Location: Tuscany, Italy Date: June 12, 2011 Cuisine: Tuscan ANY CHARACTER HERE During our day in Siena we picked up a few supplies. Most notably, at the sign of the Cinghiale, the Tuscan wild boar. This funny little gourmet shop…
Restaurant: Trattoria Pepei Location: Siena, Italy Date: June 12 & 19, 2011 Cuisine: Tuscan Rating: Delicious & Fun! ANY CHARACTER HERE Our first full day in tuscany and we went into Siena. We selected a restaurant the night before using Michelin, picking a centrally located one…
Restaurant: Pozzo dei Desideri Location: Bologna, Italy Date: June 11, 2011 Cuisine: Tuscan Rating: Good food, good value ANY CHARACTER HERE Today we drove through the mountains between Forli in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, then down past Florence to Staggia a small…
Restaurant: Al Caminetto Location: Cervia / Milano Marittima, Italy Date: June 10, 2011 Cuisine: Adriatic Seafood Rating: Great service, great food ANY CHARACTER HERE For our anniversary my wife, me, and our family went out to what the locals described as “the…
Restaurant: Ristorante Notte E Di’ Location: Cervia / Milano Marittima, Italy Date: June 10, 2011 Cuisine: Pizza etc Rating: Great pizza place, bug menu ANY CHARACTER HERE After a morning touring ancient mosaics in Ravenna we were hanking for pizza…
Restaurant: Ristorante La Frasca Location: Cervia / Milano Marittima, Italy Date: June 9, 2011 Cuisine: Adriatic Italian Rating: Top top traditional ANY CHARACTER HERE A mere two nights have gone by without a truly elaborate starred restaurant dinner, so we headed to…
Restaurant: Lo Sporting Location: Milano Marittima, Italy Date: June 9, 2011 Cuisine: Trendy Italian Rating: Decent food, but overpriced ANY CHARACTER HERE One of the cool things about the beach town of Cervia / Milano Marittima is that there are a…
Restaurant: Palace Hotel Location: Cervia / Milano Marittima, Italy Date: June 9-11, 2011 Cuisine: Italian Rating: Great hotel breakfast ANY CHARACTER HERE The Palace Hotel in Cervia fits into an interesting class of European hotel. It’s a beach resort, and elegant, but…
Restaurant: Locanda dei Salinari Location: Cervia, Italy Date: June 8, 2011 Cuisine: Adriatic Seafood Rating: Great seafood ANY CHARACTER HERE After three days in the Modena/Parma/Bologna area we relocated west to the Adriactic coastal town of cervia/Milano Maritima. While technically still in…
Restaurant: Il Fantino Location: Modena, Italy Date: June 7, 2011 Cuisine: Emilia Romagna Rating: Big portions, too big! ANY CHARACTER HERE This evening we took to wandering around Modena. We stopped into a local restaurant at 7:30 or so but they weren’t open yet (in the…
Restaurant: Trattoria Leonida Location: Bologna, Italy Date: June 7, 2011 Cuisine: Bolognese Rating: Big menu, great food ANY CHARACTER HERE We continue our sojourn across Emilia-Romagna. It was a rainy day in Bologna, and we stopped for lunch in this Trattoria in the…
Restaurant: Osteria Francescana Location: Modena, Italy Date: June 6, 2011 Cuisine: Emilia Romagna Rating: Amazing Italian Molecular! ANY CHARACTER HERE Our first fancy meal of the trip was at Osteria Francescana, a modern Italian in Modena with 2 Michelin stars. Francescana has an unusual…
Restaurant: Cocchi Ristorante Location: Parma, Italy Date: June 6, 2011 Cuisine: Emilia Romagna Rating: Amazing traditional! ANY CHARACTER HERE Today we ventured out to Parma, home of Parmesan and Prosciutto. We met up with a friend of a friend who took us…
Restaurant: Hotel Real Fini Via Emilia Location: Modena, Italy Date: June 5-8, 2011 Cuisine: Breakfast Buffet Rating: Typical Italian Hotel Breakfast ANY CHARACTER HERE Italian hotels almost always include breakfast. The Real Fini in Modena’s is extremely typical of mid range hotels….
Restaurant: Osteria del Pozzo Location: Modena, Italy Date: June 5, 2011 Cuisine: Emilia Romagna Rating: Very good casual ANY CHARACTER HERE This post kicks off the food portion of my 2011 Europe trip, Eating Italy. We begin our month of gastronomic excess…
Restaurant: Mezze Location: 401 N La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048. 310.657.4103 Date: May 31, 2011 Cuisine: Modern Middle Eastern Rating: Really tasty! ANY CHARACTER HERE For a long time in the 2000s Sona was my favorite restaurant in LA, and I was sad…
Marlowe’s compelling voice pulling you through at breakneck pace. But at the backbone for me was the sinister portrait of pre-war L.A. While visually tame by today’s jaded standards, this is a dark book, with realistic characters. The movie is forced by 40s standards to gloss or smooth over many of these darker elements, but the novel exposes them for what they are.
This post isn’t so much a review of the 4th Pirates installment, but an little digression on its amusing relationship to one of my favorite books. What’s interesting here is that Disney put “suggested by the novel On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers” in the credits and felt it needed to option the novel just to include the two basic elements of Blackbeard and the Fountain. Nothing else. Still, it’s a fun movie, better and more self contained than either Pirates 2 or 3.
It was my brother-in-law’s birthday, and a warm California Friday in late may, so his wife organized a little get together in the Santa Monica mountains at Malibu Wines. Now, I’m not super partial to California wines in general (too…