ma dai ! : procopio angelo, 75010

There would not, initially, seem to be much purpose in my writing anything at all about Procopio Angelo, the eponymous restaurant of a popular Tuscan chef in Paris, once based on rue Faubourg St. Honoré, now transplanted to a back road near Colonel Fabien in the 10ème. Procopio's Italian wine list is representative of the genre as one typically encounters it in Paris: a seeming panoply of regional wines, which upon closer inspection turn out to comprise little more than the diverse ranges of a few titanic producers of supermarket wine. Then you have poor Marco Parusso's decent if overmodern Barolos - always the current vintage - sitting there like duck-decoys for the big spenders who stray in.*

But Procopio keeps cropping up in any discussion of Italian food in Paris. No less than two friends whose culinary opinions I otherwise respect have proposed his restaurant to me as an example of "real Italian."

Sociologist Peter L. Berger famously argued that reality itself is a social construction, an interwoven fabric of institutionalised social perceptions. Procopio Angelo is real Italian cuisine, if, like many Paris diners, one disregards the last twenty years' of Italian restaurateurism and continues to define Italian cuisine in opposition to the technique and complexity of a serious restaurant.

n.d.p. in milan: bar basso

Seeking to wring every last drink out of my brief stay in Milan, I arranged to meet my friend and host M for last call at Bar Basso, a proudly classic, slightly hokey cocktail bar famous for being the birthplace of possibly my favorite cocktail, the Negroni Sbagliato, or wrong Negroni.

The Negroni Sbagliato is simply a Negroni made with prosecco instead of gin. Just Campari, dry vermouth, and prosecco. I was introduced to the drink just a few years ago at a restaurant called Dell'Anima in the West Village, whose proprietor Joe Campanale has had great success with a variation involving roasted orange.

The cocktail's genesis story - all successful cocktails have at least one - is that Bar Basso's proprietor's father was mixing a Negroni and grabbed the wrong bottle, presumably realising his error when the ostensible gin bubbled and fizzed. The cocktail thus born is buoyant, bitter, immensely refreshing, and notably less inebriating than a classic Negroni, therefore ideally suited to endless aperitivo hours. It's also completely idiot-proof, with the exception of one time in Paris when I received it in a piddling frouffy champagne flute, which seemed gravely wrong at the time. Then again, before visiting Bar Basso and seeing how a Negroni Sbagliato was served by its originators, how was I to know ?

n.d.p. in roma: obikà, for all basic needs

I love traveling, but I don't profess to be any good at it. In particular I am bad at budgeting time for leisurely transportation itself, with the result that, regardless of where I am, I feel as though I've just been hurled there without warning. (When flying Ryanair, this simile hews uncomfortably close to reality.)

The Native Companion* and I arrived in Rome the other Friday afternoon in characteristic fashion: wild-eyed, confused, and pressed for time. Due to her work schedule and the timing of our flight, she hadn't slept in 24 hours. I had a work meeting I had to get to, and a house-key I had to retrieve, and to all this was added the responsibility of ensuring that the NC didn't walk into traffic or keel over from exhaustion. Neither of us had eaten.

It was kind of a godsend, then, that our taxi to the Balduina neighborhood happened to pass by a location of renowned mozzarella bar chain Obikà, which I recognized both from my one other trip to Rome, and because it had been the original inspiration for the restaurant I used to manage in Los Angeles. By making certain violent gestures I was able to get our taxi driver to stop and let us out. I then used very similar gestures to request a table and subsequently order us a wide plate of gorgeous life-saving mozzarella.