Restaurant: Il Fantino
Location: Modena, Italy
Date: June 7, 2011
Rating: Big portions, too big!
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 summer Italians rarely sit down before 8:30 or 9). So we stopped at a nearby bar for…
Campari and soda, with a bit of orange.
They also had these funny fruit teas.
Here after the tea has been added.
Then along to the restaurant.
And it’s simple menu posted outside.
My mother models the bread.
A light start with a plate of mixed local meats.
Cheeses.
And an array off ready prepared cups of lard. Who needs butter? In all seriousness, this is spread on bread and enjoyed straight up.
Our wines of the evening. The lambrusco was of the flat variety. It tasted like a mediocre Beaujolais. The Sangiovese was better, but Emilia-Romagna isn’t Italy’s greatest wine region.
A now ubiquitous instalta misto.
And the local olive oil and balsamic.
We then moved to some pastas. They served huge bowls of each. I mean HUGE! This is a slightly worse variant of the ricotta and spinach stuffed ravioli we had at Cocchi.
Classic ragu.
An interesting gnocchi, with ragu and pumpkin, spiced likely with nutmeg I think. My favorite of the group.
And an extra pasta we didn’t have.
The rub here was that these portions were so big that after we stuffed ourselves silly, we hadn’t even cleared half of each dish. So we had to cancel the meat course, get the check, and go in search of gelato.
Il Fantino was tasty, and the quantities were huge, but the pasta while great by American standards, just wasn’t up to some of the other places in this fabulous food region.