Forget April; January is the cruellest month. The festivities are over, the bank balance is nearing empty, and the next thing you have to look forward to is… Valentine’s Day? Please, give me strength.
Having blown most of my cash in the January sales (can anyone explain why paying €120 for a pair of shoes seems perfectly reasonable when they’ve been reduced from €160 but not at any other time?), I haven’t been out to eat much in the past couple of weeks. Still, in the name of professional research, I made this weekend an exception. We’re getting paid soon anyway…
On Friday night, I went on a very strange sort of double date. I use the term ‘date’ loosely; at least one member of our party is in a relationship with someone other than the those present, and the rest of us are more or less single. Two Australian brothers whose first experiences of drinking wine happened approximately a week ago; two British copywriters who use words like anhedonia (we learnt that on Friday – it means the inability to experience pleasure. It was such a terrible prospect that the word etched itself on my mind) and like to think we know our Reservas from our Crianzas. I was looking for somewhere simple but satisfying; a treat without breaking the bank. A colleague recommended the Struisvogel and it hit the mark entirely. The basement restaurant on the Keizersgracht offers a selective three-course menu for just €21. We tried the carpaccio (not up to my nostalgic benchmark but more than edible), raw marinated salmon with sesame seeds, and a poultry pate served with a berry chutney, the last of which was particularly wholesome. As a main course, two of us ate the restaurant’s namesake, struisvogel (ostrich), while the others had an Irish lamb stew. Both were simple, gutsy and un-fussed over. We none of us had room for dessert, though we did manage to polish off several bottles of extremely reasonably priced red wine: a Rioja and a Chilean Cab Sav I’d had elsewhere called Santa Digna. We must have been having a good time because we even agreed to let one of those Polaroid men take our photo. January – it does funny things to you…
Saturday heralded the eve of a friend’s birthday. She’d booked a table for ten at Casa di David, an Italian institution I’ve both wanted to try and strangely avoided for the past two years. A pervasive smell of burnt bread and a reticence on the part of the waiters to take our drinks order didn’t fill me with hope. The feeling was compounded by the intimidatingly long menu which (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again) made me wonder how one kitchen could possibly produce so many dishes well. The prices of the antipasti were also fairly intimidating: €15 for a plate of tomato and mozzarella? The reason quickly became apparent: one antipasto alone could have easily substituted a main meal and left you little room for limoncello, let alone dessert. This perplexes me: why serve overly large portions at overly large prices when the customer can neither eat nor afford them? Fortunately for us, we had some experienced Casa di David diners at our table, who advised us to order the mixed antipasti for two to share between four. No longer faced with the daunting task of working our way through a small salami factory alone, we were able to enjoy the exceedingly fresh mozzarella, creamy vitello tonnato and nutty grilled aubergine. My Italio-phile friend wasn’t totally impressed by the quality of the salami, but we all agreed that the antipasti did a lot to rescue the reputation of the restaurant. As primo (not that I made it to secondo), I had an open lasagne of pumpkin, sausage and ‘crescenza’, which I later discovered to be a type of cheese. For me, the creaminess of the cheese was overpowering and I could barely taste the pumpkin and sausage, let alone the other spices that were struggling to find a voice on my plate. It was not unpleasant but it wasn’t to my taste. It was like meeting your sister’s boyfriend: he’s not bad looking but you just don’t fancy him. Meanwhile, the wine was higher in price and lower in quality than Friday night’s tipple; we had to take a demotion from the Vino Nobile di Montepulciano to the house wine in a last ditch attempt to make it through the month without maxing out the overdraft. Casa would do well to pare down its menu and its prices; what remains would be very good.
