30 November 2006

Somebody has reminded me that this website or blog is supposed to be about Southeast Asian food, and don't worry, I'm coming to that. I just want to say a few things more about our recent Italian trip and the places we stayed at and the food we ate - if I run out of restaurants to talk about, I might give you the recipes for some of the good things I cooked in our foresteria (see 27 November).

One restaurant I have to mention is Gigetto. It's in a small town called Miane, on the road from Vittorio Veneto to Valdobbiadene. (Even if you don't speak Italian, you score points with friends there if you pronounce that name with the stress in the right place - it's val-do-BYA-de-ne.) This road is so fascinating that it deserves a page to itself: it winds between, around, occasionally up onto, the steep foothills of the Dolomites, often with sweeping views towards the plain and the sea - from one or two high spots, on a clear day, you should be able to see the towers of Venice. These hills are almost completely given over to the cultivation of the prosecco grape, and most of their inhabitants seem to make a good living from it, as growers or winemakers.

Fittingly, Gigetto offers not only excellent food but a magnificent cellar, a catacomb of wine that wriggles away under the various small and large dining-rooms of the restaurant and out, by my reckoning, beneath the roots of the vines and deep into the hillside. On the website that I linked to above, you can see a picture of just one little corner, twist, or possibly dead-end, in this labyrinth of a cellar, its walls lined and its floor stacked high with fine vintages, wines from all over the world, brandies, grappa, single-malt Scotch from every distillery, it seems to go on and on...