Milan - The Food

We are looking forward to eating lots of delicious food while we're here in Italy. We brought a compact bathroom scale with us to (hopefully) ensure we don't pack on too many pounds during our stay. But it is so hard to say no to pizza when you walk past a shop window that looks like this:

Our first night in Milan we headed over to Eataly which is a worldwide chain. There are locations in the US but not in our town so it was our first time experiencing this multi-storey dining and food hall. The ground floor is like an upscale Italian grocery with aisles stocked full of olive oils, vinegars, cheeses, cold cuts, and just about any kind of specialty treat you might be in the mood for. 

We came here hungry so we stopped in at one of the restaurants on the upper floors and had a delicious pizza with antipasti and wine. The pizza was topped with yellow cherry tomatoes, fresh zucchini flowers, and big dollops of ricotta cheese. Buon apetito!

An interesting Milanese food tradition is the aperitivo. Like our American Happy Hour, the Italians head out after the workday for a drink with friends before going to a restaurant (or home) for dinner. The aperitivo is literally an alcoholic drink that is supposed to stimulate your appetite before you eat. Italians generally don't eat dinner until later, around 8pm. But at about 6pm you'll see them all sitting down at tables with brightly colored cocktails chatting away with friends. One of the most common drinks you'll see is the Aperol Spritz - about equal parts of prosecco sparkling wine, bitter Aperol liqueur, and soda water with an orange slice. Certain bars will give you a free plate of appetizers if you order a drink, turning the aperitivo into an apericena. (Cena is Italian for "dinner"). Cin cin! (Cheers!)

We also booked a food tour to make sure we didn't miss out on any of the great food here. On Friday night our guide Antonio took us on a walk through the beautiful Brera district as we stopped in at several different restaurants to sample some northern Italian dishes. The streets in this part of town are pedestrian-friendly and the weather was perfect for dining al fresco.

We visited Rossi & Grassi, a salumieria shop which is a delicatessen that specializes in cured meat and local cheese.

At another restaurant we had some risotto alla Milanese, which is a slow-cooked rice (usually arborio variety) flavored with a hint of saffron giving it the bright yellow color. Typically we think of pasta when we think of Italy, but on the tour we learned that pasta is much more a part of the southern Italian food culture. Here in the north conditions are perfect for growing rice, and you can find risotto on nearly every menu.

Some restaurants even specialize in risotto exclusively. For dinner on our last night in Milan we headed to another part of town, the Navigli district, to a restaurant called "Officina del Riso" (literally "Rice Workshop") and each had a deliciously flavored risotto for dinner. Milan used to be crisscrossed with canals, similar to Venice. The canals were used to bring in the massive stone blocks as the Duomo was being built. During his time here, Leonardo da Vinci designed some levees to improve the canal system. But Milan decided to modernize during the early 20th century -- transportation by car had become preferable to navigating by boat and many of the canals in the city were covered over to make way for streets. Only two large canals remain here in the Navigli district and this area is now very popular with tourists and the young crowd who come here for the bars and nightclubs. Since our clubbing days are over, we opted to just take in the sunset and then headed back to our apartment in the much quieter Brera district. Arrivederci alla prossima, Milano -- until next time!