Anthony Bourdains Favorite Restaurants Rome

 

Anthony Bourdain with Asia Argento

A Meal at Settemio

Rome, Italy

TONY'S SECRET RESTAURANT - Rome

On Sunday December 5, CNN broadcast a stunning Rome episode of Parts Unknown in which Anthony Bourdain and Asia Argento go to a trattoria, which they do not name. It’s Settimio. Sorry for the spoiler but I don’t believe in depriving Mario and Teresa of business through exclusion Watch the episode it is brilliant.

I vividly remember my first visit to Settimio al Pellegrino. It was in 2007 and my friend Jess and I had gotten a hot tip from a regular that a short walk from Campo de’ Fiori sat an uber-authentic trattoria serving simply dressed fresh pastas, meaty mains, and seasonal vegetables. We made a booking but when we showed up for dinner the door was locked. We were already off to a rough start. One of us noticed a button next to the door and after a sustained buzz, chef and owner Teresa opened the door a crack and said something to the effect of “chi siete”, who are you?

If that doesn’t sound like a warm greeting, it wasn’t. But at Settimio, warmth isn’t doled out frivolously. Warmth is earned. If you turn up without a reservation, there’s a real chance you will be sent away, whether they are booked up or not. It’s the kind of place where the possibility of a regular rolling in late leads Teresa and her husband Mario to set aside tables for such an occurrence. And even calling to reserve well in advance doesn’t guarantee a table. On that note, if you don’t speak Italian, have your hotel ring for you. And if all this sounds too fussy, don’t read on. Settimio isn’t for you.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

PARTS UNKOWN - ROME

PARTS UNKNOWN - ROME

With ABEL FERRARA & ASIA ARGENTO

I have to be honest: arbitrary seating policies give me agita. I grew up in restaurants and treasure hospitality. I want to connect with the people who make and serve my food, not be rejected or dismissed. Yet I was determined to win over Teresa and Mario. That night, Jess and I ordered every course, including my current go-to, polpette, scorched yet delicious meat patties. We cleaned our plates, admired the eclectic decor (framed posters and paintings gifted by Settimio’s clients, which include plenty of artists and film makers) and watched as Mario worked the room, taking orders and doting on regulars. Teresa emerged from the kitchen occasionally to clear plates and pinch cheeks. Man, did it feel bad being an outsider at Settimio that night.

Jess and I apparently didn’t make much of an impression because I went back on my own a few days later for lunch and was given the same suspicious treatment. After a few more visits, however, I was totally in, cheek caresses and all. This is good news if you live in Rome or visit often. You, too, can become a doted-on regular. Otherwise, visit knowing you won’t be pampered by the service but you’ll definitely walk away having witnessed a Roman relic. 

SETTIMIO PELLIGRINO

ROMA

That is to say, a lot of what’s appealing about Settimio is the attitude and atmosphere. Some regulars have been going since the place opened in the 1930s, others a decidedly shorter length, but all are given special attention. In that way, the place is not unique. The attraction to countless other local joints is the experience and the relationship with the owners, even more so than the food.

I don’t think anyone with Roman dining experience would say the food is flawless. Like many places in town, it makes sense to stick to certain things like those meatballs or the onion-rich vitello alla genovese. At Settimio, comfort food reigns: fettucine with meat sauce, gnocchi with tomato sauce (Thursdays only), trippa alla romana, and involtini (meat rolls). The handmade pastas pass muster, but you won’t write home about them. The pillowy, super sweet, candied chestnut-studded Montblanc, which they do not make in house, is another story. I dream about it sometimes. Usually right before I go to the dentist. I am also very into the mela cotta (baked apple). I’m a sucker for overcooked fruit. 

Second only to the struggle of winning the owners’ affection is the wines, which range from undrinkable to painfully undrinkable. While it’s charming that regulars leave unfinished bottles in the fridge for their next visit, I can honestly say that the only wine worse than the wine at Settimio is day-old wine at Settimio. It’s not what you’ve come for anyway.

Settimio al Pellegrino
Via del Pellegrino, 117

+390668801978 

Trattoria  SETTIMIO PELLIGRINO

ROME

SETTIMIO PELLIGRINO

ROME

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The TV Dinner Fried CHicken

 

 

FRIED CHICKEN

 

 

FOOD PORN ???

 

 

Or NOT ???

 

 

 

If you were a little kid in the 1960's, this Fried Chicken TV DINNER

 

may very well been FoodPorn to you ...

A BRIEF HISTORY of The TV DINNER

In 1925, the Brooklyn-born entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye invented a machine for freezing packaged fish that would revolutionize the storage and preparation of food. Maxson Food Systems of Long Island used Birdseye’s technology, the double-belt freezer, to sell the first complete frozen dinners to airlines in 1945, but plans to offer those meals in supermarkets were canceled after the death of the company’s founder, William L. Maxson. Ultimately, it was the Swanson company that transformed how Americans ate dinner (and lunch)—and it all came about, the story goes, because of Thanksgiving turkey.

According to the most widely accepted account, a Swanson salesman named Gerry Thomas conceived the company’s frozen dinners in late 1953 when he saw that the company had 260 tons of frozen turkey left over after Thanksgiving, sitting in ten refrigerated railroad cars. (The train’s refrigeration worked only when the cars were moving, so Swanson had the trains travel back and forth between its Nebraska headquarters and the East Coast “until panicked executives could figure out what to do,” according to Adweek.) Thomas had the idea to add other holiday staples such as cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes, and to serve them alongside the bird in frozen, partitioned aluminum trays designed to be heated in the oven. Betty Cronin, Swanson’s bacteriologist, helped the meals succeed with her research into how to heat the meat and vegetables at the same time while killing food-borne germs.

The Swanson company has offered different accounts of this history. Cronin has said that Gilbert and Clarke Swanson, sons of company founder Carl Swanson, came up with the idea for the frozen-meal-on-a-tray, and Clarke Swanson’s heirs, in turn, have disputed Thomas’ claim that he invented it. Whoever provided the spark, this new American convenience was a commercial triumph. In 1954, the first full year of production, Swanson sold ten million trays. Banquet Foods and Morton Frozen Foods soon brought out their own offerings, winning over more and more middle-class households across the country.

Whereas Maxson had called its frozen airline meals “Strato-Plates,” Swanson introduced America to its “TV dinner” (Thomas claims to have invented the name) at a time when the concept was guaranteed to be lucrative: As millions of white women entered the workforce in the early 1950s, Mom was no longer always at home to cook elaborate meals—but now the question of what to eat for dinner had a prepared answer. Some men wrote angry letters to the Swanson company complaining about the loss of home-cooked meals. For many families, though, TV dinners were just the ticket. Pop them in the oven, and 25 minutes later, you could have a full supper while enjoying the new national pastime: television.

In 1950, only 9 percent of U.S. households had television sets—but by 1955, the number had risen to more than 64 percent, and by 1960, to more than 87 percent. Swanson took full advantage of this trend, with TV advertisements that depicted elegant, modern women serving these novel meals to their families, or enjoying one themselves. “The best fried chicken I know comes with a TV dinner,” Barbra Streisand told the New Yorker in 1962.

 

WANT to KNOW HOW

 

to MAKE AWESOME FRIED CHICKEN ???

 

 

RECIPES in The BADASS COOKBOOK

 

 

SECRET KFC KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN RECIPE

 

BADASS FRIED CHICKEN Recipe

 

and More ...

AMAZON.com

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

"CONTEMPLATION"

Tee SHIRT

 

 

 

Souffle Mania to Hit New York

Classic CHEESE SOUFFLE

Souffle Mania? What? Yes "Souffle Mania" is about to hit New York. Chef Franics Staub (Le Coq Rico) has been mystified to the reasoning why the Souffle isn't more popular in New York, and he's looking to change that with his new namesake restaurant Francis Staub," in the former space of Les Halles, and the kitchen where Anthony Bourdain once ran. Yes it's hallow ground.

Staub and his Chef d Cusisine Richard Farnabe plan to have as many as 10 different Souffle choices on the menu, 5 savory and 5 sweet ones, which will range in price from $14 to $22 ... Chef Farnabe says that possible souffle options will be Lobster Souffle, Foe Gras Souffle ("Yumm"). Escargots, and of course a Chocolate one.  Bistro classics such as Escargots, Pate, Steak Frite, Dove Sole and other classics are sure to be on hand.

This all sounds most interesting. We wish Mr. Staub and his team well, and we're interested to see how this Souffle Thing will take. Bon Apettit.

SUNDAY SAUCE

AMERICA'S Favorite ITALIAN

RECIPES

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Did Anthony Bourdain Invent Food Porn

Tony

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Anthony Bourdain

KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

The BOOK THAT MADE TONY FAMOUS

BUT DID HE INVENT FOOD PORN ???

Well Tony popularized the term FOOD PORN, and did so without a doubt more than any one single person in this World. Yes Tony did, and is still doing so, with his wonderful Food Shows (Food Porn) : NO RESERVATIONS, PATS UNKNOWN, The LAYOVER and other Bourdain Shows, all absolutely wonderful, and as only Tony could do,     "Fugettabout it FOOD NETWORK, you can Only DREAM of Doing something as Masterful as Mr. Bourdain." Keep Dreaming ..

So Who Did INVENT FOOD PORN, you want to know? Well a writer named Rosalind Coward in her book FEMALE DESIRE (1984)  ...

Here you go, the passage Mis Coward wrote, using the term Food Porn for the first time in the History of the World ..

"Cooking food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude. It is a way of expressing affection through a gift... That we should aspire to produce perfectly finished and presented food is a symbol of a willing and enjoyable participation in servicing others. Food pornography exactly sustains these meanings relating to the preparation of food. The kinds of picture used always repress the process of production of a meal. They are always beautifully lit, often touched up." 

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ANTHONY BOURDAIN on The LINE at LES HALLES

NEW YORK , NY

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FOE GRAS

TONY'S FOOD PORN

PAPAYA KING HOT DOGS

One of TONY'S FAVORITES

FOOD PORN

TONY'S FAVORITE FOOD PORN

A BOW of NOODLES in SOUTH EAST ASIA

PHO in VIETNAM

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BARBECUED PIG

PORK

.

TONY'S IDEA of HEAVEN !!

FOOD PORN

THE BADASS COOKBOOK

SECRET RECIPES

 

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FOOD PORN  - Lust for the Gastronomic, from Zola to Cookbooks ...

by Anthony Bourdain 2001   Food porn, the glorification of food as a substitute for sex, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Nor, perhaps, is the "objectification" of food: displays or descriptions of food -- and its preparation -- for an audience that has no intention of actually cooking or eating any of it. Few people leafing through that ultimate volume of chef porn, the unspeakably lush, jaw-droppingly beautiful "French Laundry Cookbook," would ever attempt to re-create its recipes. We keep it on a special place on our bookshelves, safely away from any food that might mark its seductive and colorful photographs, as our parents might once have kept Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" or "The Olympia Reader" away from general reading. Like the best of pornography, the best of food porn depicts beautiful "objects" arranged in ways one might never have previously considered; star chefs, like the porn stars before them, doing things on paper which few amateurs would ever try at home.

If early works about sex sought to appeal to a sense of yearning, a longing for physical gratification, so did Emile Zola's 1873 foodie masterpiece, "The Belly of Paris," which places its starving hero at the epicenter of French food, the Parisian central marketplace of Les Halles. In page after page of lavishly detailed descriptions, the line between sex and food becomes permeable, the charms of charcuterie, fish, meat and vegetables threatening to supplant sex entirely. Among wildly enthusiastic accounts such as "surging piles [of vegetables] akin to hurrying waves, this river of verdure rushing along the roadway like an autumn torrent . . . tender violet, blush rose, and green yellow" comes this bodice-ripping vision of a pork store:

"There was a wealth of rich, luscious, melting things. Down below, jars of preserved sausage-meat were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these, small plump, boned hams, golden with their dressings of toasted bread crumbs and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Next came larger dishes, some containing preserved Strasbourg tongues, enclosed in bladders colored a bright red and varnished so that they looked quite sanguineous beside the pale sausages . . . [T]here were black puddings coiled like harmless snakes, healthy looking chitterlings piled up two by two, meat, minced and sliced, slumbered beneath lakes of melting fat . . . [F]rom a bar overhead strings of sausages and saveloys of various sizes hung down symmetrically like cords and tassels, while in the rear fragments of intestinal membranes showed like lacework, like some guipure of flesh." While Zola's prose might well inspire tumescence, I doubt that its effect on reader behavior differed much from a return visit to a favored passage in "The Story of 'O.' " It's as hard to imagine that readers of the former rushed out and began assembling the ingredients to make boudin noir or tongue en gelee as it is to imagine readers of the latter went to purchase a corset or a riding crop. In both cases, it is the voyeuristic aspect that appeals, not the prospect of real blood and meat, nor real tangles of sweaty limbs.         


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ANTHONY BOURDAIN Parts Unknown CNN

Premiere Episode of New One-Hour Weekend Series Explores Food and Culture of Myanmar

Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, hosted by the world-renowned chef, bestselling author and Emmy winning television personality, premieres on Sunday, April 14, at 9pm, ET.

The one-hour weekend lifestyle series follows Bourdain as he travels the across the globe to uncover little-known areas of the world and celebrate diverse cultures by exploring food and dining rituals. Known for his curiosity, candor, and acerbic wit, Bourdain takes viewers off the beaten path of tourist destinations – including some war-torn parts of the world – and meets with a variety of local citizens to offer a window into their lifestyles, and occasionally communes with an internationally lauded chef on his journeys.

The premiere episode of the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown offers an inside look at Myanmar. In his maiden voyage to the country formerly known as Burma,Bourdain and his crew discover the fabled beauty and local cuisines of a country that had been, up until recently, off-limits to outsiders.  Future episodes include tours of Libya, Colombia, the Quebecois side of Canada, Koreatown in Los Angeles, Tangier, Peru and the Congo.

Following original episodes of Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown on Sunday nights at 9pm, encores will air on Friday nights at 11pm, Saturday nights at 9pm, and Sunday nights at 8pm. (all times Eastern)

In addition to his work on Parts Unknown, Bourdain will be traveling the United States in the spring to bring his “Guts & Glory” tour to live audiences beginning April 12 in San Francisco through May 13 in Washington D.C.

Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown is produced by Zero Point Zero Production with Executive Producers and Founders Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, along with Executive Producer Sandra Zweig. The Emmy award winning Zero Point Zero Production has produced programs with Anthony Bourdain for more than a decade, including Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, The Layover, A Cooks Tour, and Decoding Ferran Adria.

CNN Worldwide, a division of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a Time Warner Company, is the most trusted source for news and information. Its reach extends to nine cable and satellite television networks; one private place-based network; two radio networks; wireless devices around the world; CNN Digital Network, the No. 1 network of news Web sites in the United States; CNN Newsource, the world’s most extensively-syndicated news service; and strategic international partnerships within both television and the digital media.

Viewers can find updates, behind-the-scenes photos, and exclusive content fromAnthony Bourdain Parts Unknown by following the show’s Twitter account@partsunknownCNN, and accessing the CNN Parts Unknown Facebook page. During each show, viewers are invited to go to the live blog atCNN.com/partsunknown and join in the conversation using the #PartsUnknown hashtag on Twitter.

   "KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL" by Anthony Bourdain Is Thee Greatest Book Ever    
                                 Written on the Restaurant Business and the Book that made Tony Famous. We Love
                                 and Highly Recommend it ...