Benvenuto

Welcome! Here I will discuss what is almost always on my mind and near to my heart: food. Though I love many different cuisines, as an Italian, the food and cooking of Italy is my favorite. Just in my lifetime I have seen a huge improvement in the quality of Italian food in America.

1) Increase in imports: there is a much greater variety of Italian products imported here now than there were 20 years ago, including smaller and superior brands, not just the mass production giants.

2) Restaurants have really upped their game. For a long time, no one in my family would set foot in an Italian restaurant. I think it happened exactly three times in the first 20 years of my life, and I remember each experience distinctly. Two of them were horrible, and the other was excellent. My parents told me there was difference between Italian food and Italian-American food and these three experiences showed me very clearly what those differences were. Now there are many excellent Italian restaurants that make real Italian food, and I enjoy visiting them very much.

3) Perhaps the most exciting change is the new trend of domestic producers and businesses who are producing excellent traditional Italian products in the U.S. In many cases they have spent time in Italy learning the craft firsthand.

It is one of the great pleasures in life for me to discover faithfully-made Italian products produced in the U.S. I love the story of Americans or Italian-Americans going to Italy to study the craft of making gelato or prosciutto, for example, so they can open a business in the U.S. that really does it right. And though I love to support the products of Italy, it's better to buy things domestically if the product is as good. Importing goods across the ocean is the cause of a lot of pollution.

And so it is on this blog that I will write about the discoveries that I make (I call them discoveries even though I will not be the first person to be reviewing or trying these products) and give my recommendations. I hope it will be as fun to read as it will be for me to write.