Venice.  And Al Cantonet was chosen because I could not get into two nicer restaurants I had hoped to.  I barely got into this place, too.  With a very interesting, very artisanal menu with maybe fifty types of pizza plus a dozen or so from a special menu highlighting a type of local tomato that was season.  It took me nearly a beer to make a choice which was pizza with burrata and 24-month-aged prosciutto di Parma.  The presentation was rather unexpected with the pizza nearly unadorned except for smatterings of tomato sauce and mozzarella and a ball of burrata.  The prosciutto slices were on a plate on the side.  It was excellent featuring a crisp crust similar to the Roman pizza tonda, but larger in diameter, it seemed.  I could see some of the open kitchen with dough portioned from a tray and put into a brick oven with a rotating bottom and two pizzaiolos working steadily.  The burrata and prosciutto were terrific and far better than similar products I’ve had since I’ve returned.
 
Much cheaper, too.   Pizzas ranged from €4 for the very simply adorned marinara or margherita pizzas to up to €13 or so.  Not bad at all, particularly with dollar and euro now at parity.  Even places were I didn’t order pizza kind of impressed, at least what I could see for the pies on other tables like at the humble Al Folgher also in Conegliano where I had top-notch prosciutto and fried calamari instead.  Now might be a better time than ever to enjoy pizza in Italy.

The excellent Pizza Unica at Il Melograno in Trieste recently

When asking for recommendations for Verona from a friend in the wine business and a native of Verona, at the top of her list, and bolded at that, was dinner at Antica Bottega del Vino, the famed wine bar-restaurant in the heart of historic city center that boasts one of the best wine lists not just in Italy but the entire world.  With 4,700 interesting selections on its wine list and a cellar of 18,000 bottles, it’s owned by thirteen of the top Amarone and Valpolicella producers and the city of Verona is a nexus for the nearby wine regions of Soave, Bardolino, and Lugana in addition to the fruit of the vines coming from the nearby Valpolicella hills.  The sheer amount of vines that can be seen when driving near Verona is amazing, befitting the largest city in largest wine-producing region in Italy.  I had actually been looking forward to visiting Antica Bottega del Vino for years.
 
My two initial attempts at reservations a week beforehand were not successful; the restaurant was booked for both its seatings for the midweek evening that suited the group.  There were nine of us, which did not help, a big table at a very popular destination with international renown.  I was resigned to just visiting for glass of wine or two sometime during our time there.

I did that with a couple others on our first full day in the area.  On lookout for its sign, “Bottega Vini” tucked away on a side street off the marble-laden ritzy retail pedestrian street, Via Mazzini, we finally found it.  Thin and festooned in dark wood, and really not much to the ground floor interior but with an feel of comfort bereft of much fanciness much less pretentiousness, we walked in past the glass case of appealing cicchetti, the area’s version of tapas, just inside and gazed up at the chalk boards behind the bar to decide on the first wine of the visit.  There were thirty whites, rosés, reds and sparklers plus a bakers’ dozen of Amarones, one from each of the houses that own the restaurant - this is certainly the best spot to sample Amarones.  Both an impressive and inviting list of wines by the glass, with neat choices from nearby but also further afield especially from Champagne.  The prices were friendly, too, ranging from €5 to €19, though for an Amarone Riserva, most were well under €10 for wines that might be three times as expensive at restaurants and wine bars here.

We started with Bardolino Chiarettos and a Franciacorta Satèn, a rosé from nearby Lake Garda and the lower pressure bottling of that method champagne method wine, and sat down at one of the tables that were empty before the dinner service that begins at 7:00.  The couple at the neighboring table were drinking a rich Valpolicella Ripasso, ignoring the temperature that neared ninety with sufficient humidity.  It was certainly a good wine.  And they turned out to be practiced imbibers, English, saying that they had visited Antica Bottega del Vino on fifteen or so trips to Verona over the past couple of decades, if I heard them correctly.  We soon got shooed outside because of the necessary preparations for dinner and found space at one of the few tall tables set out in front.  Another round ensued, different, chilled wines to sample.  It was a very pleasurable introduction to the place.  I could readily understand why we could not get reservations for dinner: there are maybe eighty seats both inside and out on the street just outside its door.  Maybe.  And it was quite well known to many people who liked wine well beyond Verona.

The restaurant was also a favorite of the owners of the villa, Giorgio and Alessandra, we had rented in the hills of the city.  Fortunately for us, they lived in an adjacent property and had mentioned in one of our first conversations with them there our inability to get a table and they had some strings to possibly pull there.  They couldn’t promise anything but would try.  Alessandra notified the next day that she was able to get a table for all nine of us at nine that night under her name.  It’s good to have connections.
 
The visit was prefaced by aperitivos at one of the crowded cafés a few blocks away on Piazza Erbe as my friend suggested.  The aperitivo is welcome part of near-daily life in Verona and much of northern Italy these days, it seems.  Then after one bitter starter, we ambled near the storefronts for Gucci, Burberry, Bottega Veneta and Dolce & Gabbana, we made it to the more humble one for the restaurant.
 
We were seated at the long table not far from the entrance where we initially were the other night when the place was much emptier, greeted with the first side of The Clash's "Combat Rock" in the air seemingly spun from vinyl.  The dinner that night was a lot of fun, one of the highlights of the trip.  As we sat down and begin to order, the street in front of the restaurant and small area near the front of the counter began to fill up with a festive crowd, seemingly mostly locals, not too young nor too old.  Mostly single, at least for the evening, it seemed.  Seated nearby, the indoor dining area is not much, it was a fun environment for a wine-soaked meal. 
 
Antipasto, pasta with truffles as the primo or the house specialty Risotto con Amarone for me next – “Fantastico” was Alessandra’s description – then the meats and finally dessert.  We did it up in the indulgent tourist fashion.  Plenty of wine, too, of course.  It was a joy to thumb through one of the oversized wine lists to try to select the wines, at least once with help from one of its sommeliers.  The Pra Otto Soave, Speri Valpolicella Classico, and Torre d’Orti Valpoicella Ripasso Superiore were each very well made, delicious, complementary to their parts of the meal, and very reasonably priced for American customers.  I did note again that Vitello alla Milanese gets less desirable the further you travel from the Milan area, as mine was drier and less flavorful than it should have been, hence the need for accompaniments of tomatoes and mayonnaise.  No matter, a very enjoyable night.  After finish the desserts and rest of wine and digestivos, I seem to remember, we split up to find cabs in different parts of the city center in a still bustling Verona past midnight on a weekday.
 
Antica Bottega del Vino is a terrific stop for wine whether or not a full dinner is in store.  A number of cicchetti can be a great partner to the second glass of wine and can make for a meal in itself.  The restaurant, the bar, is worth more than just one visit, in fact.  I’m looking forward to a future return.
 
Antica Bottega del Vino
Via Scudo di Francia
37121 Verona, Italy

I can’t believe that I did this, especially warning friends to avoid doing so. “Be careful of the well past prime white wines that Spec’s likes to leave littered on its shelves like brown-tinted booby-traps,” is what I recently wrote.  I had seen too many too old bottles, and in a distressingly frequency, along the Italian white wine aisle at the big Spec’s on Smith Street over the years.  In other aisles, too.  The big format whites and rosés might be as bad for having bad bottles litter its spaces.
 
But, the other day, seeing a producer I liked, one whom I raised toast with during a wine trip to Friuli some years ago, actually, Gradis’ciutta, from a terrific region for white wines, the Collio, I picked up a bottle of its Chardonnay.  And I had a couple Chardonnays on trip to Trieste last month and was still intrigued on how this ubiquitous varietal thrives in a different fashion or fashions in areas near there like the Collio and Carso.  The bottle of Gradis’ciutta was of the brown and in my haste and interest in the wine, I didn’t check the vintage shown in small print on the back of the bottle, 2015.
 
The wine was spoiled and awful.  A small sip and quickly down the drain.
 
I believe that I am done buying wines at Spec’s for now.  It is much safer to purchase wines from Total Wine, Houston Wine Merchant, French Country Wines, Coscto, Whole Foods, etc.

I recognized “sgombro” in the title of one of the pizzas at Pizzeria Du De Cope the other evening in Verona.  Mackerel.  In a just-post-pandemic dining landscape where reservations are a near-must in most somewhat popular restaurants in Italy, we were happy and felt lucky to be able to get seated very soon after the doors had opened.  And this pizzeria is from Verona’s star chef and restaurateur Giancarlo Perbellini, who has nearly ten restaurants in Verona and elsewhere and a couple of Michelin stars at his flagship, Casa Perbellini, so maybe it wasn’t that odd to see a chef-y license with the pizza toppings.
 
One of our large group, maybe on my suggestion, ordered an unusual pizza: “Sgombro, cipolla e burrata” as it is listed on the menu.  Along with the mackerel in substantial pieces, it had buffalo mozzarella, burrata, mascarpone, halves of small perfectly ripe tomatoes, pickled red onions, pieces of basil and gratings of reserve Grana Padano cheese arrayed in nearly perfect circle of dough bounded by a high crown.  There was not just fish on the pizza but in the traditionally thought-to-be-unholy in Italy combination of fish and cheese; fish and grated cheese, too.
 
I swapped a quarter of my pie for the sgrombo and company one.  It was different, but not too different.  The firm pieces of the mackerel were mild, so the pizza was not assertively and offputtingly fishy tasting like the cheap anchovy pizzas of my distant youth.  That it was from an establishment of a top chef and in a city known for its seafood in restaurants, helped ensure that the fish was of good quality.  The bit of acidity from the pickled onions and fresh tomatoes provided a nice complement to the fish – though I might have liked a lemon wedge on the side for some more of that – and the trio of different cheeses rounded out the flavors going with the fairly sturdy crust.
 
That wasn’t the only fish on pizza during the recent two weeks in northeastern Italy.  Just across the autostrada from Soave where we spent a terrific day tasting wine is San Bonifacio, home of I Tigli, the fourth best pizzeria in all of Italy according to the reputable and useful 50 Top Pizza, which, unfortunately, did not fit into the schedule that evening or another.  It has long served a Polenta and Baccalà pizza, a version of the popular regional appetizer, whipped salted cod over polenta.  Among the fifty or so pizzas at the excellent Al Cantonet in Conegliano that I stumbled into one night were four seafood-topped ones.  A couple with swordfish carpaccio and a couple others with shrimp including that surprisingly named Tony Esposito also with pesto, tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella.  I’m pretty sure that he didn’t have anything like that when he was expertly tending goal for the Hawks in the Chicago Stadium, or on the road for that matter.
 
I was surprised to encounter fish on pizzas during this trip, but maybe I shouldn’t have been.  Fish on pizza, at least in a tamer and more famous form, has been around for forty years, ever since Wolfgang Puck put smoked salmon along with crème fraiche and caviar on a pizza for the actress Joan Collins on the road to stardom.