I would question your use of the word “most”, and would suggest the word “some” instead.
Rational justification? My girlfriend can barely eat when she visits, resorting to eating salads half the time when we go out. We do not have this problem in the UK where even restaurants have something to offer her. Ethnic restaurants, further, are bordering on the non-existent here. Where I was in the UK before I moved here, we had an Argentinian, Japanese, Sudanese, Chinese, Malaysian, various forms of Indian, ad infinitum all within spitting distance of my front door.
That’s all the justification that I need to say that Italian cuisine is extremely limited in its range of ingredients and pretty bland. Similarly, buying even mundane spices, so we can at least cook something with a bit of taste, is a trial at even the largest supermarkets.
I’m very sorry if this somehow offends you. But nothing you have said in this thread has changed my mind that the food being put in front of me is pretty bland, OK for a limited period of a few weeks, but when eating it day in day out rapidly gets old, and not at all worthy of the reputation it has in the rest of the West.
Hell, look at the comments of some of the people arguing for the same position you are in this very thread. “Safe cuisine for people with bland palates”, “Italians eating curry are seen as bohemians”. These aren’t the sorts of comments I’d expect when reading about a dynamic and varied cuisine.
You might want to heed your own words, as they are spot on…
There is a reason why Italian cuisine is one of the world’s most popular, available from Anchorage to Adelaide, from Manilla to Montevideo, and just because you have a desperate need to point out to the SDMB that you have been living in Italy for a year or so isn’t going to change that…
Yeah, that and McDonalds hamburgers.
I think there’s a couple of issues here. First, Italian cuisine is generally from a narrow band of ingredients. Many of the dishes are made with the same ingredients but combined in different ways. This means that even if you eat a wide variety of Italian dishes, you’re still basically eating the same things. No matter how good the dish is, you eventually get tired of eating the same thing.
The other problem is that each region pretty much only has cuisine from that region. So you don’t have access to all Italian cuisine. And forget about non-Italian cuisine in Italy. If you get tired of the cuisine in your particular region, there really aren’t too many other choices.
So to someone who enjoys experiencing new and different flavors, Italy can be disappointing after a while. I supposed it would be like if 95% of the restaurants in Chicago only served Chicago-style pizza. No matter how much you liked it, it could get old after a while.
You mention others using the no true Scotsman argument and you say that Italian food is conservative, but I think as food goes that’s a catch 22 for anybody trying to make a new dish. At least until that dish is ingrained in the culture it’s bound to be labeled as unauthentic. The first person to make pasta carbonara wasn’t making ‘real Italian food’ at the time. If it had been invented last year people would talk about how it’s not ‘real Italian food’ in the same way they talk about Mexican border foods as not being ‘real Mexican food.’ If a dish isn’t conservative it’s not going to be recognized as an authentic dish of a particular cuisine, at least not for a long time.
It’s like the arguments that people get into about chili, arguments I’ve got into myself (arguing food is fun and you have to work really hard to get hurt feelings about it, some of you seem to be working pretty damn hard BTW). If you add beans to it, it’s not chili anymore to some people. If you don’t add beans, it’s not chili anymore to some people. An Italian making a dish faces the same thing, put peas in your carbonara and your dish isn’t ‘authentic,’ you can’t innovate and still claim to be ‘real.’ You say Italian food is conservative, but if it ceased to be conservative it wouldn’t be perceived as ‘real’ Italian food anymore.
Who, except perhaps some Italians, thinks that Italian food is the “best cuisine in the entire world”? I mean, lots of it is very yummy, but I don’t typically see it listed as even one of the two best cuisines of the world, an honor usually accorded to the French and Chinese culinary traditions.
I think you’re perhaps overstating the “hype” that Italian food receives outside of Italy. Is this perhaps a British thing? I’ve noticed that British people often seem to think that Italian food is “fancy” in a way that we Americans, accustomed to the pizzerias and red-check-tablecloths spaghetti joints run by thousands of Italian-American immigrants, don’t perceive it.
Not that there isn’t a lot of very fancy and delicious food in Italian cuisine, both in Italy itself and in other places. But yeah, typical Italian food in most non-Italians’ minds is not all that varied in scope.
This, however, is not really germane to your original complaint that Italian cuisine itself is overrated.
What you’re complaining about here is instead the fact that Italy doesn’t seem to have enough non-Italian cuisine for your taste, or for your girlfriend’s dietary requirements.
I think OP is getting huffy because he’s confused the concept of “opinion” with that of “fact.” It’s fine that OP is not wild about Italian food, but it comes off as condescending, to say the least, to look down upon the Italians for liking their own food, or upon those poor, ignorant tourists who come back from Italy thinking they’ve eaten well!
Shrug, Italian food has been a part of Spanish food for a long time (to the extent of Aragonese salad being penne-based, or caneloni being the traditional Boxing Day main dish in Barcelona). To Spaniards, going to Italy is very much like being right at home.
The only complaints I’ve heard from Spaniards about food in Italy have been from ones who hadn’t found out that their notions of what’s a “first” and “second” dish are different from ours (we consider salads as either a first or something to be left in the middle to share; they have it as a second). Once you know that, it’s perfectly fine home cooking. Chinese trattorias which serve pizza are a plus.
Speaking as an observer who has no stake in the discussion and doesn’t really care what conclusion is ultimately reached, I’d say the OP is getting huffy because none of his perfectly reasonable ‘credentials’ are being accepted as sufficient. As I read through this thread, the goalposts kept getting shifted further and further back by our Italianistas, and that is annoying in an eye-roll-y kind of way. He’s huffier than I would be, but I see his point.
On-topic, I disagree that the cuisine itself is even remotely overrated. However, based on the posts here, it does seem that Italian palates are fairly conservative. Two fairly different issues.
Hey, everyone’s got an opinion, no matter how misguided. 
OK, kidding aside, we’re not in GD here. Dunno why OP’s opinion should have more weight than someone else’s. I accept that OP isn’t wild about Italian cuisine. What’s the big deal about that? But it’s a long leap from there to “Italian cuisine is overrated,” don’t you think?
I’m late to this discussion and haven’t read the whole thread, but I wanted to put my twopenn’oth in anyway.
I don’t think the issues are as entirely separate as are being made out here. I think the extreme conservatism in culinary art has as one of its symptoms, a distinct lack of creativity.
To my mind, Italian cuisine’s main strength - particularly with home cooking - lies in simplicity of preparation and quality of ingredients. It can be stunningly good.
However, if the quality drops, then it can indeed be worse than regular US/UK fast food. Also, the lack of variety can drive you nuts. In low to mid-end restaurants it’s generally the same ten dishes on the menu over and over again. In my experience, going to a little town and find five restaurants and they’ll pretty much all be serving the same thing. And there are so many arbitrary immutable rules - e.g. “you must NEVER serve parmesan with seafood” - that remind me of British food snobbishness in the 1970s. There is also a serious amount of squeamishness that I have observed when it comes to trying new things. As I said in an earlier thread:
I don’t share the OP’s vehemence about it being overrated, as when it’s good, it’s very very good indeed (the bloody steak I had in Tuscany earlier this year with half a white truffle grated on one end and half a black truffle grated on the other is one of my top five foodie ‘wank bank’ memories…), but I do get what he’s saying. Perhaps if he’d said ‘food culture’ rather than ‘cuisine’ it may have been a more successful thread.
They are referring to what in the US we would refer to ‘the house wine’. Just tell the waiter to bring you a glass of red wine or white wine, and you get the house wine. You are looking for the local made wine.
Each region has the main specialty, and each town in a region may actually have it’s own local specialty based on the agriculture - if you can get lucky enough to go to someone’s home for a meal, you will generally get the town specialty. Think of it as going to Castroville CA for artichokes and Gilroy for the garlic. You rarely go to Gilroy for the artichokes, nor Castroville for the garlic.
I think that this is the crucial point in the argument.
Hell, I have a friend who thinks hitting up a sushi bar is the sublime food.
I can only eat dressed rice lumps with assorted fish slapped on it so much. [I actually prefer sashimi, myself.]
He rates places by the quality of their sushi joints. He thought that Amsterdam sucked, because he didn’t have time to go to all the sushi places there and find the best one. :dubious::rolleyes: [my Dutch EVE buddy tells me he knows a place where we can get stroopwaffles hot off the grill, in a manner of speaking … :eek: I can’t wait!!!:D]
Yeah, but it’s like GD Lite: less filling, and more non sequiturs …
Based on what I’ve read, it seems that the cuisine in Bologna is indeed repetitive. And, although Italy does have a wide variety of dishes, it seems that there is little overlap across regions.
Perhaps there’s another issue. The Wikipedia article on British cuisine says:
In other words, British cuisine does not have a good reputation. But, the article continues:
In simple terms, British cuisine is underrated.
With several references to British cheeses and to the prevalence of ethnic restaurants in Britain, the OP is defending British culture as much as he putting down Italian cuisine.
I would certainly agree that British cuisine and the food scene there is generally underrated by foreigners. “English food” is still more the punchline to jokes than something to be taken seriously. It’s similar to America’s reputation of their beers. I contend that there is no better place to be, if you’re a beer lover, than in America right now (although that does vary a bit by region and city.) Likewise, I think a good argument could be made for London being the best place to be for food, in terms of choices, quality, and innovation. I have always been impressed with the food I’ve had in Great Britain, and it’s a shame its reputation for having bland and greasy food still survives. Even the average British pub (or at least the ones I visited–maybe I just happened to end up at gastropubs all the time) had fare that was top-notch and even imaginative.
This thread is making me hungry for pasta.
The analyses of Italian food here are starting to remind me, somewhat surprisingly, of Indian food (in India, that is).
Indian cooking is often delicious, creative and very varied, and I’ve encountered many Indian cooks (in both restaurants and private homes) whose food was fantastic enough to make me want to go on eating nothing else for the rest of my life. But in ordinary day-to-day mealtimes you can find yourself getting kind of bored with the rice-and-dal-and-chapatti-and-sabzi [cooked vegetables], rice-and-dal-and-chapatti-and-sabzi over and over again. And I could see the oft-repeated keynote of pasta in Italian cooking having the same effect, especially if you don’t like or can’t eat pasta in the first place.
However, I still don’t buy the OP’s claim of Italian cuisine being “possibly the most overrated cuisine around” or that “the hype in the rest of the west would have you believe” that Italian food is “the best cuisine in the entire world”. I suppose Italian food might indeed seem overrated if that’s the kind of hype you’ve been seeing about it, but I’ve never seen it hyped to that extent myself.
Oddly, I find myself agreeing with the OP. Different shapes of pasta don’t make it taste any different. There are about 5 Italian dishes I like: pesto, white lasagna, speidini, spaghetti carbonara, and occasionally, lasagna. Everything I’ve had that was supposedly authentic (yes, in the US. So send me to Italy) has been greasy and gummy, and horribly acidic.
Maybe American cheese ruins things, but I have had excellent Wisconsin parmesan and romano. And I do think the Italians make great salads. And biscotti. But right now, Italian food is way, way down on my list as a desireable restaurant option.
Yeah, and what the hell’s up with this damn beagle? Useless little fucker won’t even herd my damn sheep. :dubious:
Laugh and dismiss it as a non sequitor if you wish, but it’s essentially the same thing. Pecorino cheeses weren’t made to be sliced and put on a sandwich any more than beagles were made to herd sheep. Pecorino is dry and waxy so that you can shave it or grate it terribly fine and get nice discrete little pieces that coat something evenly. Which, incidentally, is something you can’t do very well with cheddar–you can grate it with a microplane and get little shavings, but they’re so soft and moist they all want to clump up on each other instead of dispersing evenly. Why does cheddar suck as a coating cheese? Same reason your average German Shepherd sucks at rabbit hunting.
That whole masking it with condiments thing is…well, the polar opposite of the philosophy behind Italian cooking. To Italians, if that bland cheddar doesn’t add anything to the sandwich or is so bad you have to cover up the taste of it, you shouldn’t be putting it on your sandwich. You should either be saving it for a dish where you’ll appreciate it (because it cost either work or money, and it’s wasteful not to get everything you can out of it), or just not eating it at all. If you’re used to looking at food through a completely different lens than the people around you, of course you’re not going to see the local cuisine in the same way.
Also, I think you may be conflating the ideas of something being considered the finest cuisine in the world and it being a lot of people’s favorite cuisine. They’re two very different things. French and Chinese are generally considered the finest cuisines in the world, for their complexity and the subtleties of flavor you can create with 10 million fussy little steps. Italian food isn’t like that–they take a few simple ingredients, do a few fairly straightforward things to them, and call it a day. A really, really tasty day.
It’s those things that impede Italian from being considered in the same light as French or Chinese food that make it so popular. It’s simple and straightforward and homey-feeling, made with ingredients you know what they are and can lay your hands on easily in processes you can duplicate at home without dirtying every dish in the damn house. And if you do it well, like the carbonara I made last night with home-cured bacon and eggs straight from our own back yard, it’s unspeakably delicious.
Before I opened this thread, my reaction to the title was, “You’re doing it wrong.”
Right. And plenty of “real Americans” eat at McDonald’s every week and think Cheesecake Factory is great. Just because “real Italians” like certain food or specific restaurants doesn’t mean the food they like is any good.
I’ve eaten a lot of Italian food: in the US and in Italy, in fancy restaurants and VFW halls, in chain restaurants and pizza parlors and in dozens of homes. All of my family is Italian, and many of my relatives are great cooks. There are many types of what I would call good or great (or outstanding) Italian food.
For example, there are the simple, delicious, hearty meals cooked by one’s grandmother. Peasant food. It doesn’t have to be “gourmet,” but it’s some of the best food I’ve ever had. I had dinner with my mother’s cousins in Umbria – we had squab that had been roaming around the village minutes before, cooked in an outdoor oven, and fresh figs just off the tree. Fucking outstanding.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the most elegant, expensive restaurants: a cold antipasto, followed by a hot antipasto (and neither of these involves cold cuts), followed by a soup, followed by fresh pasta in a light sauce, followed by a meat and a vegetable. Paired with great wines, eaten with fresh bread. Follow with cheese, dessert, coffee, more drinks. Linger, talk and talk and talk.
Yeah, you’re doing it wrong.