How We Eat Out

Just about a year ago I wrote a post about food, and I am happy to report that we still love to eat minestrone, risotto, roasted vegetables, and a savory tart on a regular basis. When we crave a good grilled steak, we have a local place that serves up a perfect Fiorentina of Chianina beef that is nearly as good as what we often order when in Tuscany. Other than that, we rarely eat out. For one thing, the late-night dinners that Romans are accustomed to just don’t work with our schedule; for health reasons we try to eat our main meal at noon and stay light in the hours before going to sleep. The other problem is I like to cook and use the local fresh ingredients from my favorite markets because everything just tastes so good. In restaurants I am frankly disappointed, thinking, “I could make something better than this.”

Because of my love of the Tenuta San Carlo and the awesome rice grown there, thanks to social media, I stumbled on the story of Domenico Cortese and Sofie Wochner, a husband/wife team who just opened a wonderful new restaurant near the trendy food neighborhood of Testaccio in Ostiense. Last Friday, with our good friends David DesChamps and Bennett Singer, in town to do some more work on their documentary film project, we had lunch at Marigold Roma. Parking was a logistical nightmare, but I dropped my mother off and they had scored a table, and then my NYC parking prayer* worked -- I found a spot not too far away.

Let me say at the outset that I could tell I was going to absolutely love everything about this restaurant. The space is

intimate but not too small and crowded, spare and Scandinavian in its aesthetic choices but not cold and corporate like Ikea. Our server, Doris, was so warm and spoke perfect English, making us feel instantly welcome. Excited by the menu and specials, we decided to start with some small plates to share, and then each picked a different course to follow. The suggested red wine was phenomenal.

 

Tiberi “l’Rosso” Umbria IGT 2017 
Gamay Perugino, Ciliegiolo. Acciaio/Stainless Steel
An expressive light-bodied red with fresh red fruits, spice and pleasantly rustic.

I hardly know where to begin with my rave review of every

bite of food we ate. My fork travelled around the table to sample creamy stracciatella cheese layered with artichokes and hand-torn croutons, a perfect vegetable puree soup, a crunchy inventive salad of puntarelle and fennel with toasted hazelnuts and a bit of grated pecorino, vegetable quiche, a roast veal sandwich on Sofie’s sourdough with mustard aioli that my mother thoroughly enjoyed, and then

two spectacular warm plates, one with sausages and lentils, the other a beef stew or spezzatino with just a hint of heat that lingered in your mouth. For dessert we shared Sofie’s carrot cake and a brownie with our espresso coffees.

But what really made this meal special, aside from our good friends, the warm environment and staff, the delicious food and wine, was the opportunity to talk with first Domenico, and then Sofie, and discover that they were every bit as wonderful as I somehow knew they would be, and that our shared love of Tenuta San Carlo meant there was instant simpatia between us. They seemed truly happy to be doing the hard work of running a new restaurant. We took home the seeded rye bread and a scone, which my mother had later that day with her afternoon tea.

This was that rarest of gourmet experiences – inspired. So of course I picked up Maria’s hand-cut puntarelle the next day and a fresh fennel at my regular market in Flaminio, plus some hazelnuts from my organic store and dressed Domenico’s salad with my lemon garlic dressing. The next day I made my Caesar Salad dressing and used the rye bread to make garlic croutons. We had rye bread toast with avocado and eggs for breakfast, and the second time I made Domenico’s salad for lunch I added in some fresh shrimp. After a rainy weekend we craved some stew so I bought veal for spezzatino and added peas to the usual combination of

carrot, celery, onion, and potato with some tomato puree. I also made a batch of my banana oat raisin cookies but with almonds instead of walnuts, and some dried peaches.

We went out to Marigold and ended up bringing a bit of Marigold home with us. We can’t wait to go back.

*Jesus, Nana, and Manny, please find me a place to park. (This was passed on from a friend, and always works, especially if you’ve been looking for a while and then say the prayer).

A Road Trip

In 1969, my father’s sister Paola decided to buy a piece of property with him in the beach town of Castiglione della Pescaia, up on a hill called Poggiodoro, to build a large stone two-

Paola on the construction site in a white linen dress
with my Aunt Helen in 1969

family house. Close friends of hers agreed to join in the project and use the second half of the building. As an architect with exquisite taste, she designed the houses as virtual mirrors of each other, joined by a large open terrace that had a view extending from Tuscan hills across the plains of Maremma and the nearby regional park out to the Mediterranean sea. Every summer we would spend our vacations there, enjoying beach life, Etruscan tombs and museums, and occasional excursions to hill towns. Adjacent to the entrance, Paola added a Roman marble tomb fragment that said “sibi et” followed by either a p or an f (which we thought could be pater or frater) so that was the name we gave our beloved vacation home.

L to R: Helen, Silvio, Paola, Maureen, Jen and me

It wasn't hard to spot the Americans at Bagno Somalia

Even after we decided it was time to sell the house decades later, we continued to return to Castiglione and stay in town at the family-run Hotel Sabrina, where we were always made to feel welcome. We made life-long friends with the Odello sisters and their parents at Bagno Somalia, our simple beach club, that we now consider to be our “Roman family.” So when we arrived in Rome on my mother’s 89^th birthday, we got in our rental car and drove straight up the coast to the beach, desperately in need of a vacation after the frenzy of packing up and leaving New York.

During our two week stay, on a somewhat cloudy day, we decided to go for a lunch of ricotta and spinach tortelli at a local restaurant called Macchiascandona. We had no reservation

Tortelli with butter and sage

and were lucky to get a spot at the other end of a long table, but when we heard the couple behind us getting turned away, I chased after them and invited them to join us, explaining as New Yorkers we were accustomed to communal seating and they couldn’t leave Maremma without tasting the famous tortelli. Of course by the end of lunch we had befriended these lovely people, and learned that Marina had just been out to visit a local rice farm, Tenuta San Carlo, to shoot photographs for a magazine article. She and her husband urged us to go see it, as it was owned and run by a young American woman. We went the following day and I got to speak briefly with Ariane Lotti and pick up some packages of her rice, both white and brown. We stayed in touch through email and Facebook, got to see each other briefly during the winter in Rome, and I promised we would come stay on the farm in her agriturismo apartments after Easter.

Maremma cattle live in the heart of Tenuta San Carlo

One of the many perks of our new life in Rome is that now we can go visit Castiglione

The entrance to the farm

whenever we like, as it takes a little over two hours to drive there and is quite beautiful off season as well as during the summer months. When my sister Jen made plans to come visit us for 10 days before starting a new job at NASA, we agreed that we should take a road trip up to the beach and stay at the Tenuta San Carlo for two nights. We had never seen Castiglione in the spring and we figured even if the weather didn’t cooperate we would still enjoy time in the countryside.

Although we discussed this plan many times with my mother, she was hesitant about going away, not sure where we were going, and even insisted we could go without her. It was therefore quite touching when we arrived in town, took in all the familiar landmarks around us, and my mother expressed delight at this wonderful surprise. We went to see the beach

and then drove back south to the farm where we were staying in the “Cinghiale” apartment (I have a real soft spot for wild boar). It was a little chilly so we turned on the heat and bundled Maureen up in her big bed for a late afternoon nap while we explored the farm.

We went back to town for a seafood dinner since we had made plans to eat at the farm our second night. The next day we met a local friend for coffee, had lunch by the harbor with a view of boats and the sea, and while my mother napped, my sister and I took the bicycles offered to us and went for an hour long ride along a road lined with pine trees. It’s hard to

put into words just how magical the experience was. The silence, except for the squeaky bicycle wheels turning, the late afternoon light bringing out infinite hues of green and brown, the scent of pines and sea air were intoxicating to the senses. Along the way we stopped to collect pine cones and bark and marveled at the beautiful landscapes of woods and wetlands leading out to the beach.

Dinner at the farm was just perfect, from antipasto to dessert, and afterwards we got into pajamas and into the big bed to finish watching Notting Hill, which we had started the night

before. In the morning, before leaving, we went back to Bagno Somalia and our friend Gabriele was on hand to take a picture of us at the entrance. The sun had finally come out and we couldn’t resist one more panoramic drive up the hill before heading home to Rome.

“Isn’t it wonderful to return to a place you have loved?” said Maureen.

“Yes,” agreed Jen.

“And fall in love with it all over again,” I replied.

Back in our apartment, Jen and I worked on a collage project inspired by some art we had seen at the farm. Using our collection of bark and pine cones, and some hand printed paper I had saved, we made this pine tree and hung it in Maureen's bedroom as a reminder of our time together.