We have Scary French Lady to thank for most elements of this blog post. You may know of Scary French Lady because she leaves comments occasionally, or you might have met her at Hidden Kitchen. She’s effortlessly elegant and a marvellous baker (her almond madeleines are utterly Proustian) and she’s French, of course. Which means that even though she claims not to be a foodie (in fact, she calls me simply ‘Foodie’ to differentiate me from her other friend Vicky), she knows more about food than most Brits of my acquaintance.
Scary French Lady recommended De Italiaan to me soon after we met, and I’ve been meaning to eat there ever since. On Friday, she invited a group of friends for drinks (she is also a social matchmaker), so I decided to stop by the Bosboom Toussaintstraat beforehand with one of our party. Scary French Lady had introduced me to the Moldovan (who looks – and sometimes talks – like a Russian author) back in December, and I’d been promising to take him reviewing ever since he told me he was eating a Domino’s pizza one evening. (Clearly, he needed my help.)
De Italiaan does contemporary-meets-cosy quite well: I don’t remember too much about the décor, other than that it’s split level and uses a lot of red. I don’t expect the Moldovan remembers much about it either, since his gaze was generally occupied by the clientèle – most of whom were female and as hot as the restaurant’s wood-fired oven. Tables for two are pretty small, which meant we were playing footsie under ours most of the time. This did not seem to bother my dining companion, however, who declared ‘Footsie with Foodie’ to be a new game.
