Agreed. This is why fancy Italian restaurants make no sense to me.
I mean, I made risotto at home last week. Rice, stock, a few ounces of cheese. How can you sell a plate of risotto for more than two fifty?
Honestly, if restaurants actually make it correctly, and not just serve a pile of rice and call it “risotto”, I’m happy to pay $10-$15 for it. Risotto, in my experience, is one of the most abused dishes in Italian cuisine.
You aren’t paying $15 for half a cup of sauce. You’re paying for SOMEONE ELSE to do the cooking, the serving, and the cleaning up. Plus you’re paying for the rent and the furniture. And the better Italian restaurants make their own pasta.
I have to say that most Italian restaurants that I’ve been to server quite mediocre food. I doubt that I spend as much to make 12 servings of lasagna as I’d spend to buy one serving from a restaurant…and MY lasagna is ever so much better. Sometimes the restaurants have fantastic bread, sometimes mediocre bread.
I think that the problem is that a lot of places buy their supplies and ingredients and even meals from the same suppliers, so that even if you go to different places, the dishes will taste pretty much the same.
Risotto is expensive because of the prep, not the ingredients. I am usually wary of ordering risotto in a restaurant.
Amen. I never order it, because it always comes out piled up on the plate.
Here’s a restaurant in Bologna that TripAdvisor says has Fusion and Italian cuisines.
Here’s the link to the restaurant’s website: Marco Fadiga Bistrot.
And here’s the Google translation of the menu:
Same old, same old, right?
Okay, the ratings aren’t great, so maybe the new Italian cuisine is overrated, but not boring.
Me, I’m baffled by the assertion that Italian food hasn’t embraced globalization. Consider: If there’s one single ingredient that defines modern Italian food, it’s the tomato. Which isn’t even native to the Old World.
It’s not that Italian food isn’t globalized; it’s just that it finished globalizing centuries before anyone even thought of the word “globalization”.
Ahem! All that and a bag of tortilla chips, obviously. Sheesh. 
Chronos - I love your post. how come other people always say what I want to say so much more concisely!
Yes. I like Italian a lot of Italian food. It just isn’t the best cuisine in the entire world, which the hype in the rest of the West would have you believe. In particular, it pales in comparison with e.g. French cuisine.
Sure, like I said in the OP, Italian cuisine ossified about 150 years ago. Of course you can point to the use of tomato, chilli and milk of the water buffalo in various Italian recipes (though, with respect, actual Italian cuisine uses the tomato a lot less than “Italian” cuisine does in the likes of the UK and US: a real ragu, for instance, isn’t the tomato soup slop you get elsewhere).
Is it, though? If asked, I’d automatically say “French”, not “Italian”.
Let me get this straight. You think Bologna can automatically claim as its own all of the cuisine of the Emilia Romagna region? That’s quaint, but wholly unconnected to reality. Modena is not Bologna. Parma is not Bologna. Balsamic vinegar and parmesan cheese are used all over Italy. You think Bologna has some special claim to them just because it’s a little closer to those cities than it is to, say, Florence?
How long have you been in Italy, and how much have you traveled? I’ve been here for 25 years, and have sampled the cooking from Trentino to Sicily.
You know, it just sounds to me like you don’t like the food where you live. Which is fine. However, it’s a large stretch to expand that to “Italian cuisine is overrated.”
Pretty much, yes, in the same way that Roman cuisine claims sugo all’amatriciana as its own, despite being invented, well, not in Rome. Parma ham, Balsamic vinegar, and so on, is a quintessential aspect of Bolognese cuisine. Many Bolognese dishes make heavy use of the likes of Parma ham, cheese, balsamic vinegar and so on (e.g. cotoletta alla bolognese) in a way that the cuisine from other regions doesn’t.
I have to admit I got a bit of a snigger out of a guy who, until yesterday, could only really name ragu bolognese as a dish from the city trying to pass himself off as an expert on the cuisine, though.
Yes. They’re in the same region for a start, of which Bologna’s the capital, and share largely the same cuisine. There are no dishes from Modena, Ferrarra, nor Parma that are not present in Bolognese cuisine (they’re named differently, though), and vice versa. The cuisine is that of the region, not the city itself.
Bully for you. I’ve been here 14 months and travelled around enough to be able to appraise the situation. I’m not a self confessed gastronomist who has only visited his supposed favourite foody destination once in 20 years, despite only living across the border in France.
I’ve travelled to the Veneto multiple times. I’ve travelled to Tuscany multiple times (37 minutes away on the train to Florence). I’ve travelled to Piedmont multiple times. In short, I’ve been pretty much everywhere in Northern Italy. Further, there’s enough Pugliese restaurants in Bologna serving Pugliese food to Pugliese immigrants that I’m more than firmly acquainted with the cuisine. Believe me, Bolognese cuisine more than holds its own against other Italian cuisines. Yet, it’s still overrated.
No offence, but your posts are seemingly just one iteration of “but you’ve not been here long enough!” or “but you’ve never tried true Italian cuisine”. Complete bullshit, I’m afraid. You like it. I get it. I like it too. But it’s overrated. It isn’t as great as every tourist who has ever visited Italy (the majority of them who travel to the Midlands or Northern Italy, not Puglia, I should point out) makes it out to be.
Sigh. Of course you know better than I. Whatever was I thinking, that my 25 years in Italy might have given me some measure of experience? I’m sure your 14 months have made you an expert in Italian cuisine.
If you think you’re eating “real” cuisine in restaurants, think again. Go eat in people’s homes, then report back.
I think there’s another factor in play here; in the past couple of decades or so, extremely good Italian food has become available outside of Italy and a few Italian immigrant enclaves.
What I’m driving at, is that you may go to a higher-end local Italian food restaurant, and end up with food on par with what you might find in Florence or Bologna.
I ran into this very phenomenon when my wife and I went to Italy last year. The food was excellent, but kind of a letdown in some ways, because it wasn’t any better than what we could get at a local Dallas place (Daniele Osteria). Sure, it was cheaper, more plentiful, and there were more things on the menu, but overall, the Italian food and the Dallas Italian food were in the same ballpark in terms of quality, freshness, skill of preparation, etc…
A lot of it is a matter of personal taste as well. I imagine if you grew up on Chicago-style pizza, Italian pizza wouldn’t be “right” to you, any more than say… Alabama or Kansas City style barbecue just is not "right"to me, having grown up on Texas style barbecue.
Sorry, you’re right. I need to wait at least 15 months before I can judge what I’m eating. Or was it 21 months? Can you give me some estimate of when I stop being a gastronomic parvenu and become a learned master, just like you? I mean, at some point in your vaunted 25 year sojourn in Italy, you must have stopped being a naif, unable to appreciate the complexities of the food set before him, and become the master you are today, right?
I live with three Italians from opposite ends of the country (Emilia Romagna, Marche and Calabria). Perhaps I’ve just not eaten with enough Italians? How many more do I need to eat with, in your estimation?
Sicily. IMO. Nearly died of joy/artery blockage.
Ciao from Padova, btw. Come and try spaghetti with squid ink in Venice. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I love Italian food and I though the food in the UK was dreadful across the board. Lived there for five years but am not from either country so have no stake.
Do think it is funny how Italians seems to think eating a curry means you’re wildly adventurous and bohemian.
So you really think a half dead Tesco sandwich is better than a piadino…each to their own, I suppose. shrugs
Seconded. I Italian food’s strong point is in what average people eat every day (i.e. really well) rather than in high-end restaurant food. I think the difference between a good UK restaurant and a good Italian restaurant wouldn’t be huge. But the difference between an average UK person at home and an average Italian person at home? Night and day.
Nobody mentioned Tesco other than you.
Learned master? Gee, thanks, but there’s really no need. 
I just mean that, obviously, I’ve been around the boot more than you have. C’mon, don’t you think experience counts for anything? It does in the bedroom, and I think it does in the kitchen, too. 
Of course, there’s that pesky question of individual taste, and that’s what I suspect is working here.
I’m glad to see you have Italian roommates. Have you been to Le Marche or Calabria, to their homes?