I have come to the conclusion that Italian cuisine is possibly the most overrated cuisine around. Numerous factors have lead me to conclude this:
[ul]
[li]Italian cuisine is ridiculously conservative. The Italians are still eating what their great-great-great-grandparents were eating. It’s like the globalisation of different cuisines has completely passed Italy by. My first day at work involved me being taken to an “ethnic restaurant” by my Italian coworkers. It served food from Puglia. Restaurants serving foreign food are pretty rare here. Even getting hold of moderately exotic spices (i.e. cumin, or anything to make a curry with) in a supermarket is ridiculously hard. What brought this point home was me eating a hoi-sin duck pizza in an Italian restaurant in Edinburgh (it was actually pretty nice) and realising that an Italian restaurant in Italy would never in a million years be as adventurous as to attempt that.[/li][li]Italian cuisine is largely repetitive and boring. Tortellini with ragu is not a different dish to capelletti with ragu. There’s literally a million different types of stuffed pasta which all taste largely the same. My girlfriend’s dietary requirements drove this home. She’s diagnosed with a disease that requires her not to eat gluten, dairy, legumes or corn. Even with such a restrictive diet in the UK eating out at a restaurant is no problem much of the time. Even buying food in a supermarket in Italy, the land of 00 wheat flour and cheese, is a massive problem.[/li][li]In many cases, Italian foods are just plain overrated or substandard. Despite the reputation, with few notable exceptions Italian cheeses are uniformly boring. They completely pale in comparison to British cheeses. There’s a billion different types of pecorino, each as bland and as tasteless as the rest.[/li][li]Italian restaurants are no better than a British restaurant for the same price. Contrast this with Paris, where for the same price as a meal in the UK you really get something special.[/li][li]The “healthy Mediterranean diet” thing is largely a myth. I live in the region with the best purported cuisine in the whole of Italy. The cuisine here is heavy on butter, cream, lard, fats, and so on. Italy’s childhood obesity rates are starting to reflect this.[/li][/ul]
Italy, naturally, does have many great dishes. Their wines are nice (let’s not mention the beers, though). Yet it seems to me that the reputation of Italian food in the rest of the West seems vastly out of proportion to the quality of their cuisine. Was I just expecting too much? Does anybody else agree?
Yep, having eaten Italian in Rome, Florence and Milan, as well as Budapest, New York City, Dallas and Houston, I can safely say that the best Italian I’ve had was in Budapest, of all places.
I just spent 2 weeks in Italy, and the food was excellent. There was a wide variety, and the only thing I thought was uniformly awful was the bread in Tuscany. Oddly enough, I didn’t like the wines much at all. Too tart for my tastes.
Yes, I was going to mention the bread. Italian restaurants almost uniformly serve stale bread. No matter how much you are paying, you will be served bread in a basket that was cut up 12 hours earlier and then left to sit around hardening in the air.
when I was in Italy the only bread I ate was fresh from the bread shop. we ate it with meat and bread fresh from the shops for lunch. don’t remember eating bread much in the restaurants.
I was in Northern Italy. I remember the rice dishes, the veal, the gorgonzola, the polenta.
The wide variety of “Italian food” must be noted. Northern is different from Southern is different from Venetian. I love Italian food.
eta - I know that’s just your opinion, Alessan, but I’ve had lots of good Italian food in lots of well-run Italian restaurants. Of course some of those Italian restaurants were run by Mexicans…
stepping in again to say I’m confused why the op thought the basics of Italian cuisine should change so much or be so influenced by globalization. Globalization means I can get good Italian food in Wisconsin; It doesn’t mean Italian food becomes Thai.
I think the beauty of Italian food is its subtle elegance. There’s not a lot of big, bang flavors like in other cuisines. It’s more about the ragu that’s cooked for 12 hours and has amazingly complex flavors. Perfectly aged meats and cheeses. They know how to do a few things with food, and they do it really, well.
They also have a lot of regional pride. They think the wines/meat/cheeses/pasta from their region are the best and that’s all they want to eat. That’s probably a big factor why things don’t change. They already believe they have the best food. Why would they want to change a thing?
Not really. I live in Bologna which is supposed to have the best food in the whole of Italy. I also eat out quite a bit, and have travelled all over the North of the country (pretty much every major city, with a few smaller ones besides). Bologna’s not a tourist town, so there’s no tourist traps selling cheap shit to people who don’t know better.
Where did I say the basics? I don’t expect them to suddenly ditch pasta and tomatoes. Yet there is hardly any outside influence at all on Italian cuisine, or what was once an outside influence ossified about 150 years ago.
Further, you’re kind of proving my point. I can get good Italian cuisine all over the rest of the Western World. It’s kind of hard to get any decent alternative cuisine inside Italy. Their eating habits are very insular.
I agree, but mostly because I think pasta is a scam.
I can buy a box of the same Barilla pasta every restaurant in the US uses for around $1.00. There is no way I’m paying another $15 or so far a half-cup of sauce.
I kinda think of Italian food like Mexican food. The good stuff can be very good but a large fraction of it is just the same ole same ole repackaged.
Waiter, whats in this mexican dish? Beans, meat, cheese, corn stuff. Whats in this other mexican dish? Beans, meat, cheese, corn stuff. Repeat over and over.
Waiter, whats in this italian dish? Pasta, sauce, cheese, and a meat. Whats in this other italian dish? Pasta, sauce,cheese, and a meat. Repeat over and over.
Bologna? Heck, you’re just a hop, skip and a jump down the A14 from me. I’ve never heard anyone say that the best Italian food is in your area. Bologna is noted for its ragù, but, so far as I know, not for much else. If you want good eating, go to Tuscany, or Puglia, or … well, lots of other places.
Bologna’s nickname is la grassa because of its food. Certainly the idea that Bologna has the best cuisine in Italy is not something unique to me, and my Italian coworkers from all over the peninsula state that Bolognese cuisine is the best in the country, or at least a contender. Further, the region immediately around Bologna is noted for quite a bit more than ragu: mortadella and a million other cured meats, Parmesan cheese, cotolleta alla bolognese, passatelli, Balsamic vinegar, etc.
No, but that’s an exception amongst pecorinos in my experience. Go to a cheesemonger or a supermarket and there will be a million billion different pecorinos with very little distinction or merit.
