Another Amazing Meal!

Trip to Italy - Journal Entry #17d - September 26, 2009 - 7:00 am

For dinner this evening, we had reservations at a restaurant where had dinner 24 years ago with his very good friend, Len Collamore: Corte Sconta. We're not exactly sure what that name means. Dad thinks it may mean "secret courtyard." The restaurant was tucked down an alleyway, but relatively easy to find. It was of average size, but it was unique in that one of the largest rooms was an open courtyard topped by a patchwork of grape vines. We sat at a table just on the edge of this courtyard. It was very pretty.

Our food this evening was a wide variety of fish. Our wine was a pinot grigio.

We started off with what they called their appetizer assortment. It consisted of four different offerings, each served separately and which we shared family-style. The first two were both cold plates of thinly sliced fish -- one was tuna in a balsamic vinegar, the other was a white fish in olive oil and lemon with bamboo shoots. The third was a pate on toasted bagettes. This is not my favorite kind of food, but these were all very nicely presented and so I tried everything -- and most of it was very good!

Next came a large bowl of miniature clams. Again, I am not a fan of clams -- at all -- but these were EXCELLENT! What a shock. They were in some sort of lemon pepper butter sauce and they were great. I could have eaten the entire bowl by myself.

Our last appetizer was a melange of miniature shrimp, squid, octopus, and spider crab. I like the spider crab the best and the octopus the least. Dad and Chris made me try it but, as I had anticipated, it was rubbery and bland and I didn't like the texture.

After all this food, we had a "first course" of pasta. Dad had gnocchi. Chris and I had noodles with tuna (I think). Quite frankly, we had so many different kinds of fish, that it's all a bit of

a blur. The pasta was excellent but, by this time, I was truly stuffed and I had difficulty eating more than half of my serving.

However, notwithstanding how absolutely stuffed I was, there has to be room for dessert. We needed to try the tiramisu -- our third sampling since the beginning of our trip. This one may have been the best of the three. It was served in three little wafer towers with cream in the middle and laced with hardened chocolate. Yum, yum, yum!