Last weekend went to Milano.
Off the scale seafood food explosion. At a Sardinian restaurant called Osteria Al Molo 13 the waiter quickly picked up on our inability to order italian food, much to our benefit.
“Antipasti for 6?” said he.
“No, just for 3,” said we.
Even though we were 6 I think we were trying to be conservative so we would have room for more courses later. I don’t know if what he brought was intended to be for 3 or 6, but it was enough for 10.
Huge plate of perfect steamed mussels, huge bowl of mixed seafood with arugula + lemon juice, huge pan of shells baked with bread-crumbs and scallops or shrimp, tiny squid tentacles in chili sauce with polenta, undersea snails (not as good as escargot, but deadlier shells), all totally awesome.
Pasta course (a whole course just for awesome pasta, awesome) == fresh tagliatelle with seafood & minitomato sauce.
A whole lobster sliced in half cooked in OO, minitomatoes, onions, very simple. Perfectly cooked. I call them minitomatoes because it sounds cooler and they actually taste good, unlike most cherry tomatoes I’ve had.
After of course the espresso that somehow the rest of the world can’t figure out how to make.
Then they just leave chilled bottles of limoncello and a sardinian booze called mirto–which looks and tastes exactly like robitussin–on the table and walk away. I guess they assume that you won’t/can’t drink a lot of it; they are wrong.
I have a theorem that the Italians and French are the only ones who can make decent loaf of bread because they’re the only ones who can consistently make decent sauces that are *worth* licking the plate clean of. But as you know, noses get in the way of plate licking, thus bread was invented.