What made you fall in love with your favorite restaurant?

2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20

One day someone asks you for the ranking of restaurants that are in your heart. You do not want to make a ranking and you will not do it.

Because even if, in addition to being poets, saints, navigators, football coaches, we are all food critics, for you that is a piece of life. They are memories, a series of small sparks, equal to emotions, that dwell in you. You don't know what to say, like when someone asks you for the boyfriend you loved the most or if you love mom or dad the most.

Trying to stay true to myself, to avoid unnecessary rankings, I still wondered what the springs are, what is the tic of falling in love in a restaurant, what makes it enter the memory or for what small insignificant detail will we remember it forever? How do restaurants land a spot on our secret and hidden rankings of the heart?

Let's start from the fixed points, go through the personal variants and try to understand.

1) The first restaurant (starred) is never forgotten

The first starred restaurant is like the first kiss. Surprise, he has inside the amazement of something he has never tried, never seen. What, it depends on us.

For some it will be the place, the environment, for others "that flavor", unexpected, sublime, for others still the colors, shapes and presentation of the dish. Or maybe the bread basket, which we have never seen so good and beautiful.

After the first restaurant, which wins easy and is remembered forever, the rest is an open game. In the middle there are us and our expectations, perceptions, moods, contaminations, preferences, origins.

2) The game of memories

One of my parameters is who wins the memory game. A bit like when I leave the cinema, as soon as I leave the restaurant I cannot give a profound judgment. I need to think and understand.

I understand immediately if I have just had a positive experience, but I can hardly ever talk about it.

After some time, I know very well that those who survive memories, there are, have left their mark that will make me remember them. There are restaurants of which I will always remember some dishes. Even after 10 years.

3) Love at first sight

Some are love at first sight.

The flag fish Parmigiana with original fish and fresh tomato sauce by Gennaro Esposito, the Walk in the fish market by Ciccio Sultano, the cod by Moreno Cedroni, the fried fish by Mauro Uliassi, the Rubik's Cube by Matteo Baronetto al Cambio of Turin, the Cloud of Caprese by Pino Cuttaia, Autumn in New York by Massimo Bottura, but also the sautéed Cibi Cotti in Naples.

Those, yes, are the real blows to the heart, they explode as soon as you put the fork in your mouth. You will love them forever.

4) Places and people

You fall in love with places and people, even with an entire family. When you go to the restaurant Don Alfonso, for example, one would like to stay with the forever Iaccarino family, perhaps planted like an olive tree in the land of their farm overlooking the Gulf of Naples.

Same thing for The Council of Sicily, in Donnalucata (Ragusa), with Roberta Corradin and Antonio Cicero.

In some other places you feel at peace with the world and with nature, as after sitting on one of the stools in the Clandestino in Portonovo.

Or perhaps secretly robbed of a dream, because we imagined the restaurant on the beach just like that (and we hope that the dream will come back to life soon in spite of the anomalous waves).

5) The wine

You remember the wine of some restaurants. You also remember the sommelier's eyes or hands or the words exchanged, his cellar and the smell of cherry branches, the dust, the humidity.

6) The perfumes

Or you fall in love with a perfume, like in front of the brioche of Sicily coffee of Noto, which makes you forget even the granita.

7) Feel at home

Then there are the latest ones, the ones where you feel at home. You would stay there for hours, to eat, talk, stay, eat again and start again in the waltz of the perfect restaurant.

In general, it could be said that when the discovery is triggered, when something has amazed us, when we did not think we were struck, when we recognized a taste, or we found it interpreted as we did not believe, when we found ourselves in front of the absolute, when something made us open our eyes wide like at 4 years old, we could say that yes, that is the moment of the inscription of a restaurant in the memories.

How does it happen to you? What makes you remember about a restaurant or what triggers you to fall in love?