It was my birthday so we decided to go to our local restaurant – not the Taverna, the hotel restaurant. Unbeknown to me Hilary had been in earlier and ordered and paid for a bottle of prosecco from Valdobbiadene – the best – and Giampiero the owner brought it to the table with a ‘tanti augurai a te’ (happy birthday to you). All a bit embarrassing, bit I gave Hilary a kiss and Giampiero said, ‘eh che moglie’, which means either ‘what a wife!’ or ‘that wife!’, the distinction in English is a subtle one.
Giampiero speaks no English, though he gets lots of English-speaking customers who speak no Italian, because his restaurant, Hotel Farfense, is well known among the Brits and he has had a write-up in The Guardian. He has been handling the language difference perfectly well for a decade or more. Giampiero married into the hotel trade, his parents-in-law opened the hotel restaurant in 1969 and when they retired Giampiero and his wife, Daniela, took it over. They have two children, the older one, Frederico, now seems to work there full-time, since we’ve been going there he has been the pizza chef, originally as a teenager and now as a young adult, for Farfense does proper pizza, where Frederico rolls out the dough, chucks it in the air spinning it round a few times (proper pizza chefs seem to have to do that) and puts it on a shovel into the wood oven, that is to say an oven where the heat is supplied by burning logs at one side of the open-fronted oven. If Frederico is not there there are no pizzas and we can see from our house when he is, by smoke rising up from the oven chimney at about 6.30pm, then we sometimes say, let’s go and get a pizza.
But though the pizzas taste wonderful, there is salt in the dough, possibly a little too much salt for our liking. And the last pizza we had there I asked for one with pancetta on, which turned out to be speck – German salty bacon – I think Frederico might have muddled the orders a bit – and while it was very, very, tasty, I had yet another night getting up several times for a glass of water.
And of course you know you are eating freshly-cooked ingredients, for you can see Frederico kneading and rolling the dough.
Work in the restaurant trade is relentless, as we know from experience, and we wonder how much longer Giampiero can keep it up, he’ll be around sixty and has been complaining of a painful knee for at least five years. Possibly Frederico will take on the business though before he can do that he’ll probably need to find a wife. He’s quite a good-looking chap.
Anyway, on my birthday both Hilary and I chose the same dishes, which is maybe a bit worrying, though we were in agreement without feeling the need to make a point one way or the other. We both started with ravioli stuffed with dried figs, and covered in a sauce of melted sheep-milk cheese with pieces of sundried tomato. This sounds rather odd, and we have never tried it before, and it is a surprisingly wonderful dish. It helps that the ravioli are handmade by Daniela, and are so very light, we suppose it is the years of experience that do that.
To follow, rabbit alla marchigiana. ‘Alla marchigiana’ in this context means cooked in white wine, garlic and rosemary; on each plate was half a roast rabbit cut into three with a light gravy or ‘jus’ as it is sometimes posily called. We have had rabbit in Hotel Farfense before and sometimes found it too salty, but we took a risk and it did not taste too salty, though it probably was as yet again a night of regular water breaks.
To do roast rabbit to order means that you must have pieces of rabbit ready-roasted that you heat before serving, it would take too long to cook from chilled or frozen, even with time to eat a starter. At least I think that’s right, I am ever ready to be surprised. Whether Giampiro buys in the rabbit ready-roasted I don’t know – he might do. It was extremely tender though, so possibly not. In the UK now all rabbit comes from China, unless you breed them yourself or know someone who does. Is that true of Italy too? It might be, though rabbit is often on the menu in restaurants in Italy so maybe there are rabbit farms. Yet something else to try and find out.
Giampiero suggested what vegetables we might have with the rabbit, he more or less told us what we should have, which was a plate of roasted potatoes, chopped small before roasting and not oily, quite dry, if I roast potatoes in that way, which I do sometimes, I have difficulty in preventing them from sticking to the dish unless I put enough oil, so I don’t know how Daniela does these, they were very good, and on a separate dish what Giampiero called a ‘meex’, made that day by Daniela. He seemed to be proud of having learned the word, ‘meex’. It was a plate of diced courgette, aubergine and capsicum pepper cooked in a thin sauce that we could not quite identify, it might have been meat-based (vegetarian in Italy means: you’d better stick with pizza) and we thought with rosemary. But tasted very good however Daniela had done it.
That plus a bottle of mineral water and two ridiculously tiny Italian coffees, forty-eight euros. Can’t complain at that, in a decent restaurant.
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