Friday, 12/23

Lunch: mozzerella and prosciutto sandwich from a grocery store on Via Urbana
Dinner: pizza with mushrooms and onions; tomato bruschetta; suppli (fried ball of rice, mozzerella, and tomato sauce) from a restaurant whose name I will look up soon
Dessert: two Italian pastries, name unknown; gelato, from a famed gelateria whose name I'll look up soon

The pizza was completely crisp--not a soggy spot to be found. That's crisper (more crisp?) than any New York pizza I've had, almost chip-like. There was very little sauce; the focus was really on the cheese and the toppings. The cheese was very good, with lots of flavor. The onions were onions, and the mushrooms were terrific, with a nice bit of char flavor to them.

Suppli is basically deep-fried pizza. (You'd think they'd have this in Hungary--possibly it's not porky enough for them.) The texture is different enough from pizza, though, that I could eat this with pizza (actually, after--we ordered it as our pizza was disappearing) without feeling like I was eating the same thing twice.

Everything I ate today tasted like mozzerella, which I'm happy to eat at every meal right now. The best New York mozzerella I've ever had was from a place across the BQE (possibly on Union St.) that closed a few years ago. It's not as good as the mozzerella here. The fight won't be fair, I guess, until we import some water buffaloes.

The pastries I had for dessert were sweet things that weren't crunchy, but were rigid, not soft at all. The outer layer is chocolate-flavored (like the chocolate cookies from Court Pastry), and their inside was lemony. They seem to melt a little bit as you bite into them. That's a label that gets attached to food--melting in your mouth--but these really do seem to. The first one I had was a bit stale; the second wasn't, and was much better.

The gelateria aims for the decor of a laboratory. They give you a gelato in a little cup, which, if they were serious about the whole thing, they ought to sterilize. I had pear, which wasn't so much like gelato as like a pear that happened to be cold. It had a rather rough texture and didn't taste at all creamy, which was good: pear has a delicate flavor and this let you have it unmasked.

Traffic in Rome is what New York traffic would be like if they took away all the traffic lights. It's more exciting to cross the street like this, and much more satisfying when you succeed.