I had flown to Napoli for a trip with my brothers John and Lucci to visit our folks in nearby Salerno and to try a few recommended places to pick up tips, ideas and equipment for our new project, Codename - Enoteca Nunzia.

We had a fair bit to cram in and not only in our bellies, I mused, as we tucked into a late supper at Osteria Brigante, a pirates hangout kind of place with the menu of daily Salernitana dishes hand written on a page torn out of a school exercise book. Cheap, cheerful, and authentic; in particular we enjoyed the cavatelli pasta with beans and mussels, the aubergine involtini with a filling of tagliatelle, tomatoes and ricotta, and the totani (a kind of local squid) with potatoes. Washed down with 1 and 1/2 litres of raw, young but pleasant white and a nice bottle of Barbera del Benevantano IGT Pengue ; it was a promising start to the weekend.

Sunday was the family day and 18 of us had a long boozy lunch at Zi’ Franco’s favourite Trat in a one horse town somewhere in the hills called Il fungho Velonoso , the poison mushroom, which specializes in, yes you got it, mushrooms in all their glory. As the porcini season is over they harvest and preserve, dry, freeze and who knows what else to the king of funghi and we savoured them in many ways throughout the meal.

A place I can recommend is the Ristorante San Pietro in Cetara,
a pretty little fishing village on the Amalfi coast which spills messily down the hill into the sea. The fishing boats go mainly in search of bluefin tuna (much more highly prized by gourmets than the more common yellowfin variety) and anchovies for which Cetara is rightly famous .
Cetara’s gastronomic delights, besides the daily fresh fish, include Limoncello made from the local thick skinned knobbly lemons, and colatura di alici - a condiment made from liquid that drains from the anchovies when they are salted and cured - a distant relative of garum - the condiment made from fermented fish in ancient Roman times and used liberally to flavour just about everything and sometimes mask the flavour of rotting food!
The wonderful anchovies are, of course, available in tins and jars as well as the Mediterranean bluefin tuna even though a local told me the boats have to venture ever further afield to source this prized fish. Ventresca di tonno is meat from the belly and considered by gourmets as the most delicious part of the fish and quite expensive while bottarga, the cured roe, is often served simply on a nice plate of vermicelli with olive oil, garlic and parsley.Nice.


We settled down with a Greco di Tufo from Cantina Benito Ferrara, a full bodied white from nearby Avellino province while the gracious young waiter recommended some dishes for lunch.
As we had a plane to catch in Naples we kept it light.

Farro con colatura d'alici - this little soupy dish was made from spelt, a type of grain eaten in the area since the Romans, and the aforementioned colatura d’alici. It was redolent of past times and hinted at ancient flavours and textures I had not experienced before. Altogether a very intriguing start to lunch.
Our Antipasto had 4 small tasters to get us going.
Salted and cured tuna with mild and very fresh ricotta was a perfect balance of feather light creaminess and a savoury, piquant firm dark red fish.
The marinated anchovy and tuna ventresca were served very simply with a thread of oil, and some smoked tuna with fennel and maize panzanella (bread salad) was another great dish which I shall be recreating myself!
We shared a frittura di seppie, deep fried cuttlefish served in a cone of absorbent paper while we waited for our second course. The chef came out to tell us we could have some lemon if we wanted but explained that it was usually eaten just with salt to enjoy the delicate flavour of this tasty little cephalopod.

The paccheri,a typical Neapolitain pasta was with a sauce made from a slow cooked local harbour fish (coccio that looked like a large gurnard and was served by the chef who earlier explained that he could cook the fish quicker if he sliced it first but obviously it tastes much better if allowed to cook on the bone slowly. It was up to us as we had the plane to catch he said.



I’m glad we told him to just do as he saw fit as the pasta, shaped like a giant smooth tube, was delicately flavoured with a light Sauce from the fish which had been stewed in its own juices with just a little fresh tomato and garlic.
While we ate these the chef, Bruno Milano, boned and served the fish, a firm, delicate sweet thing with the freshness shining through Superb.
The fact that Bruno took the time to leave his kitchen and talk to us about different aspects of the meal and his passion for cooking local produce really did make the meal extra special and memorable.
There was no time for pud so we finished with a complimentary local limoncello before heading to the airport and back to blighty.

Rajah’s
Roundhay Road
Leeds

I have decided to review some of my restaurants instead of dad’s weird restaurants.
I went to dinner with my mum and dad after my judo lesson to dad’s favourite Indian restaurant in Leeds.
We started with a drink and some poppadoms which were nice and crispy not like those horrible greasy ones you can get in the rubbish places .I like the raita with fresh mint and shredded cucumber. The tango was freezing and orangey it was a gonner in 2 minutes and dad had kingfisher beer.
I had chicken Jalfraizi with peppers and onions, the chicken was tender and in between mild and spicy. I had rice and naan which was warm, chewy and freshly cooked.
I tried some tandoori king prawns , they were spicy and smoky and I don’t usually eat fish , they were cooked in an oven which was a hole with coal in and really hot.
The meal was just perfect with friendly staff but I get really tired after a nice curry so we got the bill to go home and hit the bed.
This is a cool place for kids, they can make the food not too spicy and mr Rajah is friedly and helpful.

Salvo

“I’d rather be here than on a stormy Island dad”………………………..so said young Salvo as we sat on a beachside table in Nice on the Cote d’Azure in France enjoying beer and ice-cream though why they named this coastline after the magnificent AZZURI rather than LES BLEUS is anyone’s guess, The AZZURI did win the World Cup so I suppose they have a point.

It was my first time staying in France since I was a nipper, driving to Italy in dad’s Ford Zephyr and later the Cortina 16000E, when flying was the preserve of the wealthy and privileged, mostly driving right through the country non stop but occasionally staying over a night for an adventure in a pension.

We had just spent three nights on the Ligurian Coast, chilling and watching Genoa Football and Cricket Club (founded by an Englishman and the first club in Italy) beat 10 man village upstarts Albino-Leffe, albeit by a whisker in a Friday night Serie B fixture. At this rate Genoa will be playing in the Campionata, or Italian Premiership, next season and my mate Richard, who could be a honorary Italian if he would only eat fish, will have an excuse to try and drag me to Genoa every other week.

Back to France and Nice, nice but a little too much construction going on at the moment ( April ’07) with major works to the tram system cutting the city in half, the old part of town however is totally enchanting with a laid back ambience and lots of places to eat! . As I was with my 11 year old son, fancy food was not on the agenda but I had heard of a little place called La Merenda with a good rep, no credit cards, no phone, no smoking, no fizzy drinks and a small blackboard menu.

This sounded good.

Good it most certainly was, far better than good in fact and I had to bribe my young companion with a pair of extortionately priced Heelies and a t shirt with ’ Italians do it better’ on the front to persuade him to go the second time.

The menu was short so I ate most of it over two days.
Amazing bread, a sourdough type with a hard crust and chewy, holey consistency and a deep tasty flavour. Blim! but this was an encouraging start to the luncheon!
Stuffed sardines; when they are truly fresh as opposed to chilled you see what the fuss is about with this humble fishy. Simple perfection.
Next up was Poutine, these were raw new born anchovies on a chunk of toast with a glug of olive oil. My son loved this, just to look at mind, he wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole but he delighted in the 1000 little eyes looking up from the toast like one of those mad Pixar movies. These may be a bit of an acquired taste (the newborns if not the movies), a very rich and slightly fatty taste improved with a dash of lemon to cut through but it was a dish that actually tasted better and improved with every bite. These, at 16 Euro’s, were the most expensive dish on the menu but sold out immediately as they weren’t on the menu the following day. These little beauties are not always available and I suspect word gets around and the Frenchies pile in and snap them up as soon as.
We sat next to two lovely old French girls who were also eating them and we wagged chins talking about calves heads and tiny fish. As my Gallic language skills only strech to 70’s kitchen French I didn’t really grasp everything that was said but sometimes its better that way.

Strangely I got the distinct impression that I got better service everywhere I went if I started conversations in Italian, if they didn’t speak Italian I would say Ingleesh? Conversation continued in English but, it seemed, with more er, je ne sais quais if you knoworramean.

Tete de veaux or boiled calves head with sauce gribiche, a cold olive oil based green sauce with parsley, capers and boiled eggs followed. Mon Deiux as they say in the Foreign Legion or Blimmin’ ‘eck as we say around the ‘hood in these parts, this was a perfectly balanced dish in every way with different textures of meat combining with the sauce perfectly and one large yellow waxy boiled potato. Absolutely Fabulous is the only way to describe this.

Salvo declared his pork sausage with lentils and chard as yummy and coming from an eleven year old wary of anything green or legume like is probably a higher commendation than my Absolutely Fabulous. He also charmed the knowledgeable and engaging waiter by voting his lemon tart as the best pudding ever, even better than the Mars bar fondue at Salvo’s! Creep.

For my dessert I had another piece of toast, I was getting addicted to this bread, this time with some ricotta that had been macerated with grappa and left to mature for a year. Wow, another result. Perhaps you can see why I was planning to come back now.

This was the real deal, a talented chef patron cooking everything, plain plates, no garnish, the guy obviously KNOWS how to COOK, nothing fashionable but great ingredients cooked by someone who knows food inside out. Small menu but you can just order anything; it’s all good as they say. Deep joy can be felt at places like this.

There is no wine list, a red and white Cote de Provence at 21 euros a bottle, along with beer and water are the only drinks they unapologetically hold in stock. The ‘we know best’ approach is a great dining experience in the right hands.

We arrived the following evening but it was full so we put our names down and killed an hour wandering around Veiux Nice, Salvo gliding along on his brand new Heelies looking sharp as a razor with his new ‘Italians do it better’ tee and me dragging my heelies and admiring the glammed up eye candy in all it’s gory glory.

We started with the intriguingly named ‘pasta’ which turned out to be home made long pasta with pistou, the pungent Nicoise version of pesto, a ligurian speciality from just over the border. This was served with parmesan and nothing else, unlike the version in Liguria which has string beans and a dice of potatoes boiled together with the pasta before being tossed with the pesto/pistou. Different from Italian pasta but very good, even the kid loved it.

The andouilette was a kind of sausage filled with tripe and innards, Salvo did me proud by eating half of it, in fact I thought he was going to scoff the lot without giving me a chance to taste it but I wrestled the plate from him and tasted the finest innards I’d tasted since the Lampredotto sarnie in a market in Florence earlier this year.
The Daube de Beauf was everything a good beef stew should be. Good sized pieces of meat, tender with no underling dryness showing the importance of reheating a stew gently as fierce heat can dry the meat out in a flash. A simple but rich and unctuous sauce and some plain spuds to chase the gravy around the plate. I enjoyed this while the boy made short slurpy work of more lemon tart.

It’s almost shocking to eat food so sparsely constructed with clear strong flavours and simple presentation. I can still see Salvo’s face when he first saw his lemon tart, no cream, coulis, fruit garnish or burnt top, he looked a bit disappointed then tasted it and started his trademark low end grunting, ummming and aaaghing that he does when he is really enjoying something. You would expect him to growl under his breath like a nervous puppy if you started moving your hand towards his plate.
Everything in this place is about a chef cooking some good food well for some people, knowing every single dish going to the table is right, no ifs, buts or can you modify this for my anal irrelevant diet, you get the feeling it is definitely a ‘my way or the highway kind of place.
And that’s what makes La Merenda my favourite experience in Nice. With direct and cheap flights from Leeds and Bradford to Nice I can see a few quick trips on the horizon.