The Well-Fed Bong

  https://www.thewellfedbong.in

As pointed out by many a worthy, Italy is fiercely regional and the food changes quite a bit even a short distance away. However, fed all my life on a mish-mash of different kinds of Italian dishes, it took some time before I started noticing the differences. The differences are not quite as stark as India where the Punjabi finds avial inedible and a true Bengali won't come anywhere near curd rice, but they are quite distinct nevertheless. In this bicycle ride I was going only in one direction, I soon realised that repeats of many things I had loved (or missed out on) were not possible - Florentine lampredotti and Milanese risotto are about as easily available as a masala dosa in faraway Lecce. I whizzed through six regions in Italy and the one thing they had in common (other than the Indo-Swiss Express) was that, by some strange coincidence, they all had center-left governments. Indeed, with the tiny exception of South Tyrol, my trip turned out to be a perfect cleave between cente...

Great ingredients are enormously important in Italy. As my friend Silvestori pointed out, Italians start with great stuff and don’t fuss about with it like French chefs do. Italian cooking methods are simple; the wow comes from what is used rather than from sophisticated techniques and delicate procedures. Though a veteran of at least a hundred meals in this journey, I’m not trying to pretend to be an expert - even on the food of one town of Italy. This is therefore a personal and possibly wildly unrepresentative set. Even from that I have chosen only a few stars - there’s much I had that I’ve left out. Its a blog post, not a compliance document. Tomato The defining ingredient in Italian food, to my mind, is the tomato (or pomodoro). Many countries have tomatoes but somehow in Italy it is juicer, tangier, sweeter and more tomato-y than anywhere else I’ve seen. The tomato is universal in Italian cuisine - raw, grilled, dried, stuffed, puréed, roasted, in salads, sauces, sandwiches, insi...

I did not land in Sydney with any great expectations of the food. No imperial traditions, no street food, no ancient cooking traditions; Australia's culinary greatness rested (in my mind) on a flashy television show where cameras were more important than tastebuds.   As it turns out, I was spectacularly wrong.   Yes, cooking in Sydney is all modern urban stuff with no distant roots into any past greatness. Yes, it is food of restaurants rather than streets or palace courts. Yes, it was invented by people still alive rather than great great great grandmothers of people long dead Yes to all that but... its some of the most spectacular food I've eaten.  I'm all about culture and history and tradition and all that, but its really hard to argue with great food, especially with your mouth full. First day first dinner show in Sydney, and Aniruddha Paul (a man whose passion for the great meal rivals mine) took me straight to the top - Quay Restaurant by Peter Gilmore w...