Thursday, October 12, 2006
BIG ITALY
I think I’ve mentioned Tony Foreman before. He’s the owner of Bin 604 and Pazo and some other hot area restaurants. His wife Cindy Wolf usually gets all the press as a celebrity chef of sorts. He maintains his own blog, and he usually posts about wine tasting or food. Considering he owns four restaurants and a wine shop, it is usually very detailed and full of intricacies about different wines. It can be interesting, but is usually fairly dry, kind of like a ’01 California Granache.
His most recent blog entry was rather refreshing. It was his wife’s birthday, so he took her to an Italian restaurant. Well, he took her to Italy. After driving through a couple European countries, they arrived at their hotel and lo and behold the reservation was screwed up and they couldn’t check in. He didn’t go into many details about that, but it sounded like the kind of situation that makes for the excoriating reviews on tripadvisor that are so much fun to read. So they left the hotel to find another one, deciding that they didn’t even want to stay in the same region they were so miffed. I gather that the drive to Cernobbio to Lucca is probably equivalent to Baltimore from DC, so it really makes me itch wondering how bad their treatment was to drive them that far.
After they checked into the new hotel, they got directions to a good restaurant nearby. Walking directions in a centuries-old Italian town have got nothing on Mapquest on its worst day. After the third piazza and the left through the alley, I’m not sure I could have safely navigated out of the lobby. They did eventually find their way there, by that time completely starving for dinner, and saw the long line out the door of people with their families. And it was definitely a family place, from children to grampa, the place was crowded and noisy. The whole reason this all caught my attention and I felt it worth blogging about here, is that these are the people who own some of the classiest restaurants in Baltimore, and for dinner they wound up at Shakey’s. You know that classic scenario in situational comedies where the rich couple dines uncomfortably amidst the common folk? It definitely had that vibe throughout. He wasn’t very complimentary about their wine, I’ll say that. Of course, it was a popular restaurant for a reason and they were in the middle of Italy, so the description of the food they ordered was absolutely heavenly. I was glad to hear that his wife had an enjoyable birthday eventually.
One note about that restaurant. I may have referred to it as “Shakey’s”, but I couldn’t actually come up with an equivalent allegory because there really isn’t one. Italy is a different country and anyone who expects things to be exactly the same way there as here is a fool, and Tony and his wife definitely do not fall into that group. It doesn’t change the tone of his entry, and I hope he doesn’t get offended if he ever reads this one. I was just impressed that he finally had a blog entry where he sounded like a regular person, by which I mean, I guess, he complained about stuff.
His most recent blog entry was rather refreshing. It was his wife’s birthday, so he took her to an Italian restaurant. Well, he took her to Italy. After driving through a couple European countries, they arrived at their hotel and lo and behold the reservation was screwed up and they couldn’t check in. He didn’t go into many details about that, but it sounded like the kind of situation that makes for the excoriating reviews on tripadvisor that are so much fun to read. So they left the hotel to find another one, deciding that they didn’t even want to stay in the same region they were so miffed. I gather that the drive to Cernobbio to Lucca is probably equivalent to Baltimore from DC, so it really makes me itch wondering how bad their treatment was to drive them that far.
After they checked into the new hotel, they got directions to a good restaurant nearby. Walking directions in a centuries-old Italian town have got nothing on Mapquest on its worst day. After the third piazza and the left through the alley, I’m not sure I could have safely navigated out of the lobby. They did eventually find their way there, by that time completely starving for dinner, and saw the long line out the door of people with their families. And it was definitely a family place, from children to grampa, the place was crowded and noisy. The whole reason this all caught my attention and I felt it worth blogging about here, is that these are the people who own some of the classiest restaurants in Baltimore, and for dinner they wound up at Shakey’s. You know that classic scenario in situational comedies where the rich couple dines uncomfortably amidst the common folk? It definitely had that vibe throughout. He wasn’t very complimentary about their wine, I’ll say that. Of course, it was a popular restaurant for a reason and they were in the middle of Italy, so the description of the food they ordered was absolutely heavenly. I was glad to hear that his wife had an enjoyable birthday eventually.
One note about that restaurant. I may have referred to it as “Shakey’s”, but I couldn’t actually come up with an equivalent allegory because there really isn’t one. Italy is a different country and anyone who expects things to be exactly the same way there as here is a fool, and Tony and his wife definitely do not fall into that group. It doesn’t change the tone of his entry, and I hope he doesn’t get offended if he ever reads this one. I was just impressed that he finally had a blog entry where he sounded like a regular person, by which I mean, I guess, he complained about stuff.
# posted by Renfield @ 11:47 AM 
