Great lunch yesterday at ABC Seafood (Chinatown, Los Angeles) with our friend Jeff from Austin (who flew in from Texas to eat his way through LA and catch my band’s show on Saturday night).
No website, no fancy sign. Just an LA classic, reasonably priced and always delicious. Highly recommended.
Here’s the Google place page.
Leave a Comment » | 
de cibo, de urbe angelorum | Tagged: ABC, Chinese food, Los Angeles, seafood | 
Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Taste with me tomorrow evening at Ciao Bello in Houston, where I’ll be leading a tasting of Italian wines together with Chef Bobby Matos who will be preparing pasta table-side and sharing Italian cooking tips with guests. Should be a super fun event and evening…
Next Wednesday, I’ll be presenting one of my best friends in Italian winemaking today and producer of some of my favorite wines, Giampaolo Venica, who will be leading a wine dinner featuring five of his wines (including his Magliocco from Calabria and four of his family’s legendary white wines from Friuli) at Sotto in Los Angeles.
Hope to see you there!
1 Comment | de cibo, de vino, de vinographia | Tagged: Ciao Bello, Giampaolo Venica, Houston, Los Angeles, Sotto | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Had a BLAST working the floor at Sotto in Los Angeles last night. We still have some kinks to iron out in our newly minted wine program but folks were digging my all-Southern Italian list with a sprinkling of Natural California wines (the Donkey & Goat Sluicebox really wowed a very glammed-out Hollywood four-top). And I am SO GRATEFUL to all my friends who came out to support me and the new restaurant. THANK YOU!
The wine that really blew me away last night (when I finally got to sit down for dinner), however, was not a wine on my list but a wine brought in by my good friend Schachter (Sotto has a very reasonable corkage fee, btw): 2002 Terra di Lavoro (!!!!!). Man, I rarely get to taste this hard-to-find wine from the Terra di Lavoro in Campania, one of the greatest expressions of Aglianico IMHO (here’s the fact sheet). This wine was all earth and mushrooms, black fruit and cinnamon and eastern spices. Fan-friggin-tastic wine… (Thanks again, Schachter!)
I was also entirely geeked to finally get to try the pizza at Sotto. I had the house-cured guanciale, shaved scallions, and fennel pollen. It was excellent: the dough was baked perfectly Neapolitan style (soggy in the middle, the way Tracie P and I like it).
That’s chef and pizzaiolo Zach Pollack with the Mesquite-fired Neapolitan pizza oven in the background. Zach pretty much rocked my world last night with his pizza. Awesome stuff…
Thanks, again, to everyone who came out to support me last night. I’ll be there again tonight. Hope to see you!
5 Comments | de cibo, de urbe angelorum, de vino | Tagged: guanciale, Los Angeles, Sotto, Terra di Lavoro | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Late last year, when I was asked to contribute to a collection of essays dedicated to and inspired by my UCLA dissertation advisor, mentor, and friend, poet, scholar, gourmet, and gourmand, Luigi Ballerini (above), I decided to chronicle the Italian food scene in Los Angeles circa 1994. The Italian regional cuisine phenomenon had yet to explode in the U.S. but the City of the Angels was already awash in a sea of grappa: with Bloomian anxiety of influence, Angelino restaurateurs had embraced two of Italy’s most humble (however beloved) food stuffs — polenta and grappa — and anointed them as queen mother and queen (respectively) of Italian cuisine.
At the time, Luigi and I were working on a wonderful translation of his poetry that would become Cadence of a Neighboring Tribe. And Luigi was just beginning to shift his focus to gastronomy. Among many other articles, translations, and essays, our collaboration led to an English-language annotated edition of The Art of Cooking by fifteenth-century Italian celebrity chef Maestro Martino (UC Press 2005) — one of my most proud moments as a scholar and translator.
The one is an image in his mind’s eye, a scene he often spoke of: Milan, 1945, the then five-year-old Ballerini watches a defiant Nazi soldier atop an armored car, part of a phalanx in retreat from the Lombard capital, leaving it an “open city”; the muscle-bound German bares his chest in the winter cold, as if impervious to pain even in the moment of ultimate defeat. The Nazis left behind a broken city and people, who had already known hunger for quite some time and would not know prosperity and plenty for many years to come. At five years old, Luigi knew hunger all too well.
Click here to download a PDF of the essay.
“La tovaglia che sazia: Luigi Ballerini the gastronome and his ‘tablecloth of plenty,’” by Jeremy Parzen, in Balleriniana, edited by Giuseppe Cavatorta and Elena Coda, Ravenna, Danilo Montanari Editore, 2010.
O, Luigi, you can be the king and you most certainly are in my cook book. But may we wear your crown?
Thanks for reading!
Leave a Comment » | de rebus italicis, de urbe angelorum, de vino | Tagged: 1990s, Grappa, Los Angeles, Luigi Ballerini, Maestro Martino, polenta | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Above, from left clockwise: “I have to stay outside,” “You’re poor? It’s YOUR damn problem,” “We are voting for Berlusconi” (they’re dressed as Freemasons), and “this car has been de-Berlusconi-ized” (a play on denuclearized). These stickers were printed by Cuore (a magazine supplement to the leftist daily L’Unità) in the early 1990s during Berlusconi’s first campaign to become Prime Minister.
When I first traveled to Italy in 1987 for my junior year abroad as part of the University of California and Università di Padova exchange program, Italy and the outlook of Italians seemed much different than it does today. When I attended my first academic year there (and there would many years to follow, later at the Scuola Normal Superiore in Pisa, study at the Vatican Library, three summers in the Dolomite Alps where I earned my keep playing cover tunes, and summers in Montalcino where I first began to appreciate wine), the Italian Socialist Party still dominated Italian politics. In spite of the inconveniences posed by the legendarily lethargic Italian bureaucracy, health care was free for all (that first year, I badly sprained my ankle playing basketball and was amazed when I wasn’t even presented a bill at the emergency room) and a year’s tuition at the university cost roughly 300,000 lire, about $250 at the time (in 1989 I returned to Italy and re-enrolled at the Università di Padova).
Above: My junior year dorm room at Monte Cengio where I roomed with Steve Muench. We’re still close friends today (scroll to the bottom of this post).
That was before the Mani pulite investigation and the subsequent Tangentopoli scandal that brought the Socialists to their knees. And it was before the rise of Italy’s richest man Silvio Berlusconi as the most powerful politician to emerge in post-war Italy. Berlusconi famously told journalist and historian Enzo Biagi (think of him as our Walter Cronkite) that he entered politics because existing laws did not allow him to make even more money. If the law doesn’t allow me to grow richer, he decided one day, I’ll just rewrite the law.
Today in Italy, vigilante posses comb the streets at night harassing immigrants; doctors have been asked to report illegal immigrants (extra-communitarians, as they are called) to authorities when they request medical care; there have been cases where emergency health workers have allowed immigrants to die at the scene of accidents by delaying medical attention; Berlusconi’s agricultural minister has asked Italians to boycott Chinese restaurants; and Lucca has outlawed “ethnic” food in its center… The list goes on and on.
It’s a different Italy than the one first encountered by a bright-eyed U.C.L.A. junior who had a knack for languages in 1987.
Above: The last summer I played at the Birreria di Pedavena, my band and I stayed in the mountain pass village of Croce d’Aune.
I recently found the stickers and the photos in a shoebox that arrived last week in Austin from a storage space in Manhattan. They brought back memories of a time when the outlook of most Italians I knew didn’t seem rosy but was certainly instilled with a resilient humanitarian and humanist spirit. That attitude endures among most of the Italians I know but a dark cultural hegemony has taken hold there in the Berlusconi age.
Yesterday, an article in The New York Times reported how Berlusconi forced the resignation of the editor of the Italian Bishops’s Conference daily newspaper. He did so by publishing front page features in his own newspaper detailing the editor’s rumored sexual preferences. He did so because the editor had written an editorial about Berlusconi’s widely publicized (and in many instance self-propagandized) lasciviousness.
What’s this world coming to?
In other news, Agnelli heir and playboy Lapo Elkann has publicly announced that he is converting to Judaism.
What IS this world coming to?
Boccaccio’s tale of the conversion of Abraham comes to mind…
7 Comments | de cibo, de musica, de rebus italicis, de vino | Tagged: Abraham the Jew, Agnelli, Berlusconi, Boccaccio, Cuore, Dino Boffo, Lapo Elkann, Los Angeles | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
If you grew up like I did, going to Hebrew school three times a week in La Jolla (twice during the week after school and then on Saturday for synagogue services) and the mandatory two hours of Holocaust studies per week (along with Hebrew language and bar mitzvah prep) and the countless field trips to the Holocaust museum in Los Angeles, then you have probably suffered from the same Holocaust anxiety that I did as a young kid.
So when Tracie B and I were deciding how to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our first date, she took the reins and said, “after the week my man’s had, I think he could use him a little Nazi ass-kickin’” and treated me to a screening of Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds, about a group of Jew commandos sent behind enemy lines to kill Nazis toward the end of the second world war.
I’ve read a lot of disappointed reviewers who say the movie is not “violent enough” and lacks the thriller elements of his other films. And they might be right.
But a closer look at the film reveals that it is not a roman d’aventure (story of adventures) but rather an aventure de romans (adventure of stories): the film is a seamlessly woven fabric of allusions to nearly all the great war movie genres and beyond, with the Spaghetti Western as the frame that holds all the elements together. The conceit of the “cinema that kills” was entirely brilliant.
Tracie B pointed that in my endorsement of the film I am contradicting my credo that there can be no good Holocaust movie with a happy ending. But I counter saying the story is a fantasy and is exaggerated caricatures underline its basis as an oneiric and purely filmic tale. But I don’t want to ruin the dénounement…
I do wonder if the e in Tarantino’s basterds is akin to Derrida’s a in differance. Does anyone know the derivation?
Ironically, on this day, one year from our first date, when I boarded a plane and came to visit her for the first time in Austin, I said goodbye to Tracie B today: I’m at the airport headed to California for business and to catch up with a few friends.
I promise: more wine tomorrow (and probably some good stuff, considering where I’m heading) but thank you for indulging me today in a little Nazi ass kickin’… It’ll do a body good every once in a while.
1 Comment | de austinopoli, de photographia | Tagged: aventure de romans, cinema, Hebrew school, Holocaust, Inglourious Bastards, La Jolla, Los Angeles, roman d'aventures, Spaghetti Western, Tarantino | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
From the “shameless self-promotion” department…
Come see what Ménagerie is all about, tonight in San Francisco (Friday in San Jose and Saturday in Los Angeles at Spaceland, my favorite LA club).
Leave a Comment » | de musica | Tagged: Los Angeles, Ménagerie, Nous Non Plus, San Francisco, San Jose, Spaceland, tour | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Do you know the way to San Jose?
Oh, LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star
Above: My friend François Gourveneur snapped this photo of a poster advertising our show at Spaceland on May 9 in Silver Lake (Los Angeles), one of my all-time favorite clubs.
In case you haven’t seen the review of our semi-new album Ménagerie in Blender Magazine this month, here’s a snippet:
The shows in San Francisco at Rickshaw Stop (May 7) and Los Angeles at Spaceland (May 9) will probably sell out, so please buy your tickets in advance (click links for ticket sales). I’m really looking forward to getting back to California, playing some good music, and reconnecting with friends there. (And Tracie B will be at the LA show.)
The show in San Jose at Nickel City (May 8) probably won’t sell out but here is advance ticket sales info anyway. I don’t know why our manager booked us at a all-ages video arcade, although in all fairness to him, teenagers do like our music. I just googled San Jose and the city’s motto is: “San Jose, the fun never stops.” Who knew?
Hope to see you at the shows!
*****
Do you know the way to San Jose
I’ve been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way
Do you know the way to San Jose
I’m goin’ back to find
Some peace of mind in San Jose
LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parkin’ cars and pumpin’ gas
You can really breathe in San Jose
They’ve got a lot of space
There’ll be a place where I can stay
I was born and raised in San Jose
I’m goin’ back to find
Some peace of mind in San Jose
Fame and fortune is a magnet
It can pull you far away from home
With a dream in your heart you’re never alone
Dreams turn into dust and blow away
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away
I’ve got lots of friends in San Jose
Do you know the way to San Jose
Oh, LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star
Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parkin’ cars and pumpin’ gas
I’ve got lots of friends in San Jose, oh…oh…
Do you know the way to San Jose, mmm…mmm…
Can’t wait to get back to San Jose
2 Comments | de musica, de rebus californicis | Tagged: Burt Bacharach, Do you know the way to San Jose, François Gourveneur, Hal David, Los Angeles, Nickel City, Nous Non Plus, Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, San Jose, Spaceland, tour | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Above: Fiano d’Avellino grapes on the De Conciliis estate in Cilento (Campania, Italy).
Isn’t Facebook a trip? It gives us a view unto the personal lives and sometimes very intimate details of people whose lives would not ordinarily intersect with ours in the real-time world (as opposed to the virtual world). The vicissitudes we witness in this strange new medium are sometimes moving in ways — perhaps because of the degree of separation yet lack of alientation — unexpected and often welcome.
I had never met him, save for a phone interview I did with winemaker Bruno de Conciliis many years ago. After I tasted his 2004 Antece last year at Bacaro in Los Angeles, I looked for him on Facebook because I wanted to write him and tell him how much I liked this stinky, oxidized expression of Fiano d’Avellino, one of Campania’s most ancient grape varieties and one that has a enjoyed a renaissance in recent decades: it’s macerated with skin contact for 7 days, he wrote me, and, as he put it in a Facebook message, “we try for oxidation.” His approach is to “let what easily oxidizes oxidize. The rest is welcomed.” The resulting unfiltered wine (aged in large old-oak casks) is delightful, rich and aromatic, with some tannic structure. It’s a great example of natural wine. Bruno rightly calls it Antece or the ancients (akin to the Italian, antici; the penultimate syllable is the tonic): gauging from my knowledge of ancient winemaking (as described in Columella and Pliny), I believe that this wine is very similar to the wine produced in antiquity (and probably until the 18th century in Italy). (It reminds me of IWG’s excellent post, Interview with the Ancients.)
Bruno wrote that it’s his favorite wine he’s ever made and he sent me these photos. Facebook and wine seem to pair nicely together, don’t they?
In other news…
When is Brooklynguy gonna get a Facebook? Fugedaboudit.
4 Comments | de urbe angelorum, de vino, de vinographia, nugellae | Tagged: Antece, Antici, Avellino, Bacaro, brooklynguy, Bruno de Conciliis, Campania, Cilento, Columella, Conciliis, Facebook, Fiano, Los Angeles, oxidation, Pliny | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Having grown up and come of age in southern California, I have had the opportunity to experience some of the best “sushi” and Japanese cuisine in the country. During the 1990s when I was a graduate student at U.C.L.A. (and when the sushi craze was rippling through the U.S.A., with its epicenter in Los Angeles), I was fortunate enough to dine at the now legendary Katsu (first in Los Feliz and then in Beverly Hills), opened by Katsu Michite who now works in Studio City at my fav LA sushi place, Tama Sushi (no website, unfortunately, see info below).* Then came Hirozen (in an unassuming strip-mall, still fantastic, a must), R23 (downtown, disappointing the last two times I visited), and one of the most beautiful restaurants I’ve ever eaten in, Thousand Cranes, which is supposedly returning to its former glory (the traditional Japanese breakfast there is worth a visit if you’re staying downtown).
Down in San Diego, where I grew up, Zenbu can be a lot of fun. So crowded and popular (and expensive) these days, it has its ups and downs but I still love their “aggressive” dishes like live prawns and giant clams (and by live, I mean literally). I also like the colorful cocktail menu inspired by local surf spots and surf lore. The lounge is very hip there and one of my best friends, Irwin, performs electronica there on some nights. The restaurant’s owned by another of my high-school friends, Matt Rimel, a huntsman and fisherman, whose fishing crew provides nearly all of the fish, working with eco-friendly and dolphin-safe fishing techniques.
Above: I felt like I was a tourist in my own city when I asked our sushi chef Mano, at Sushi Ann, NYC, to pose for a picture (with a beer we bought him in gratitude).
I had always found NYC sushi disappointing, even though I’d been treated to some of the finer and pricier venues in town. But now I have seen a new dawn on my NYC sushi horizon at the wonderful and very reasonably priced Sushi Ann.
The Odd Couple — that’s me (Felix) and Greg (Oscar) — dined there last night on the recommendation of friend and colleague, top NYC Italian restaurateur and wine maven, Nicola Marzovilla (who owns I Trulli and Centovini). We asked our chef to prepare whatever he liked — really, the way to go at the sushi bar — and we were delighted with each serving. The fish was fresh and he avoided the sushi stereotypes. One sashimi dish was tuna belly cubed (not sliced) and drowned in a miso reduction sauce (sinfully good). Mano, our chef, also liked to counterpose bitter and sweet, as he did in some rolls, which he served together, the one made with Japanese basil and pickled radish, the other with scallion.
Above: Mano offered me a leaf of Japanese basil, sweeter than the western variety.
Most of the fish seemed to be flown in from Japan (Japanese Red Snapper, Japanese Mackerel, etc.) and tasted fresh (didn’t have that freeze-dried taste that find in so many of the Lower East Side sushi joints). The restaurant was very clean (important for sushi restaurants, in my opinion) and the waitstaff polite and attentive.
Above: skewered octopus tentacles, raw but seared with a torch.
One of my favorite dishes was the seared octopus tentacles, dressed with just a little bit of lemon juice.
Greg drank a cold, unfiltered sake (which was a little too sweet for my taste, although our waiter said it’s very popular in Japan) and I stuck to beer. I’m sure we could have spent a lot more had we indulged in a bottle of fine sake — the list was alluring but it wasn’t the night for that. Our bill was very reasonable for an excellent experience in a high-end midtown neighborhood (51st between Park and Madison).
After ten years in this town (I got here in 1997), I finally found a great sushi restaurant. Who knows? After the recent crazy changes in my life, maybe I should stick around after all.**
–
*Tama Sushi
11920 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
(818) 760-4585
**So all you newsy people, spread the news around,
You c’n listen to m’ story, listen to m’ song.
You c’n step on my name, you c’n try ‘n’ get me beat,
When I leave New York, I’ll be standin’ on my feet.
And it’s hard times in the city,
Livin’ down in New York town.
– Bob Dylan
2 Comments | de cibo, de urbe novo eboraco | Tagged: California, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, Sushi | Permalink
Posted by Do Bianchi
Click here to add a comment or query to my Italian Wine Terms Project.
The series of posts began with a post devoted to Italian winery designations. With your help, I hope to create a series of posts that will become a stand-alone glossary.
