It’s not that difficult to find good risotto in Italy, but only once in a while you come across a truly great risotto.
Anthony Bourdain was right. The fishermen risotto from Da Romano in the small island of Burano near Venice is definitely among the best of the best. It’s certainly the greatest fish risotto I’ve ever had. The recipe has been passed down through generations and is prepared to perfection in this traditional venetian restaurant. The main ingredient for the stock is an ugly little fish from the bottom of the lagoon called “Gó”. We included a photo in the video for you guys to see that it really is an ugly little fish! The menu in Da Romano is packed with traditional venetian recipes like the Gó risotto. Everything we tried was delicious.
The restaurant staff was welcoming and made sure our stay was a truly enjoyable experience. They even invited us into their beautiful kitchen, which by the way, is the only commercial kitchen in Venice with a license to operate a wood burning oven. There we met the chef and cooking staff who showed us how you’re supposed to prepare a risotto! The last step, known as “mantecare” in italian, is an experience to watch when performed by a skilled cook like our friend in Da Romano. In this step, the pot is swiftly knocked against the table top inducing the arborio rice to jump for brief intervals, which produces the creaminess expected in a well prepared risotto without the need to add additional cream or butter.
We hope you enjoyed the video and if you ever find yourself in Venice, make sure to visit this special restaurant!
Nothing like a picnic to welcome Spring
Spring is finally here. No more Indian summers, no more teaser warm days and (hopefully) no more rain for a while! This time it should be for real. At least it feels that way in London today.
I love springtime because I get to spend more time outdoors. Spring is that time of the year when we store away our winter clothes and return to doing our favorite outdoors activities, even if just to enjoy some fresh air and sunshine. Growing up in tropical Colombia and Miami I didn’t really appreciate the wonders that spring can have on your mood and energy levels after a bitter, cold and wet winter. When I moved to the American North East, I learnt how to take advantage of those precious weeks in the year!
New York is beautiful in the spring. I used to enjoy getting friends together for a picnic at the park. If you’ve been to Central Park’s Sheep Meadow during this time of the year, you’ll know what I mean… every weekend, the green is literally packed with groups of friends enjoying the good weather and having fun outdoors. Many of them are sunbathing trying to get a little color on, others are playing cards or classic games like Twister, there’re always a group or two throwing frisbees or kicking a football around, and of course, many are just sharing a few snacks and perhaps sipping some chilled rosé.
Picnics are a wonderful way to enjoy the company of your friends and loved ones. It’s not surprising that cultures around the world have their own versions of these gatherings. In Japan, for instance, an important part of the ritual is about appreciating the cherry blossoms, which flourish in specific days at the end of March or early April every year. These hanami (花見) gatherings can run well into the night and are typically accompanied by delicious Japanese snacks and maybe a few drinks. If you’re curious to learn about the hanami tradition in Japan, Kirk wrote a great post about that last week.
The weather in London is probably not ideal for picnics most of the year, but that also explains why Londoners are especially eager to head outdoors as soon a bit of spring sunshine breaks through. I went out for a run in Hyde Park last week and there were dozens of groups gathering in the green just south of Speakers Corner having picnics. I wasn’t surprised at all, given the weather was close to perfect that day - sunny and only slightly cool - but I was curious to peek around and see what sort of snacks people were sharing. I saw plenty of the usual fruit salads, charcuterie, sandwiches, and chips, but I also noticed a couple of groups having Middle Eastern mezze (e.g. hummus and other spreads, kibbeh, falafel) as well as a Japanese couple with onigiri and Shōchū!
That’s one of the things I love about London: it’s such a melting pot of cultures! A sample of Hyde Park picnics was the perfect proof of that. And… I’ll close by noting to other football (soccer!) fans out there, that I was pleased to see more footballs than I would have expected in frisbee-dominated Central Park!
Epicurely v1 - Design Sneak Peak
Over the past couple of months our team has been working diligently to bring Epicurely to life. Between the three of us, we have traveled thousands of miles working across multiple time zones (New York to London to Tokyo to Bogota to San Francisco), but thanks to the glories of the Interwebs and innovations like Gmail, Skype, Dropbox and Basecamp, we’ve made steady progress on what we expect to be a kick-ass product.
While we’re not quite ready to open Epicurely up to the world, we are excited to be able to share some screen shots of the latest designs with you.
The first screen provides you with a glimpse in to how users will discover nearby “feasts” in their area. Users will be able to see when the feast is, the type of feast it is, who’s hosting, who’s invited/attending, etc.
The second screen is for a specific feast. Here you can dig in to the details, see who’s going and what they’re contributing (food, drinks or cash), RSVP to the event, as well as post comments and pictures.
Pretty cool, huh?
We’ve had the good fortune of working closely with a talented and passionate user experience & design agency in San Francisco. Our friends at Momentum Design Labs worked closely with us to evolve initial mockups, wireframes and rough designs into a cohesive and elegant user interface. We threw lots of ideas at the wall, saw what stuck, and worked iteratively to achieve a design we are all proud of.
We’re pretty excited and we hope you are too…
Epicurely v1 - Collaborative Dinner Parties
We want to enable a future where a new breed of authentic, personal, genuine, diverse, creative, spontaneous dining venues will emerge alongside traditional restaurants. These venues will not only offer delicious and genuine food alternatives, they will also offer real world social experiences of many flavors, limited only by the creative potential of the “Social Chefs” and the foodies attending the events. In other words, the diversity in character and theme of these experiences will be limitless!
Aspiring food entrepreneurs will be able to develop their cooking reputation online on Epicurely.com and gain recognition for their talent and unique styles. The barriers to entry to the restaurant industry 2.0 will become drastically lower.
Searching for top “social chef” talent
What is a “social chef”?
We all know amazing cooks in our network of friends and family. These people don’t necessarily need to have worked at a restaurant or have been professionally trained.
For instance, my sister happens to cook some of the most delicious ceviche I’ve ever had, yet she only cooks occasionally at home. A close friend, from the heart of the American south, was known to cook some of the juiciest braised pulled pork sandwiches in college. Another one is notorious for going all-out whenever he hosts a bbq, oftentimes sharing with guests some of his Brazilian culinary heritage, including tender picanha char-grilled to perfection.
I would classify all of them as top-notch “social chefs”.
Contest to identify the best “social chefs” in London
We’d like to inspire a social movement to identify the very best cooks in our communities. Together, we can uncover the hidden talent among us and help expose it to the world.
To start, we will focus on the city of London, a melting pot of culture and culinary talent.
How will it work?
We are building a page to host the contest. Stay tuned for the URL. On this page, you will be able to nominate yourself or friends for a particular food category. Visitors will then be able to vote for nominees, thereby endorsing their culinary prowess!
Start thinking about friends to nominate. We will begin accepting nominations formally in a few weeks. In the meantime, you may post nominations to our Facebook page or in the comments section below.
Food categories
Based on discussions with foodies and friends in London, we came up with our initial list of food categories.
We want this initiative to be a collaborative one and we’re excited to hear your ideas. If you have any comments or suggestions, please post them to our Facebook page or leave a comment.
If anyone feels that a particular branch of food is not well represented, be it a style of cooking or cuisine from a part of the world, please share your thoughts!
Cheers!
Epicurely Coming Soon!
Please visit our coming-soon page! Register to gain early access to the Epicurely community!
Epicurely: connecting people through food
Food touches all of us
Wherever I happen to be, I’ve found that people are genuinely happy to share their food traditions and customs. People have emotional connections with food that run deep. These connections are part of who we are. They are part of our personal and cultural identity. Food touches the best in all of us, which is why we’re so open to sharing our food traditions with others. Food evokes warm memories from the past; vivid recollections of our favorite meal as a child, exotic flavors from a memorable trip, the culinary traditions of our home country. Oftentimes, these memories present themselves in full force, transporting us to distant times in an almost unparalleled level of detail. Marcel Proust famously captured these sensations in his novel, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).
When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.
Yet again I had recalled the taste of a bit of madeleine dunked in a linden-flower tea which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house on the street where her room was found, arose like a theatrical tableau…[1]
Like Proust’s madeleine, even the most negligible, the most unexpected treat, has the power to evoke rich involuntary recollections that may otherwise lay dormant for years. Food is deeply rooted in our warmest memories and thus, it’s easy to understand why we feel a sense of pride, an implicit awareness that we’re sharing part of our personal story, whenever we share our food traditions with others.
Food bridges social and cultural barriers. It’s a universal language that connects us regardless of who we are or where we come from.
Epicurely’s Mission
We are on a mission to empower anyone who loves cooking to share their food with others. We want to make it easier for people to organize food-related events and meet others sharing similar interests. Concretely, we are creating an online marketplace for home chefs to share their creations and spaces with food enthusiasts in their area.
Please subscribe to our blog to receive all the latest news, updates and photos as we turn Epicurely into a reality and help connect people through food!
The team behind Epicurely
Santiago (@SirTeno), Kim (@Kimtaro), Kirk (@McMurrak)
[1] Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (1913) in: À la recherche du temps perdu vol. 1, p. 47 (Pléiade ed. 1954)(S.H. transl.)
